A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age by Joanne M. Ferraro;

Author:Joanne M. Ferraro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 5.2 Domenico di Bartolo (1400/04–45/47), Education and Marriage of the Foundlings, before 1445, fresco, Ospedale della Scala, Siena. © Josse/Scala/Art Resource, New York.

On the left side of his fresco, resident wet-nurses are shown with multiple babies reaching for their breasts. Some play with their infants and hug them, some busily sign work agreements in the presence of men. At the center, a hospital administrator hands a swaddled infant to a nurse, while on the right side, a girl who survived into adulthood is married off to a young man. As in Ghirlandaio’s fresco (Figure 5.1), the groom puts a ring on her finger and waits for his reward in the form of a dowry, i.e., the sack of gold coins flashed by the hospital warden. In contrast to Ghirlandaio’s fresco, Bartolo portrays dotal marriage not as an end in and of itself, but as a solution to the problem of child abandonment. In Bernardino Poccetti’s fresco (Figure 5.3), as well, the foundlings are shown to be rescued for a purpose: those who survive the Massacre of the Innocents depicted on the left and manage to be raised by resident wet-nurses would eventually have to line up in orderly fashion, showing proper gratitude to the foundling home’s administrators by studying, singing, and praying.116

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