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Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy book cover

1st Edition

Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy

By Diana Bullen Presciutti Copyright 2015
284 Pages
by Routledge

284 Pages
by Routledge

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.... Read more
Table of Contents to come.

Biography

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

"[The book] is a sharply focused look at the figurative imagery deployed by hospitals caring for orphaned and abandoned children. ... A significant addition to our understanding of the multivalence of visual language in the Renaissance city, elucidated through focused analyses of images and deep probing of textual sources."

--CAA Reviews

"Presciutti's study makes valuable contributions to our understanding of charity and charitable institutions in early modern Italy. ... Presciutti's analysis of the visual culture of institutions such as the Innocenti in Florence and Santo Spirito in Rome contributes most to a richer understanding of the rise of the visual cultures of charity in the early modern period."

--Sixteenth Century Studies

"A rich and original study full of revealing insights. Presciutti shows how much more we can learn about the foundling homes of Florence, Rome, and Bologna when we compare them systematically. Working through many archives for documents and images, she is masterful in her interdisciplinary treatment of visual culture as a means of advertising and 'branding' foundling homes at a time when public acceptance of these new forms of institutional charity was far from certain."

--Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto, Canada

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