ABSTRACT
Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson carefully explores the socioeconomic contexts of the art she evaluates and sees the specter of barbarity and monstrosity as a disciplining agent. She shows that artists and patrons of the Florentine orphanage for illegitimate children, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, used monstrous imagery—the bound and bleeding bodies of children—to communicate the threat that illegitimate, mostly female orphans posed to the prevailing social order, and the rather more concrete dangers that an uncaring or even hostile society posed to the children themselves. Representations of the Innocenti, the martyred victims of Herod’s massacre and the patrons of the orphanage, reminded respectable men of Florentine society that the abandoned products of their sexual license required support and protection; they also, however, testified to their guilt and to the social stigma of siring bastards. It was thought better for all, Lisot-Nelson’s analysis suggests, that these little monsters be confined and preserved within the borders of the orphanage walls.
