The innocents of florenc.., p.6
The Innocents of Florence, page 6
All told, Florentines who consigned their children to the new foundling institution could not be especially optimistic. The Innocenti did what it could to nurture these vulnerable lives with its bureaucratic efficiency and access to the medical services of the affiliated Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. But it did not turn out to be what its high-minded founders had envisioned: a place that could erase the indignities of illegitimacy, poverty, and inferior social status. At first, the Innocenti had a lower mortality rate than the general population. But as its numbers increased, it became a victim of its own success. By 1454, 395 of its 738 matriculants died, a woeful mortality rate of 54 percent that matched the general trend. Infectious disease was rampant, as Florence reeled from a plague that caused widespread death in the overcrowded Innocenti. The foundling home was in desperate need of financial assistance from the state. But in 1451, the unreliable General Council stopped paying the Innocenti the interest it earned on its investments. Famine ensued among the foundlings, as the Innocenti could not afford to send them to wet nurses in the countryside, where they would have been much safer than in the pestilential city. Mortality rates soared in what was meant to have been a safe haven.
The case of Margherita bella, pazza, e mutola, “Margherita the beautiful, crazy, and mute,” reveals the persistent dangers faced by foundlings:
On 18 September 1452 at the thirteenth hour [one p.m.] a female child was brought and placed on the font. She was about eighteen months old, and the person who brought her fled and did not wish to say whose she was or what her name was. She brought with her a note that said she had her tongue string cut because she stammered, and that afterward she spoke badly. The abovesaid child is mute and crazy and therefore the wet nurse will be given thirty-five soldi per month.
The Innocenti’s record-keeping, which has been described as “a very Tuscan mixture of shrewd realism, careful cheeseparing and rough kindliness,” produced the child’s brusque but affectionate nickname. When questioned by the Innocenti’s staff, Margherita’s deliverer revealed nothing, a typical stance. In fact, only about one in ten who brought children to the Innocenti in its early years were willing to divulge the name of the child’s father. If Margherita’s parents had meant to help her with a barbaric homespun surgery of cutting her tongue string, they were hardly outliers. Parents often did more harm than good in trying to fix some perceived physical disability. Atrocities included burning a child’s neck with a fired iron or dripping hot candle wax on them to cure epilepsy, the so-called falling sickness. Closer to Margherita’s case, the string underneath a newborn’s tongue was often cut, sometimes with the midwife’s fingernail, as a secondary—and wholly gratuitous, even dangerous—circumcision. These cruel practices could elicit merriment and boasting. Building on the ancient Roman idea that the “malformed” deserved punishment, the mutilated Renaissance child was often seen as having received its just deserts for falling short of some physical ideal. Yet children born with defects or disabilities did not form an especially large percentage of the Innocenti’s foundlings. More often than not, it was poverty and social stigma, especially illegitimacy, that caused abandonment.
We don’t know if little Margherita survived her brutal infancy. Based on what happened to similarly abused children, the prospect was likely dim. The same year she was deposited, 1452, another child in even worse condition found its way inside the Innocenti:
A dead baby girl was left on the font. She had been beaten in several places on the head and in the face so that her nose was squashed to the sides of her mouth. She was a dark thing to see, all livid and black. It could not be seen who brought her here nor will we ever know.
The Innocenti gave her a suitably stark allegorical name: Sanza Rimedio, Beyond Help. At the time, corporal punishment was widely sanctioned across all classes and administered in multiple forms. Beating instruments used against children included canes, shovels, rods, and one especially vicious device called a flapper, a whip whose pear-shaped end and round hole inflicted blisters. Even thinkers celebrated for their humanity and capacious intellects like Petrarch and Alberti approved of beating children. The staff of the Innocenti gave Sanza Rimedio a dignified funeral. Several high-level functionaries, including the wife of an administrator, some in-house wet nurses, and several female foundlings gathered at her grave to pay their respects. According to the Innocenti’s register, they “saw to it that she was buried. May God bless her.”
