Brunelleschi's Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood

FAIN: FZ-287317-22

Joseph Luzzi
Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-9800)

Research and writing a cultural history of the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence, Italy, an exceptional institution of childcare and a notable example of early Italian Renaissance architecture, from 1419 to the present.

“Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood” will be the first book for a broad audience to chart and analyze comprehensively the history of the Hospital of the Innocents (or Innocenti) in Florence, Italy, from 1419 to the present day. A foundling home designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, it revolutionized our understanding of childhood development, with contributions such as giving art instruction to unwanted foundlings for the first time, securing dowries and gainful employment for historically ill-treated female children, and paving the way for the birth of pediatrics as a medical science. “Brunelleschi’s Children” will bring together the Innocenti’s multivariate strands into one unified narrative, showing how its devotion to what the historian Jacob Burckhardt called Renaissance “many-sidedness” enabled it to impact so many areas of human life and solve a great challenge in early modern Europe: the crisis of abandoned children.