Review of “The Innocents of Florence” by Joseph Lozzi – How Abandoned Children Spurred the Flourishing of Renaissance Art | History books

CJoseph Lozzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to our time. He was a great champion of the humanities in public life, and did for Dante what his fellow poet Daniel Mendelssohn did for Homer in the Odyssey and other books.

This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s hometown of Florence, a building that Luzzi has been fascinated with since he encountered it in 1987 while studying abroad at university. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe dedicated solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left at his gates on St. Agata’s Day in 1445, gnawed by rats.

At that time, children made up half of Florence’s population, and many of them were abandoned. The church demanded “be fruitful and multiply” and condemned the use of contraceptives, which were primitive in any case. Children are left inside church entrances, thrown into rivers and dumped on rubbish heaps. They were, in the lively Tuscan vernacular, the gitatelli – The expelled. Much of it was the result of unwanted sexual advances, especially with servants, by their masters. In a fiercely patriarchal society, the majority of children placed at Innocenti were girls. Mothers break the coin into two and hang half of it around the child’s neck in hopes of meeting him again.

Innocenti was built by a guild of silk weavers in an era when the contribution that wealthy Florentines were expected to make to civic life was measured by accounting books such as “the gains and losses of the company.” The building had arches designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, the cathedral’s architect, and housed (and still houses) works by the greatest Renaissance artists: Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea, and Luca della Robbia. By caring for and educating its children, Innocenti has rescued many of them from poverty, sex work or trafficking. It also alleviated some of the stigma of illegitimacy, which in Renaissance Italy meant “to be born without honor, a status equivalent to death alive.” To suggest, as the book does in its subtitle, that the Innocenti “discovered” our modern idea of ​​childhood seems an exaggeration. But it helped reinforce the now accepted idea that every child’s fate matters, and inspired similar institutions around the world, including Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, founded in London in 1739.

Lozzi tells the story mostly directly, without the mixture of memoir and scholarship that characterizes his earlier books. He briefly notes the source of his interest in caregiving: He became a father and a widower on the same day, when his pregnant wife was killed in a car accident, and his mother and sisters helped him raise his daughter. For more on this compelling story, I recommend his book In a Dark Wood.

But mostly this book paints a wonderfully sensual and cinematic portrait of early modern Florence in all its exquisite and fascinating detail. The Innocenti, like the city itself, mixed noble motives with utilitarian and cruel ones. She raised the children to wet nurses, who used them as milk cows, nearly starving them, and sometimes collected payments after they died. She spent her donations on expensive works of art while feeding on bread and water, bread made not from flour but from bran, which they also fed to the mules. The boys were taught a comprehensive curriculum of mathematics, rhetoric, and Ciceronian music. Girls learned to weave and were pushed into a life of domestic service, even when hospital administrators knew this exposed them to sexual exploitation.

Innocenti’s novel emerges as an interesting case study of how the beautiful frescoes, arched columns, and paintings of the Italian Renaissance concealed “race and suffering from forced labor, slave rape, and child abuse.” The words of the German critic Walter Benjamin were perhaps the satirical phrase for this book: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”