Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The fresco cycle painted at the behest of Pope Sixtus IV in the late 1470s in the main ward of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome comprises an extended pictorial biography of Sixtus, prefaced by scenes representing the legendary foundation of the hospital by his predecessor Innocent III. The legend, which tells how Innocent established Santo Spirito as a foundling hospital in response to the discovery of victims of infanticide in the Tiber River, positions the pope as the savior of the city's unwanted children. This article elucidates how the construction and renovatio of the hospital is presented in the cycle as a generative product of papal will, with the care of foundlings situated as an integral part of the image of the pope as both Father of the Church and restorer of past glory to the city of Rome. While the frescoes engage with both widespread conventions for representing infanticide and commonplace notions of the social value of caring for abandoned children, I demonstrate that the ideologically potent visual rhetoric of foundling care was also flexible, and could be adapted to meet the specific needs of a particular institutional and patronal context.
Please see the online version of this article for color illustrations.
I would like to thank the Department of the History of Art and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Humanities Research Center at Rice University for their support during the course of researching and writing this article. I am most grateful to Angela Ho, Megan Holmes, Katie Hornstein, Eunice Howe, Julie Hruby, Diane Owen Hughes, Timothy McCall, Kirsten Olds, Sasha Pfau, Olivia Poska, Ivano Presciutti, Betsy Sears, Pat Simons, Louise Stein, and the anonymous readers at Renaissance Quarterly for their suggestions and assistance. A portion of this research was presented at the Beholding Violence symposium organized by Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Labbie at Bowling Green State University in March of 2008. I would also like to acknowledge the archivists, librarians, and staff at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the Archivio di Stato in Rome, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, as well as Mélanie Matthey, the staff of Giubilarte, and Marco Fiorilla of the Biblioteca Lancisiana. Thank you to Erika Suffern and Timothy Krause for valuable comments and suggestions. All translations are the author's except where otherwise noted.