'Florence’s Daughters' at the Innocenti

A new restoration at Europe’s earliest foundling hospital

By Linda Falcone

Autumn/Winter 2024-25, Issue 06

Restoration Conversations magazine

A token left with one of the children, Ph. Marco Lanza, Courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti

The cobalt blue and white roundels by Andrea della Robbia, which feature on the loggia of Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti – now home to the Innocenti Museum and Institute – depict babies who remain ‘forever young’, thanks to the glazed terracotta technique the della Robbias perfected to weather the elements, in this case, over six centuries of sun and rain. Each one of these ten putti crafted in 1487 is different – like real babies are – and the way they squirm out of their swaddling clothes is realistic too, suggesting different phases of development. Yet as a symbol of Europe’s earliest foundling hospital, these sweet ‘realistic’ babes fall short in one little-known but tremendously significant detail: most of them should actually be girls.

In Florence in 1419, the year of the hospital’s commission, daughters were an expense, not a source of income, and this fact remained true until the early 1900s. Girls would leave home at marriageable age, and the dowry wealth they subtracted from their original household’s purse often took decades to pinch together. Their brothers could excel in a passed-down profession, even achieve renown based on some talent they were born with, but girls were barred from nearly all of society’s productive sectors, which explains why most of the Innocenti’s gettatelli, ‘little throwaways’, were female, even in the case of legitimate children.

The ‘rich’ children came with bits of jewellery and carefully cut pendants. The ‘poor’ children arrived with a tied ribbon or a shred of shiny fabric, halved buttons or even jewellery in cheaper metals. These tokens were the first-ever ‘identity cards’, and potentially allowed parents to reclaim the child someday, by presenting their token’s ‘other half’. Beyond the practicalities and in the people’s minds, they were quasi-magical talismans thought to guarantee their child’s protection, and hopefully, survival. Minute religious images were a favourite, as were baubles laced with certain kinds of beads or stones – like fragments of coral, well-known for warding off the evil eye. From the late 1800s onwards, with the advent of photography, some of the children were given folded paper ‘tokens’, yet these pictures torn in two, in most cases, were not family photographs. They were printed advertisements, apparently hoarded by mothers who thought their picture lucky or lovely.

A token left with one of the children, Ph. Marco Lanza, Courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti

Beyond the babies given up as a consequence of utter poverty, an untold number of the Innocenti’s wards were master-servant babies, or those born of foreign house slaves – as rumours claim da Vinci was. Alternatively, they belonged to what the hospital called ‘gravide occulte’, the hidden pregnant – the disgraced unwed mothers of any social extraction, both rich and poor. It was an ‘ospedale’ for this very reason, because the term originally designated a hospitality-based charity, not a place to treat the sick.

The hospital’s first ward was a baby they called Agata et Smeralda. She was taken in on Saint Agatha’s day – Friday, February 5, 1445 – and given a surname reminiscent of the green gem symbolising hope. The last child left there anonymously was Laudata Chiusuri. She was also named by the Ospedale, with a first name that means ‘Praised’ and a surname recalling the word chiusura, or closure. It was June 30, 1875, the night before child abandonment was officially proclaimed a crime. Babies left after that date went through a newly instituted office and paper documents replaced tokens, when it came to determining a child’s identity, if reclaimed. All the same, parents continued to uphold the token tradition well until the mid-twentieth century.

A new project, called ‘Florence’s Daughters at the Innocenti’, sponsored by donors Connie and Doug Clark and Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle, strives to protect, preserve and raise awareness on women’s history at the Innocenti Institute, starting with its female ‘Innocents’. Centred on the restoration and digitalisation of 100 tokens belonging to girls, its focus period is the end of the nineteenth-century onwards, in order to safeguard and study a portion of the archive in need of rediscovery. A partnership between the Innocenti Institute, Museum and Archives and the Calliope Arts Foundation, the project’s 100 tiny restorations will be executed by Florence-based conservator Rossella Lari, under the directorship of Antonella Schena and curator Scientific director Arabella Natalini with the archivist Lucia Ricciardi. This project, which began in October 2024, will end with a pop-up exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti, in the autumn of 2025.

Until the morning after baby Laudata’s nighttime arrival, parents gave up their children through a grated iron window, with openings large enough for a baby to fit, which was installed in the mid 1400s. They could be left, without anyone there to spy on who was doing the leaving. Interestingly, the size of the grate’s holes was reduced in the late 1700s, to prevent parents from squeezing older children through, because by 1767, the Innocenti had 3,000 mouths to feed, in addition to the 1,057 new babies left at the ospedale that slump year.  

Facade of the Istituto degli Innocenti in Florence, ph. Courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti

Laudata’s case is recorded in all possible detail, as are those of every child the hospital ever cared for – girl or boy.  “After the doorbell rang, she was placed in the Manger Scene, with the diagonal half of a brass medal depicting the Most Holy Conception”, the archivist wrote in the big book ‘Affairs of the Creatures. Laudata came with a note that read, “Brought child, been baptised.” What they found inside her swaddling clothes was similar to the ‘tokens’ left with all of the Innocents, and the institutes archives hosts over 40,000 of them.

The babies were collected by the Innocenti’s house nannies – often girls who had grown up at the hospital, or unwed mothers taken in to breastfeed their own babies along with those of others. As a sign of welcome, the new arrivals were placed in a cradle between polychrome terracotta statues of Saints Mary and Joseph, to be looked upon lovingly, as if they were the Baby Jesus himself. Then the children were fed, washed, and recorded in the book called Balie e bambini (Nannies and Children) and baptised as soon as possible, to spare them from spending eternity in Limbo, a guaranteed fate if Death came for a child before she was christened.

Birth and death often stood side by side in the years following the hospital’s founding, as Renaissance Florence faced a fifty-percent child mortality rate. Some died shortly after birth, but most after weaning – as solid food was scarce or contaminated, especially for the poorest of children. For hundreds of years, the Innocenti sought a solution by sending its wards to the Tuscan countryside until the age of six, to get fed and strong, and to achieve this end, they put the children’s often poverty-stricken host families on their payroll.  

We know more about the women in these families than one might imagine. The Innocenti Archives are among the most precious and complete in Florence, and the children’s arrival and subsequent lives, are not the only ones worth documenting. In its ledgers for Balie e bambini and Affari per creature there are details of the women who breastfed, cared for and mothered their wards over the course of centuries, and this precious documentation makes these archives – tokens and all – one of the earliest repositories of women’s social history in Italy and the world.

Stay tuned for more on ‘Florence’s Daughters at the Innocenti’, in next issue of Restoration Conversations and in an upcoming issue of The Curators’ Quaderno.