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Dissertation Prospectus Daria Rose Foner

The Artist and the Child: Images of Children in Renaissance Florence, 1430-1530

During the Renaissance images of children as distinctly childlike became a staple of

Florentine art. Beginning in the early 1400s, depictions of children appeared in drawings,

paintings, and sculptures related to births, betrothals, and burials, connected with the miracles of

recently canonized saints,1 and in both secular and devotional representations of winged putti.

While Medieval works of art contained children, they were portrayed as diminutive adults or

symbols of the human soul.2 Children, as distinctly childlike, first emerged in the sculpture of

Donatello, a shift exemplified in his Cantoria (1433-38, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo). His

introduction of spiritellli, putti, and eroti inspired numerous artists, who soon populated their

work with youthful angels as well as the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist, portrayed as

recognizable babies and toddlers rather than tiny adults. Portraits of children, alone and with

their families, also emerged in donor portraits and in memorializing and dynastic images.

The proliferation of such images in fifteenth-century Florence coincided with a larger

societal interest in children. The Ospedale degli Innocenti, designed by Brunelleschi and

dedicated to the care and education of orphaned or abandoned children, was established in 1419,

the same year as Fra Giovanni Dominci’s Regola del governo di cura familiare, which discussed

children at length. Numerous fifteenth-century treatises addressed children’s upbringing and

education and the effect of images on them, and in 1442 Pope Eugenius IV confirmed the

charters of four children’s confraternities.3 These examples underscore the pivotal role of the

Renaissance in developing a concept of childhood as a distinct period of life.4

1 Such as Saints Clare of Assisi and Vincent Ferrer; also, Saint Zenobius, the fourth century Bishop of Florence, whose cult witnessed a revival in the fifteenth century.2 Examples of the former include Duccio’s paintings of the Madonna and Child at the Metropolitan (c. 1300) and the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena (1283-84); of the latter Giotto’s Death of the Virgin, in which Christ cradles the Virgin’s soul, is illustrative (c. 1310, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).3 These included the Compagnie dell’Arcangelo Raffaello, della Purificazione della Beata Vergine Maria, di San Niccolò, and di San Giovanni Evangelista.4 As outlined by Philippe Ariès in his 1960 L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime.

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Analyzing select images of children in several media, this dissertation will examine the

values and ideas that artists working in Florence and its environs conveyed through the inclusion

and depiction of children. Few scholars have commented upon the breadth and diversity of

children’s images or considered them in tandem with ideas of care, spectatorship, play, and as a

metaphor for artistic creation, production, and identity—indeed, as an emblem of the artist

himself. Using diverse modes of inquiry and a wide range of evidence—close analysis of works

of art, comparison across artistic media, and interpretation of contemporary literary sources—

this study will be the first to examine images of children in Italian Renaissance art as a distinct

genre worthy of its own consideration.

Chapter One will examine children in the context of the workshop as the primary space

of artistic production. The first work to be considered will be Nanni di Banco’s sculpted predella

for the niche of the Stone and Timber Masters’ Guild at Orsanmichele (c. 1413-14). A visual

demonstration of the Guild’s activities (as well as those of the sculptor, himself a guild member),

the predella depicts four stone masons at work. The figure on the left holds a chisel and carves a

pudgy child. This child, shown in the process of figuration, visualizes the Guild’s craft. It marks

a distinct shift from Andrea Pisano’s rendering of a similar scene in the previous century, which

shows a sculptor carving an athletic male (c. 1334-39, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo).