The caring valediction for Sanza Rimedio reveals perhaps the most important quality of the early Innocenti, one that no statistical analysis can fully capture: it considered itself and its foundlings as tutta la famiglia, “all one family.” This was no empty exercise in rhetoric. The hospital’s staff and administration acted in loco parentis, assuming control of every aspect of a child’s life and working to enhance it in both the domestic and civic spheres. Some Innocenti personnel took this familial injunction so seriously that they ended up adopting foundlings themselves. In 1450, the Innocenti approved the adoption of one of its girls, Agata, by Ser Silvano di Giovanni di Fruosino, the foundling home’s notary and thus heir to the trade once plied by Lapo Mazzei:
The said Ser Silvano vowed that he would raise her as his own daughter in all things that pertain to modesty and good character as all men do. At the end of eighteen to twenty years he must have her married and provide her with a dowry of at least forty florins.
The document’s language reveals a long-term concern for the child’s welfare, and the fact that adoption by Innocenti staffers enthusiastically occurred at all levels—from its commessi, the working-class married couples who provided its basic services, to its notaries—suggests a commitment to foundling care that went well beyond mere duty. At its best, working at the Innocenti was more of a vocation than a job. But as was so often the case, intentions often outstripped results: Ser Silvano’s Agata returned to the Innocenti, an unmarried young girl, only two years later. There is no record of what had happened at home, but something clearly went awry.
The Innocenti sometimes served as economic stewards for poor families. On July 31, 1465, a boy of two named Francesco was abandoned at the Innocenti by his parents, both of whom had been hospitalized for illness at Santa Maria Nuova. The person who deposited Francesco reported that he came from a family of means: his father owned a house with a workshop and a piece of land, which Francesco was to inherit. In such instances, the Innocenti managed the inheritance due to legitimate children, handling their affairs and protecting their property until they came of age. Unfortunately, in this case their efforts were for naught, for Francesco died just two weeks later. A pattern was emerging: despite the Innocenti’s admirable principles, the realities of infant mortality prevented it from making structural changes in the lives of Florence’s orphans in its first decades. The new foundling home won the occasional battle on behalf of its charges by arranging happy adoptions, wisely brokered marriages, and successful medical interventions, but the war against childhood abandonment was still largely a stalemate.
On rare occasions, a more affluent child might show up at the Innocenti’s font. In the middle of the night on September 24, 1483, an unidentified man and woman abandoned a two-year-old girl named Tita at the Innocenti. The child was unlike almost all of the others, who arrived swaddled in rags and covered in dirt, with bruises. Tita arrived with a beige dress with green velvet sleeves, a white chemise, four aprons, and two pinafores. She even wore a necklace of blue beads with five pearls and a few silver buttons. Her aura of wealth and security was borne out by the fact that seven months after she arrived, her mother returned to claim her—after leaving behind a gold florin to pay for her expenses. Unfortunately, Tita’s financial stability made her an extreme outlier among the Innocenti’s orphans.
In those early years of overcrowding and underfunding at the Innocenti, there was one way of improving the odds of survival: to be sent to a wet nurse in the country, and thus avoid the diseases laying low many babies nursed on site. As one expert put it, “Because effective, safe artificial feeding methods had not yet been developed, a baby was unlikely to survive unless it nursed at a woman’s breast.” At the time, most of the labor available to women—working at home, on the farm, or at a store or workshop run by their husbands—did not earn wages and so only contributed indirectly to a family’s income. Wet nursing, on the contrary, offered a rare paid opportunity for unskilled women that did not require the backbreaking labor of farming or domestic servitude. And it was much less dangerous than an illegal activity like prostitution. A fifteenth-century Tuscan folk song reveals how coveted the work was:
Here we come, balie [wet nurses] from Casentino,
Each one looking for a baby . . .
Whoever has one, show him to us,
Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter.
