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Darrera modificació: 2010-11-03
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Presciutti, Diana Bullen, The visual culture of the foundling hospital in central Italy (1400-1600), Tesi doctoral de la University of Michigan, 2008, 521 pp.
- Resum
- Over the course of the fifteenth century, most of the Italian peninsula's larger cities established some sort of institutional remedy to the problem of abandoned infants, part of a wider movement toward greater organization and specialization of institutional charity. These hospitals for foundlings and their patrons deployed multiple strategies to frame and promote their charitable ministrations. This dissertation argues that visual representation played a pivotal role in the articulation of these positions. While early modern charity has been the subject of considerable scholarly interest in recent years, visual culture has not been accorded its due importance.
I demonstrate that there was an extensive visual imagery associated with foundling care that evolved out of established pictorial traditions, including the Acts of Mercy, the Holy Innocents, and the Madonna della Misericordia. The institutional identities of hospitals that cared for abandoned children were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including coat-of-arms ( stemme ), logge, altarpieces, processional standards (and urban processions), begging licenses, confraternal statutes, and fresco cycles. These visual forms frequently placed the foundling hospital in the role of protective guardian, with the prototypical abandoned child constructed a swaddled newborn infant. Foundling hospitals were also presented visually as successfully guiding children along the path to becoming contributing members of communal life: newborns are swaddled and nursed, older foundlings are educated, pubescent girls are married. I call attention to the "constructedness" of these representations by contrasting these idealized or ideologically inflected images with the very different picture of the circumstances of early modern foundling care established by social historians.
Following the survival of visual and archival material, this dissertation centers upon institutions in the central Italian cities of Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Siena and takes into consideration changes that occurred between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This wide geographical and chronological scope allows me to address diachronic shifts, as well as continuities, and to make comparative arguments about different Italian regions while maintaining an interest in local particularities. Despite important local variations, this dissertation demonstrates that widespread commonalities existed in the visual rhetoric of foundling care throughout the early modern period.
- Matèries
- Història de l'art
Història de la medicina
Hospitals
- Notes
- Dir.: Megan L. Holmes (UMich).
Vegeu http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=1667987971&Fmt= ... 
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