The connection between childhood and artistic creation is also present in written accounts

of artists’ childhoods throughout the Italian Renaissance. In Ghiberti’s Commentaries, not only

does the artist as child usher in a new age of art but images of children also serve as indicators of

artistic virtuosity—themes echoed in later fifteenth-century sources and subsequently adopted by

Vasari. Ghiberti identified the discovery of a young Giotto as the moment when “The art of

painting began to rise (again)” and described the child artist who, “born of marvelous talent…

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was drawing a sheep from life.” When Cimabue encountered him, he was overcome with “great

admiration for the child, who did so well at such a young age” demonstrating “that he had a

natural talent for art....”5 What Petrarch had called “true youthful genius” became an archetype

that appeared repeatedly.6 Even in Matteo Bandello’s late fifteenth-century, semi-fantastical tale

in which Leonardo recounts Filippo Lippi’s life, the natural inclination and ease with which the

very young Filippo began to draw was emphasized.7 Indeed, almost every artist on whom Vasari

lavished his greatest praise (particularly Michelangelo, whose childhood beginnings clearly

derive from the prototype of Ghiberti’s Giotto) displayed artistic genius as a child.

Chapter Two will consider children as ideal observers of images. Following ideas laid

out by Aristotle in De Memoria, Italian Renaissance writers believed that images, as types of

phantasmagoria, left strong sense impressions on children’s malleable minds and bodies.8 Fra

Dominici, who urged the display of religious images depicting children in domestic settings,

described the child as being “like soft wax that takes whatever imprint is put upon it.”9 Children,

understood to retain the effect of images in more profound and lasting ways than older observers,

became the ideal vehicles through which to depict the full power of artistic images.10

Thus, children, sometimes in the form of cherubim or seraphim, were frequently placed

on the borders of sculpted reliefs. From this vantage point, they appear to observe the devotional

5 Christie Knapp Fengler, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Second Commentary: The Translation and Interpretation of a Fundamental Renaissance Treatise, Ph.D. diss., The University of Wisconsin, 1974, pp. 16-17.6 Letter to the Abbot of Saint Begino, in The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, “Familiar Letters,” trans. James Harvey Robinson (New York: Putnam, 1898), p. 167. 7 Matteo Bandello, in Novelle italiane, il cinquecento, ed. Marcello Ciccuto (Milan: Garzanti, 1982), p. 236.8 A belief also promoted by Thomas Aquinas, who found children’s humors to be softer and more malleable than their adult counterparts, resulting in the ability to mold children through rigorous pedagogical methods.9 Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare, “Parte Quarta: On the Education of Children,” trans. Arthur Basil Coté, Ph.D. diss., The Catholic University of America, 1927, pp. 34, 37.10 The facile impressionability is often related, though with a humorous tone, in vernacular facetiae. One example is Angelo Poliziano’s tale of “A boy’s imagination.” See Charles Speroni, ed., Wit and Wisdom of the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964), p. 147.

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image itself, as in Antonio Rossellino’s Adoration of the Child and Annunciation to the

Shepherds tondo (c. 1475-77, Bargello). (One reason for the paucity of scholarship in this area

may be that scholars tend to ignore, and reproductions to exclude, these peripheral spaces.) The

children’s faces, with distinct features that give the impression of individualized portraits,

register a range of emotions from awe and glee to fear and disbelief, suggesting the immediate

responses of impressionable observers who watch the event depicted. In a sense, their

expressions suggest how adults should react to images.

The terracotta figures on the pediment of Donatello’s Cavalcanti Annunciation (c. 1425,

Santa Croce), offer a striking instance of such individualized and responsive children. Vasari

described them as “six boys bearing certain festoons, who appear to be holding one another

securely with their arms in their fear of the height,” however they might as readily be

characterized as watching and responding to the miraculous event unfolding beneath them.11

Here, as in similar examples,12 children are oriented toward the devotional epicenter (an image of

the Madonna and Child or a physical altar), directing the viewer’s attention and demonstrating

the image’s effects on the most impressionable of observers.

