Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Visual Culture in Early Modernity) - Hardcover

Presciutti, Diana Bullen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 147245765X ISBN 13: 9781472457653

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

The social problem of infant abandonment captured the public’s imagination in Italy during the fifteenth century, a critical period of innovation and development in charitable discourses. As charity toward foundlings became a political priority, the patrons and supporters of foundling hospitals turned to visual culture to help them make their charitable work understandable to a wide audience. Focusing on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy examines the discursive processes through which foundling care was identified, conceptualized, and promoted. The first book to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this study looks beyond the textual evidence to demonstrate that the institutional identities of foundling hospitals were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries. The author draws on fields as diverse as art history, childhood studies, the history of charity, Renaissance studies, gender studies, sociology, and the history of religion to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.

About this title

About the Author

Diana Bullen Presciutti is Lecturer of Art History at the University of Essex, UK.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147245765X
• ISBN 13: 9781472457653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 284