The demand for wet nurses was soaring, especially in wealthy families. Highborn women, in particular, employed them to avoid the rigors of breastfeeding. But the practice of outsourcing to rural wet nurses often led to unsatisfying results. It was unlikely that an already overworked country woman would find the time to do more than the bare minimum for a child who was only under her care temporarily—and who often came from a higher, resentment-inducing class. Should the wet nurse herself become pregnant, as was frequently the case, there was barely enough milk to go around. Access to decent medical care was rare in the remote areas where orphans were nursed. These harsh realities led many to criticize the system. Even reasonable voices like Alberti were against the use of wet nurses, arguing that maternal breastfeeding was the only way to bond mother to child.
The Innocenti also struggled to find enough wet nurses. Desperate to recruit them, it hired both freeborn and slave-born balie, paying double what other foundling homes offered. By 1466, 456 wet nurses were on payroll, causing one observer to remark that the surrounding countryside was turning into a “milk farm” for the Innocenti. Worst of all, there were constant reports of mistreatment by the rural wet nurses, sometimes fatal:
On 22 August 1463 we gave [Giovanna] to wet nurse for fourteen months at fifty soldi per month . . . to Mona Cosa, wife of the late Nardo di Francesco. . . . On 20 February [1464] that crude bitch, the aforesaid wet nurse, brought back the abovesaid little girl weak and dying of starvation, on the very brink of death, scarcely able to breathe. And she brought her back because it was said to us by several persons that the child was being mistreated. . . . And when several of her neighbors told her to bring the child back, she said she wanted the money first and then she would bring her back. We were also told that the child was left unwatched in the tower all day to starve and die, the poor little thing. On 23 February the said girl died in the hospital room from the privations she endured . . .
The Innocenti sought to reduce such harrowing incidents by dealing with wet nurses as scientifically as possible: it placed strict limits on the period of nursing, setting weaning at eighteen to twenty-four months. It also established a formal licensing procedure for in-house wet nurses and, for off-site ones, scheduled surprise visits to monitor them. Finally, the Innocenti enlisted members of the broader community, parish priests in particular, to monitor balie and make sure they were properly nursing and avoiding foul play, especially the common tactic of failing to report the death of a child so that they could continue to collect payment.
Despite the lofty rhetoric that led to its creation, the early records of the Innocenti reveal an institution struggling to succeed against formidable odds and stretched resources. In 1483, an official at the Innocenti expressed the foundling home’s resolve to enact positive social change, writing that without the orphanage, infants abandoned at birth would be “found dead in rivers, sewers, and ditches.” To a certain extent, he was correct: in the case of its most outcast group, the unwanted children of slaves, the Innocenti’s ability to transform them into parentless wards of the state at least erased some of the stigma associated with their birth. The official went on to echo Leonardo Bruni’s celebrated exhortation linking the rescue of foundlings to civic duty:
How cruel would it be if in such a famous city [Florence] and in such a worthy place [the Innocenti] on which so much money has been spent and to which the public has given its financial support—how cruel that these children should then starve to death, as has already happened.
Of course, the Innocenti’s children could not be nourished by such language, however gilded. The words feel motivated by a sense of anxiety about the Innocenti’s mixed results in achieving its lofty goals. One senses the official trying to “sell” the new foundling home—perhaps to potential donors and sponsors—by touting its achievements at a time when it faced crippling debt and a lack of reliable financial support from its original benefactors, the Silk Weavers and the city of Florence. Regardless of its motive, the speech’s implication was clear: unless more funds were given, the Innocenti, created to protect the city’s least fortunate, would itself become an orphan. The new foundling home risked becoming as unwanted, even illegitimate, as its infants.
FOUR Bread and Beauty
Sunday, October 26th, 1484
For the priest’s lunch, 4 loaves of bread.
For lunch in the women’s refectory, 37 loaves of bread.
Wine for the day, 1½ barrels.
2½ quarts of oil.