Like the choric festaiuoli described by Michael Baxandall, these children serve as

mediators “between the beholder and the events portrayed,” inviting the viewer to enter the

image as a participant. Such angelic children offer not what Baxandall called the “compound

11 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 363-64.12 Other examples occur in Rosellino’s Funeral Monument to Francesco Neri (c. 1478, Santa Croce), Desiderio da Settignano’s Panciatichi Madonna and Child (c. 1453, Bargello), Andrea della Robbia’s Annunciation lunette (c. 1491, Istituto degli Innocenti) and Benedetto da Maiano’s Chapel of Saint Fina (1477, Collegiata, San Gimignano), where a frieze of such responsive faces runs along three sides of the space. Such figures, limited neither by material, scale, nor image type, may be found in large fresco cycles, such as Andrea del Castagno’s Famous Men and Women (1448-49, Villa Carducci, Legnaia) and small metal plaquettes, such as Filarete’s Ulysses and Iro (c. 1445, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

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experience”13 of simultaneously viewing one image through two different modes, but rather, an

ideal lens through which an observer should bear witness to the image. Such works might be

considered visual manifestations of the scriptural passage in which Christ instructed his

disciples, “unless you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the

kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the

greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”14 This conceit of a child’s unlearned innocence, as opposed

to adult misjudgment, was a recurring theme in numerous Renaissance facetiae and novelle.15

Chapter Three will examine the advent of a new image and ideology of charity that

centered on children. In pre-Renaissance imagery, Charity often held up her heart to heaven,

while distributing alms or holding a cornucopia. This joint spiritual and worldly conception of

Charity was not group specific. Gradually, however, the idea and representation became

associated directly, and almost uniformly, with children.16 In the fifteenth century, Charity came

to be depicted as a voluptuous woman accompanied by two or three very young children, one of

whom nurses at her breast.17 In Florence this nascent conception of charity, directed toward

children and illustrated visually by them, was reflected in the prominence of the Ospedale degli

Innocenti and a new public awareness of the plight of unwanted and orphaned children.18

Perhaps the visual identification of charity with children should be understood as a way of

13 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 72, 75-6.14 Matthew 18:3-4. The Vulgate Bible, “The New Testament,” trans. Douay-Rheims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 99.15 As in Poggio Bracciolini’s “Witty reply of a boy to Cardinal Angelotto” or Niccolò Angèli dal Bùcine’s “Of a man who wanted to buy a wallet on credit.” Wit and Wisdom of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 50, 162. 16 Earlier iterations express charity toward a range of people as iterated in the Six Acts of Mercy: “For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.” Matthew 25:35-37. The Vulgate Bible, p. 149.17 One example is Filippino Lippi’s fresco in the Strozzi Chapel (1493-1502, Santa Maria Novella).18 Richard Trexler, “The Children of Florence,” in Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, The Children of Florence, 2nd edition (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 35-53.

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pulling on the heart (and purse) strings of donors and patrons. In 1487, Andrea della Robbia

inserted several glazed terracotta roundels along the façade of Brunelleschi’s building, showing

infants in various states of swaddling. The babies, almost all with their arms outstretched, echo

in their poses both Christ on the cross and supplicants begging for alms.19 The frieze,

highlighting the child’s vulnerability, seems intended to elicit sympathy from the observer.

Today, organizations such as UNICEF and the Red Cross use similar images of the very young

in their fundraising efforts. A novella by Albergati Capacelli, which although written in the

eighteenth century was based on Renaissance prototypes, illustrates this sentiment—a miserable

and miserly man, upon encountering four young boys in tattered clothes who wept and wrung

“their hands as if their little hearts would break,” was so “deeply touched” that “a new soul”

seemed “to inspire him; he is no more the same being; beneficence now guides his steps.”20

The Ospedale degli Innocenti commissioned or was bequeathed an impressive collection

of art, including works by major Florentine artists, among them Luca della Robbia, Sandro

Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Piero di Cosimo. These paintings and sculptures intended

for display at the Ospedale incorporate children and elicit sympathy for them in striking ways.

In the background of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi (1488, Istituto degli

Innocenti), the artist included a depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents (not the more frequent

Flight into Egypt, as in the Sassetti altarpiece in Santa Trinita). Fra Dominici argued that images

should allow children to see themselves “mirrored” in youthful depictions of Christ and John the

Baptist and in “the slaughtered Innocents.”21 Ghirlandaio moved beyond this by including four

foundlings in the painting.22 Two children in white kneel in the foreground, while a pair of 19 One of the roundels became the emblem for the Ospedale.20 Albergati Capacelli, Novella II, in The Italian Novelists, trans. Thomas Roscoe (London: Frederick Warne,1880), p. 531.21 Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare, p. 34.22 Heightening the effect is the inclusion of portraits of members of the Arte della Lana (patrons of the Innocenti), the hospital’s prior, and the artist himself.

