Carità e potere:representing the Medici grand dukes as ‘fathers of the Innocenti’

Abstract

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.

Dead Infants, Cruel Mothers, and Heroic Popes: The Visual Rhetoric of Foundling Care at the Hospital of Santo Spirito, Rome*

“…157 v : “et considerato quanta laudabile opera sia acceptare intalluogo tante mis[er]e creature abandonate nel principio della loro nativita dalorparenti lequali sanza baptesimo spesse volte et pe fiumi et per cloache et fosse sarebbono trovate morte, se non fussi suto talluogho constuito per riceptaculo ditali mis[er]i.” Visual representations associated with the Innocenti conflated hospital foundlings with the biblical Holy Innocents, a rhetoric of foundling care related to, but fundamentally distinct from, that developed in the Corsia Sistina fresco cycle. See Presciutti, 2008, 179–223; Presciutti, 2010, 249–51.…”