The Grim Resonance of “The Innocents of Florence”

The Florentine entrepreneur Francesco Datini was the son of a barkeep. Orphaned around age thirteen, by the Black Death, he made his first fortune as an arms dealer in Avignon, during the Hundred Years’ War, then compounded his wealth by manufacturing wool and dyes, trading in spices and gold, and dabbling in usury. By midlife, he had controlling interests in seven trading companies across multiple European cities, plus two factories and a bank. In 1376, he married an aristocrat, albeit one whose father had been beheaded for conspiring to overthrow the Florentine government. Datini’s bride, Margherita, proved to be infertile; with no one to inherit his business empire, and increasingly concerned about the fate of his immortal soul, Datini left much of his estate to causes benefitting the poor. The most famous exhibit of his largesse is Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, or the Hospital of the Innocents, in Florence, which began operations in 1445; it was one of the first orphanages to be established in Europe.

This outline of Datini’s life and afterlife—an orphan with no children of his own becomes a benefactor of orphaned children—draws a pleasing circle. In actuality, though, Datini was not childless, merely heirless. He impregnated at least two teen-age servants, one of whom, named Lucia, was enslaved. The first of his children died in infancy, in 1387, as did about half of all babies born in Florence during this era. His second child—Lucia’s baby, a girl named Ginevra—was removed from her mother’s care, briefly placed in a foundling hospital, and then packed off to a wet nurse in the countryside. The historian Ann Crabb, in “The Merchant of Prato’s Wife,” writes that Datini sent the infant away because he wanted to keep her existence a secret, and because he was concerned, understandably, that Lucia “would want to see and touch the baby and that there would be no end to it.”

The Innocenti became a warehouse for such secrets. It was a home for children whose parents were lost, but not necessarily dead. With its grand arcade of columns and arches—topped by glazed terra-cotta babies in swaddling clothes, designed by Andrea della Robbia—the Innocenti’s serene façade veiled a bleak interior landscape. Similarly, the placid title of Joseph Luzzi’s new book, “The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood,” belies the sexual violence, family separation, child abuse, and mass death that the author chronicles amid the historic Tuscan superbloom of human creativity and innovation.

In the decades before the Innocenti opened, infants in Florence “could be found left inside church doorways, dumped into rivers, or flung upon garbage heaps, where sometimes they might even be devoured by wild animals,” Luzzi, a professor of literature at Bard, writes. The first infant to be abandoned at the Innocenti “had been gnawed by mice,” and died within the year. Unwanted babies could be placed in an empty holy-water font beneath the Innocenti’s arches, at no cost or risk of legal censure. The Innocenti later installed a revolving hatch behind a grated window, which granted the messenger more anonymity. Most of the babies were female, and many were the children of enslaved people. It was not then a crime to rape one’s own slave, and wealthy men preyed freely on their property; of the women in fifteenth-century Florence who gave birth out of wedlock, about three out of five were slaves.

By its nature, the Innocenti made the rather countercultural suggestion that the lives of these low-born children had value, although perhaps more in the economic sense than the spiritual one. More than half of the local population perished in the plague outbreak of 1348 that killed Datini’s parents and two of his siblings; generations later, Luzzi writes, Florence’s municipal leaders “saw an opportunity for addressing the city’s labor shortage” in the Innocenti’s salvaged children, assuming they survived infancy. Boys typically got a few years of grade school, began apprenticing in a trade by age seven, and were considered full-fledged members of the workforce around thirteen. Girls stayed largely illiterate, learned weaving and housekeeping, and were put to work as domestic staff in Florence’s more affluent homes, where it could take a decade or more to save up a small dowry.

Often, these girls faced the same sexual exploitation that their mothers had endured. A “nasty unintended consequence” of establishing the orphanage, Luzzi observes, was that “it emboldened many powerful Florentine men to act without sexual scruple.” (Perhaps the most shocking of the many statistics Luzzi cites is that, during one twenty-year stretch of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, “more than a third of the rape cases in Florence involved girls between six and twelve years old.”) One director of the Innocenti, who came aboard in the mid-fifteen-hundreds, simply stopped assigning girls to outside domestic work, owing to rampant rape and abuse. His decision led to overcrowding in the Innocenti, and resulted in many women of marrying age being diverted into the nunnery rather than risk “capitar male, ending up badly—his euphemism for sex work,” Luzzi writes.

Although the Innocenti was ostensibly a beacon of enlightened compassion, its governance reflected its times in ways that contradicted its mission. One of its earliest directors spent outrageous sums on art, believing the expenditures would help burnish the orphanage’s name and lure generous donors (who remained scarce). During this period, the Innocenti acquired Robbia’s terra-cotta cherubs and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s sumptuous “Adoration of the Magi,” in addition to other works, while the children living among these commissions subsisted mostly on bread, plus dried, salted meat twice a week and the occasional portion of cheese. (The Innocenti of today operates as a museum, research center, and provider of family-support services; its baby-deposit window was closed in the late nineteenth century.)

A far crueller and more irrational exchange economy unfolded in the seventeenth century, when the institution began hiring unmarried mothers as wet nurses, as part of a nascent welfare program. The babies of these women were sent away to the countryside, and the Innocenti garnished the meagre wages it paid them to cover the cost of their infants’ care. These young women had no say in how their bodies were used, whether to satisfy an employer’s sexual urges, gestate a fetus, or produce milk for other women’s babies. The primal bond between parent and child was broken for the sake of an extractive and absurdly unnecessary transaction, or perhaps on behalf of an equally primal urge to punish the wayward and the weak.

I was surprised, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been, at how often the present intruded on Luzzi’s slender and compelling book about the past. Since the Dobbs decision abolished the constitutional right to abortion, in 2022, at least ten states have passed new or expanded “safe haven” laws for relinquishing infants, and hundreds of temperature-controlled “baby boxes” have cropped up in Indiana, Kentucky, and elsewhere—the contemporary equivalent of the Innocenti’s holy-water font. In the past few years, multiple states have introduced or enacted legislation that relaxes child-labor laws; in Iowa, for example, a fourteen-year-old now has the opportunity to work in an industrial laundry or a meat freezer. ICE agents separate children from their parents every day, and we are told that President Trump’s top immigration ghouls want to accelerate the pace of these ruptures, in order to pressure more families to leave the U.S. Paying for Renaissance masterworks while the children in your charge are living on crusts and jerky seems preferable to, if not entirely unlike, spending hundreds of millions to bulldoze the East Wing for a chintzy ballroom weeks before food-stamp benefits are set to expire. It can be hard to locate oneself in the correct century.

Unlike many others among Luzzi’s cast of characters, Francesco Datini made uncommon restitution for his very common sins. He released Lucia, the enslaved woman who bore his daughter, from bondage and gave her hand in marriage to one of his highest-ranking servants. When little Ginevra was six years old, she went to live with Datini and his wife, who raised her as their own child; at fifteen, Ginevra, too, was married off, to a Datini family friend. “Her dowry and her wedding cost Datini a very handsome sum of money,” the historian George Huppert writes in his book “After the Black Death.” Ginevra may never have known her true relation to Lucia, or that she was born to a slave. Despite the class differences between mother and daughter, each of their lives arced toward the same best-case scenario: the safe commercial transfer of her person from one man to another. ♦