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slightly older (almost teenage) youths in black observes the scene from behind a stable. The

children of the Innocenti who viewed the painting no longer needed to imagine themselves as

John the Baptist or Christ: Ghirlandaio had placed their alter egos in the scene itself.

Chapter Four will consider depictions of children at play as conduits for artistic invention

and ingenuity by focusing on drawings by painters and sculptors, including Andrea del

Verrocchio and Alessandro Cinuzzi, who studied children’s movements and activity.23 In the

drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, in particular, the child exemplifies the connection between

visible physical action and creative mental activity.24 In several of what Carmen Bambach has

called Leonardo’s “brainstorm sketches”25 the artist seems to use the child as a conduit through

which to stimulate his creative faculties (a notable example is a sheet from the early 1480s at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.142.1). In these primi pensieri, possessing the sketchy freedom

of first thoughts, the exploration of the motif of the child allows Leonardo’s mind to play on the

page itself. From an everyday vignette of a child playing with a cat (Musée Bonnat, 152; British

Museum, 1857-1-10-1) or a toy windmill (British Museum, 1860-6-16-100), and by means of

variation, repetition, and modulation, Leonardo transforms the figure into a Christ Child holding

a lamb or carnation. “Little children, with lively and contorted movements”26 appear to have

sparked Leonardo’s invention, allowing him to materialize on paper the flow of images through

his mind. The child’s very movements seem to release the fecundity of Leonardo’s imagination.27

23 An important work here will be Ulrich Pfisterer, Kunst-Geburten: Kreativität, Erotik, Körper in den frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2014).24 A source to be considered is Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Co., 1916). 25 Carmen Bambach, ed. Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), p. 21.26 Leonardo da Vinci in Ashburnham II, 17verso, quoted in Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks, ed. Thereza Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 169.27 An important point of comparison is Anthony Colantuono’s “The Tender Infant: Invenzione and Figura in the Art of Poussin,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1986.

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Chapter Five will examine the theme of children as emblems of the artist and artistic

virtuosity. On the left side of Andrea del Sarto’s Birth of the Virgin (1514, Chiostrino dei Voti,

Santissima Annunziata) a young boy, unconnected with the scene at large, seems to emerge from

a fireplace. Andrea chose to sign the painting—not once, but twice28—just above the head of the

boy, who lifts one leg as if playing on the idea of equilibrium achieved through contraposto and

seems to be included solely so the artist can demonstrate his ability to depict a youthful body in

motion. Similarly, in Pontormo’s Visitation (1514-15, Chiostrino dei Voti, Santissima

Annunziata), a child with no discernible relation to the painting’s narrative perches on the steps

in the painting’s foreground. Immersed in the examination of his own body the boy remains

oblivious to the important theological encounter behind him. In these paintings, rather than

exemplary beholders who enhance the viewer’s mode of observation, children draw attention

away from the work’s devotional function. The demands of decorum appear relaxed, giving the

artist greater freedom to paint and greater room for artistic license. Here, children hint at an

artistic realm of inventive possibility tied not to subject, but purely to form—early instances of

the figura sforzata.

Vasari, following Ghiberti’s precedent, frequently noted both the difficulty of depicting

children and the masterful skill of artists able to do so.29 Indeed, in the preface to Part Three of

Vasari’s second edition of The Lives, he singled out the delicacy required to render figures of

28 The artist dated the work and left his monogram on the mantle, upon which sits a sculpted chimneypiece that bears his signature (ANDREAS/FACIEBAT). This is one of only four works doubly signed in this manner. The others include The Story of Saint Joseph (1515-16, Palazzo Pitti), The Holy Family with Elizabeth and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (1516, Louvre), and The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1518, Wallace Collection). 29 Ghiberti described a painting executed by Taddeo Gaddi of Saint Francis resuscitating a child as being “made with such knowledge and skill and with such talent that in my own time I have not seen anything painted with such perfection.” Fengler, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Second Commentary, p. 25. In similarly glowing terms, Vasari described a fresco by Pontormo as “the most beautiful work in fresco that had ever been seen up to that time” and described the “loveliness of the graceful and lifelike children.” Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, pp. 340, 342-43.

