This article examines a miracle, credited to the Dominican saint Vincent Ferrer, in which a “demented” wife and mother butchers and partially cooks her infant son. In the decades following Vincent’s 1455 canonization, artists like Colantonio and the Erri workshop approached the macabre narrative in very different ways. Beyond this iconographic instability, this essay argues that the unsettled status of the narrative—in both text and picture—enabled its use as a malleable vessel for articulating and projecting certain social anxieties. The Erri version, the primary focus of the article, emerges as a case study in pictorial indeterminancy: saintly power is both pivotal and marginalized; social class is both highlighted and obfuscated; cannibalism is both seen and unseen. These contradictions demonstrate the contested status of the social problems represented: female madness, child-killing, cannibalism, and, in a broader sense, the inability of men to assert control over the spaces of their domestic world.
The fresco cycle painted at the behest of Pope Sixtus IV in the late 1470s in the main ward of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome comprises an extended pictorial biography of Sixtus, prefaced by scenes representing the legendary foundation of the hospital by his predecessor Innocent III. The legend, which tells how Innocent established Santo Spirito as a foundling hospital in response to the discovery of victims of infanticide in the Tiber River, positions the pope as the savior of the city's unwanted children. This article elucidates how the construction andrenovatioof the hospital is presented in the cycle as a generative product of papal will, with the care of foundlings situated as an integral part of the image of the pope as both Father of the Church and restorer of past glory to the city of Rome. While the frescoes engage with both widespread conventions for representing infanticide and commonplace notions of the social value of caring for abandoned children, I demonstrate that the ideologically potent visual rhetoric of foundling care was also flexible, and could be adapted to meet the specific needs of a particular institutional and patronal context.
In 1605, Roberto Antinori, prior of the Innocenti foundling hospital in Florence, commissioned marble busts of the first three Medici grand dukes for the hospital loggia. Several years later, he hired Bernardino Poccetti to fresco in the girls' refectory an ‘Istoria degl'Innocenti’, which included an idealized representation of the activities of the hospital under the watchful eyes of Cosimo II. The present study argues that these decorative projects worked together to shape an image of the grand dukes as ‘fathers’ of the foundlings of the Innocenti. In contrast to much of the scholarship on the grand dukes, which has focused on their use of visual imagery to achieve absolutist goals, I show how the image of Medici ‘fatherhood’ forged at the Innocenti, by articulating a construction of ruling authority in which the hospital and its young inmates played a constitutive role, served the interests of the hospital as much as it did those of the grand dukes. The paternal metaphor, which obligated the ‘fathers of the Innocenti’ to provide for their ‘children’, is elaborated most extensively in Poccetti's fresco, which represents Cosimo II as custodian of imperilled souls, supplier of nourishment, provider of education, and guardian of nubile chastity.
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