Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This paper examines an image of infanticide found in the papal hospital of San Spirito, an institution that counted foundlings among the recipients of its charity. Using theories of spectatorship and the body borrowed from studies of film, gender, visuality, and literature, along with the methodologies of social history and sociology, I explore here the role played by the strategic visual presentation of violence in the discursive context of early modern charity toward abandoned children.

A series of frescoes (c. 1480) in the main ward of the hospital relate the legendary foundation of San Spirito by Pope Innocent III, with the pope’s primary motivation recast as the prevention of infanticide. Inscriptions beneath the narrative frescoes elaborate the drama of pictured above, detailing how women kill their children to avoid societal censure, how these dead infants are recovered from the Tiber river, and, most crucially, how these events prompt Innocent to establish the hospital.

In the opening scene of the fresco cycle, the tranquility of a post-partum birth chamber is contrasted with a startling depiction of the mother rushing toward the picture plane, holding her bleeding child awkwardly by the feet. Instead of into the nearby Tiber, she appears ready to toss the infant right out of the compositional space and onto the floor of the hospital ward. Her movements problematize the boundary between the pictorial and ward spaces, making the beholder complicit in her actions. The ideal viewer is also pictorially constructed, in the form of Pope Innocent, who responds to the sight of the dead infants with the foundation of a hospital for foundlings.

The fresco puts the violence front and center, making legible the severity of the social problem the hospital was represented as working to solve. I contrast this pictorial strategy with another depiction of infanticide, a Massacre of the Innocents (1486-89) in the Innocenti foundling hospital in Florence. Both images formed part of larger narratives and both were central to visual forms of institutional self-presentation, with the hospitals positioned as paternal guardians of potential victims. While the Santo Spirito fresco is compositionally structured to construct a role for the viewer in the child killing—visualized as a local, immediate concern—the Innocenti Massacre separates the viewer from the violence, which instead serves as an index of the sanctity of the Holy Innocents and, by extension, of the Innocent foundlings with which they were pictorially conflated.



	Diana Bullen Presciutti (Art History, University of Michigan) “Picturing Infanticide in the Hospital of Santo Spirito, Rome” This paper examines an image of infanticide found in the papal hospital of San Spirito, an institution that counted foundlings among the recipients of its charity. Using theories of spectatorship and the body borrowed from studies of film, gender, visuality, and literature, along with the methodologies of social history and sociology, I explore here the role played by the strategic visual presentation of violence in the discursive context of early modern charity toward abandoned children. A series of frescoes (c. 1480) in the main ward of the hospital relate the legendary foundation of San Spirito by Pope Innocent III, with the pope’s primary motivation recast as the prevention of infanticide. Inscriptions beneath the narrative frescoes elaborate the drama of pictured above, detailing how women kill their children to avoid societal censure, how these dead infants are recovered from the Tiber river, and, most crucially, how these events prompt Innocent to establish the hospital. In the opening scene of the fresco cycle, the tranquility of a post-partum birth chamber is contrasted with a startling depiction of the mother rushing toward the picture plane, holding her bleeding child awkwardly by the feet. Instead of into the nearby Tiber, she appears ready to toss the infant right out of the compositional space and onto the floor of the hospital ward. Her movements problematize the boundary between the pictorial and ward spaces, making the beholder complicit in her actions. The ideal viewer is also pictorially constructed, in the form of Pope Innocent, who responds to the sight of the dead infants with the foundation of a hospital for foundlings. The fresco puts the violence front and center, making legible the severity of the social problem the hospital was represented as working to solve. I contrast this pictorial strategy with another depiction of infanticide, a Massacre of the Innocents (1486-89) in the Innocenti foundling hospital in Florence. Both images formed part of larger narratives and both were central to visual forms of institutional self-presentation, with the hospitals positioned as paternal guardians of potential victims. While the Santo Spirito fresco is compositionally structured to construct a role for the viewer in the child killing—visualized as a local, immediate concern—the Innocenti Massacre separates the viewer from the violence, which instead serves as an index of the sanctity of the Holy Innocents and, by extension, of the Innocent foundlings with which they were pictorially conflated.