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children with “limbs true to nature…veiled with a plumpness and fleshiness that should not be

awkward…refined by draughtsmanship and judgment.”30 The technical skill required to draw

children points to the necessity of repeated practice and thus continual access to actual children.

Both Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo, himself an orphan raised at the Innocenti, made numerous

studies of children, almost certainly from life.31 The extreme proximity of the Ospedale both to

Santissima Annunziata, where both artists worked, and to their homes raises the question of what

type of connection existed between subjects and artists.32

The dissertation will conclude with an Appendix of images of children, each

accompanied by a brief discussion of the role played by children in the work. A selection of

seventy-five to one hundred key examples will comprise this annotated checklist.

One methodological question that needs to be answered is how to differentiate a child

from a putto, spiritello, or angelo.33 Does the difference lie in their physical appearance (the

presence or absence of wings?), or in how they are depicted (what role they play within the

image and how they are shown playing it?)? How do contemporary sources distinguish among

them?34 And if the answer to the first question is not consistent, can one establish a conceptual

framework that could be applied universally?

30 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, p. 618. 31 Examples of such studies are in the collections of the Louvre (1717; 1692), Metropolitan (1996.12), Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi (631E; 632E), and Ashmolean (WA1995.214).32 Andrea del Sarto’s home was located at what is now via Gino Capponi 22 and Pontormo’s on the present day via Colonna, both within a block of the Ospedale and the Annunziata. This is illustrated in Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Dennis Geronimus, eds., Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art), pp. x, xi. 33 The departure point for this line of questioning will be Charles Dempsey’s Inventing the Renaissance Putto, in which he considers putti and spiritelli in terms of the antique conception of their life-giving, animating forces rather than as flesh and blood children (in fact opposed to them on certain occasions).34 A complicated matter. Filarete referred to the foundling hospital in Sforzinda as being for the protection of “putti”; the commission contract called the six small bronze sculptures of winged infants encircling the Siena baptismal font “fanciullini ignudi”; contemporary sources described figures adorning Donatello’s pulpit outside Prato Cathedral as “spiritelli.”

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Another key question that the dissertation must address is how to define “the child.” Is

there a start and end point to childhood? If so, are they consistent across media? Sources will

include contemporary images of the cycle of life (an excellent example on the pavement of Siena

Cathedral divides youth between “infantia,” “pueritia,” and “adolesentia”); the official language

used in legal documents, which followed traditional Roman forms of age classification; and

contemporary educational treatises, which prescribed activities and attitudes for different stages

in a child’s development.35

Beginning with the pioneering historian Philippe Ariès in his 1960 L’Enfant et la vie

familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, scholars from a range of disciplines have identified the pivotal

role of the Renaissance in the development of the conception of childhood as a distinct period of

life. For Ariès, the modern construct of childhood emerged during the Renaissance out of an

environment in which children wanted for affection, sentiment, care, and attention, a shift he

explained, in large measure, by the Renaissance emphasis on humanist education. In his wake,

numerous scholars from various disciplines have re-examined the topic.

Over the last two decades a body of art historical literature concerning images of children

has emerged. Most notable among these work of scholarship are Anne Higonnet’s Pictures of

Innocence (1998), which traced the development of the conception and ideal of the innocent

child from the eighteenth century, and then considered its modern opposite, “knowing

childhood.” In Breugel’s Children’s Games (1997), Edward Snow examined how “kinetically

charged” images of children at play produced an empathetic response from the viewer as a result

of the artist’s subtle pairing of contrasting forms and forces. James Steward’s expanded

exhibition catalog, The New Child (1995), focused on portraiture, situated such paintings within

35 Most importantly, Matteo Palmieri’s Civic Life and Leon Battista Alberti’s De Ingenuis Moribus et Liberalibus Studiis Adulescentiae and Della Famiglia, which traced the physical and psychic development of children from infancy to adolescence.