2 pounds of dried meat.
—hospital of the innocents, daily menu
Domenico di Tommaso del Ghirlandaio is debited on this day, the 28th of June 1487, three large florins, taken by Michelangelo . . .
—ghirlandaio, account book
Francesco tesori’s life was likely one of endless worry. Elevated in 1483 to spedalingo, prior or director of the Innocenti, he oversaw every element of a sprawling foundling home that employed scores of people, cared for hundreds of children, and owned multiple farms, vineyards, and olive groves throughout Tuscany. Despite difficulties in securing donors for childcare-related funding, the Innocenti managed to triple its real estate holdings over the course of the fifteenth century. Imbibing the entrepreneurial zeal of its founders, the Silk Weavers, the Innocenti was the wealthiest institution of its kind in all of Florence if not Europe, with a portfolio of property second only to that of its massive affiliate, the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Its children were expected to contribute to its coffers: as one scholar observed, “the Innocenti, like many others, wrapped itself up in the rhetoric of saving souls while operating as a center for textile production, with children spinning thread, making lace and embroidery, and weaving tapestries.” Meanwhile, a similar mix of charitable impulses and the practical need of removing abandoned children from the streets had led to the creation of foundling homes in other Italian cities, including Pisa, Siena, Bologna, Palermo, and Rome—but none were as culturally iconic and architecturally significant as the Innocenti, with its signature Brunelleschian arches and links to Florence’s artistic rebirth. By the time of Tesori’s priorate, the Innocenti’s reputation already preceded it.
Staff reporting to Tesori included skilled professionals like doctors, lawyers, notaries, and accountants as well as a working-class cadre of bakers, cooks, cleaners, construction workers, and the numerous balie, wet nurses, whose milk kept his charges alive both on site and, more commonly, at their rural homes. No detail was too small for Tesori: he once hired a farming couple in the Mugnone region outside Florence to care for the pigeons on an Innocenti property. Even something as elemental as food had to be thought of in strategic terms: in a typical day, some 200 people in the Innocenti consumed nearly 400 pounds of bread, the foundling home’s staple, which was baked and distributed on the main campus in Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. In addition to Tesori’s in-house duties, he was at the beck and call of both the Silk Weavers Guild and the Florentine government, whose financial support—always unreliable—underwrote this myriad of daily activities. The modern equivalent to his position would be a college president or town mayor: everywhere he turned, there were egos to massage, hands to shake, disputes to adjudicate, meetings to attend, and contracts to finalize. But there was one notable difference: unlike a dean or senator, the spedalingo was unpaid. The only remuneration for Tesori’s ceaseless labor was the Christian goodwill compounding on his behalf in God Almighty’s Account.
Within just decades of its creation, the Innocenti had become a central part of Florentine family life: roughly one in ten of the city’s baptized children—all of them christened in the Baptistery font where Dante had allegedly once saved a drowning infant—ended up in the foundling home. The influx meant that life under Tesori had to be highly regimented and its routines ironclad. Typically, infant boys were sent to wet nurses in the country immediately after they arrived and did not return until they were about five, at which point they were given a rudimentary schooling at the Innocenti that ensured their literacy. They would then learn a manual trade or other mercantile skill. Only a select group, mostly those destined for the clergy, received a humanistic education in the liberal arts aimed at transforming them, in the words of the Innocenti’s first prior, Lapo Pacini, into “gentlemen,” “men of virtue,” and “religious doctors.” These blessed few could even expect to study creative fields like music and singing and learn to play the organ, percussion, flute, and other wind instruments. But most handled more practical instruments like shovels, bellows, and looms. By age seven, the vast majority were out working as apprentices in a field, guild, or workshop, and by age thirteen they were considered full-fledged “adult” workers. The typical male foundling had to grow up fast, with little or no time for play or personal development outside of his labor. The barking of some foreman, and not the dulcet strain of the mandolin, was the background noise of his truncated childhood.