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the political, literary, and economic culture of Georgian England. In Imagining Childhood

(2006), Erika Langmuir considered several thematic categorizations of images not as visual

indicators of actual childhood, but as part of a continuing narrative about traditions of

representation and image-making itself. With a focus on French nineteenth-century paintings,

Greg Thomas, in Impressionist Children (2011), examined depictions of children as visual

reflections of modernity’s duality of mass commodification and subjective individuality. Most

recently, Grace Coolidge edited The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain (2014),

which brought together a variety of scholars and approaches to examine questions concerning

both visual and literary depictions of children, the alignment of these depictions with the actual

lives of children, and how larger societal concerns influenced conceptions of childhood.

Italian Renaissance art historians, however, have remained almost silent on the topic, and

scholarship is limited to a few studies. Most notable is Charles Dempsey’s Inventing the

Renaissance Putto (2001), which examined the revitalization of antique putti in the work of

Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, among others. Drawing on both elite Latin and vernacular

Tuscan traditions, Dempsey framed the transformed Renaissance spiritelli as embodiments of

those sensations that exist beyond the rational and quantifiable realm of visual representation,

such as the ineffable sensation of love. Utilizing a different line of inquiry, A Childhood

Memory by Piero della Francesca (2007), Hubert Damisch’s astute account of Piero della

Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, advocated an anti-biographical (and anti-Vasarian) mode of

interpretation, instead foregrounding the “operation of painting” itself, set within the framework

of the connections between image and viewer, rather than between image and textual source (or

image as a manifestation of cultural practice). For Damisch, Piero’s fresco is as much about

progeny, birth, and creation as about the fundamental conceits of art historical analysis itself.

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In Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (2004), Patricia Fortini Brown (2004) wove

together architectural and art historical analysis to reconstruct the domestic environment.

Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (1999) addressed

works of art depicting childbirth as well as those created for and in its commemoration, by

positioning them within the larger context of a mother’s pregnancy, labor, and confinement.

Geraldine Johnson’s essay, “Family Values: Sculpture and the Family in Fifteenth-Century

Florence” (2000), on the emergence of the portrait bust as a type, is another important

contribution, examining the elision of portraits of children and images of a very young Saint

John the Baptist. Two exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in recent years addressed

the topic, albeit obliquely—The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (2011) and Art

and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008)—as did the 2013 exhibition, The Springtime of the

Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence, 1400-1460, organized by the Louvre and the

Palazzo Strozzi. And, fundamental to any treatment of children’s bodies is Leo Steinberg’s

inimitable The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (1983). `

In recent years, social historians have produced important works focusing on Italy

Florence that contextualized children within the fabric of Italian Renaissance society. Chief

among these is Richard Trexler’s Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980), which examined

daily life and the role of ritual in the creation of Florentine identity, with several sections devoted

to the family, children, and orphans. Philip Gavitt (Charity and Children in Renaissance

Florence, 1990) and Nicholas Terpstra (Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance, 2005)

have studied foundling homes and the plight of abandoned children in Florence.

Despite these valuable works, no book-length study exists on the image of the child in

Florentine Renaissance art. “The Artist and the Child: Images of Children in Renaissance

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Florence, 1430-1530” will be the first to undertake a comprehensive study of these images,

which mark a crucial development in the history of art and visual culture. John Shearman

concludes his book, Only Connect…Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, by stating:

“There is only one central issue in art history, it seems to me, and that is to try to understand, in

as many ways as possible, how it is that works of art come to look as they do.”36 I am convinced

that looking at children will help us see and understand works of Renaissance art in new ways.

36 John Shearman, Only Connect…Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 261.

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