Ospedale degli Innocenti: The Loggia and the Creation of the Public Sphere

As keystones of the healthcare sector, hospitals have developed into highly-complex organizations, ones that are internally arranged according to the intricate processes they execute, but are frequently barely legible as architecture. In today’s urban environments, they perform essential functions but rarely define the image of the city. Yet their historical predecessors were often icons within the urban context: they performed as architecture . In the early modern period, hospitals claimed space rather than merely occupying it, and thereby contributed to the emergence of the city as such. They played a decisive role in shaping the self-regard of, and indeed the idea of, “the public.” One of the earliest and most powerful examples of hospitals’ contribution to the new paradigm of the public sphere is from the fifteenth century, Ospedale degli Innocenti (“Hospital of Innocents”) in Florence.

Ospedale degli Innocenti is not a hospital in the modern sense, but was built to serve as the main orphanage of Florence. It was constructed from 1419 according to plans by Filippo Brunelleschi, and inaugurated in 1445. It is included in every overview of European architectural history to mark the beginning of an era that was increasingly aware of the civic role of secular buildings. This awareness—a turn towards the world-as-it-is—was thanks both to the re-animation of antiquity and to a new enthusiasm for the scientific observation of natural phenomena: the Renaissance.

Unlike the hospitals of centuries before, Ospedale degli Innocenti did not take in and care for all those in need, such as the elderly, the sick, the homeless, or pilgrims, but only abandoned or unwanted children, the so-called innocenti . In this regard, the Hospital also marks the beginning of an ongoing process of identifying and differentiating groups as recipients of care. The first child, the scrupulous hospital records tell us, was placed in the pila— the baby hatch of the Foundling Hospital—at eight o’clock in the evening on February 5, 1445,1 and for centuries afterwards the Ospedale was the most important institution for child welfare in Florence, if not all Europe.2

The term “innocenti” resonated with the story of Herod’s massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem from the Gospel of Matthew. Every orphan was therefore understood as a proxy for the newborn Christ, even more directly than the other types of needy and poor. The “foundlings” thus became recipients of charitable Christian care in accordance with the seven canonical works of mercy as an additional “eighth work.” Their admission to the institution, their diaper-changing, wet-nursing, baptism, education, training, and integration into society was depicted in an extraordinary fresco by Domenico di Bartolo in the early 1440s in the Pilgrims’ Hall of Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.3 The tasks depicted by Bartolo in Siena were arranged spatially, in a highly specialized architecture, for the first time in Florence.

Domenico di Bartolo, Accoglienza, educazione e matrimonio di una figlia dello spedale, 1441–1442. Photo: Sailko/Wikimedia Commons.

The hospital was commissioned by the Arte della Seta, the silk weavers’ guild of Florence. When he died in 1410, Francesco Datini left money in his will to the already existent Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova to help the gittatelli, the “discarded” children, and to feed, raise, and manage the young children, the fanciullini.4 However, Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova, then already a century old and still in operation today, did not take in orphans, so the guild was entrusted to fulfill Datini’s intentions by building a new institution.5 It should be noted here that guilds in the Republic of Florence were not only professional associations, but also took on public tasks as civic associations. The Arte della Seta had been responsible for foundlings since 1294.6 According to Diana Bullen Presciutti, the concern for orphans came not only from purely charitable motives, but was also a solution to an acute demographic crisis. Due to outbreaks of plague in the middle of the fourteenth century, the population of Florence for a time shrank from 90,000 to 37,000. The aim of the Foundling Hospital was therefore not only to provide shelter for children in an overpopulated city, but to fill empty urban spaces.7 Infanticide and abandonment had to be avoided at all costs in order to repopulate the city.

In keeping with the tradition of building hospitals along arterial roads near city walls (to intercept the sick, vagabonds, and pilgrims on the outskirts of the city, and thus separate them from the citizenry), Ospedale degli Innocenti was built to the north of the city center, on the south-eastern flank of Piazza SS. Annunziata. Filippo Brunelleschi had joined the Arte della Seta in 1404 and his appointment as the architect responsible for the construction of the Foundling Hospital is documented in its sources until 1427. After that, Francesco della Luna took over construction management. During the years of the Ospedale’s construction, looking from the piazza down along the Via dei Servi, one would have had a direct view of the apse of the Cathedral of Florence and, above it, the building site of Brunelleschi’s dome.

The nine-bay loggia of Ospedale degli Innocenti rises above a wide flight of steps. The arcade arches of the loggia are supported by Corinthian columns. The gateway, built later, and the additional southern entrance, take up the motif of the loggia. A continuous architrave spans the entire width of the building, which is followed by a plain plastered upper story with aedicule windows above the arcade apexes. With its flat plastered surfaces, set off by the use of grey-green pietra serena, Brunelleschi’s building would have, to contemporary eyes, presented a skeletal vision of emphatic minimalism. In 1487, the austere building was emblematically decorated with majolica tondi by Andrea della Robbia, which, in a reference to the unraveling of silkworm cocoons, literally show the infant unraveling from baby to child.8

The central, main entrance leads visitors into a wide square courtyard that opens out onto a large garden and features columns arranged identically to those of the loggia.9 The buildings that flank it were historically used as the orphanage church and dormitory, and somewhat later were supplemented by a long rectangular courtyard that served as a girls’ wing.

This specialization and separation of functions was new in the fifteenth century. Leon Battista Alberti noted in his De re aedificatoria, decades after Brunelleschi’s plans in Florence, that hospitals: “are to be built with much thought, and a good deal of variety: for one place is proper for harboring the distressed, and another for curing and softening the sick and infirm.”10, trans. Cosimo Bartoli and Giacomo Le, (London, 1726), 86; see also Ernst Rodenwaldt, Leon Battista Alberti: Ein Hygieniker der Renaissance (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1968), 54.] However, this proposed specialization of care was very slow to catch on, and it would require greater financial resources, an overarching municipal state, and, above all, a new medico-analytical approach to the subject of care and illness.

The hospital loggia and the idea of the public sphere

The loggia is the decisive architectural feature of the Foundling Hospital in Florence. It not only defines the Piazza SS. Annunziata (which was at the time unpaved), but also marks the building as a decidedly public institution by referring to the entirety of the citizens of the city, ruling and ruled.11

The loggia as an architectural element is not an invention of the Renaissance: loggias in front of or next to public buildings were already part of the medieval image of Italian cities. According to Alberti, the loggia is an ornament of the piazza or square.12 Unlike the piazza itself, the loggia offers a multifunctional space that is protected from the sun, wind, and rain. From the thirteenth century onwards, the loggia had a significant career in Florence as a motif of public power, with more than a dozen erected in the city, including on the exterior of the so-called Bargello (1293); the grain market and seat of all the guilds, Orsanmichele (1338); and the Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria (1381).13 Likewise, there were numerous medieval hospitals in Florence—at the end of the fifteenth century, one contemporary counted a total of thirty-five—that also incorporated loggias, thus marking their decidedly public aspirations.14 The loggia of the nearby Ospedale di San Matteo on Via Ricasoli, built between 1393 and 1408, functioned as a place of assistance, a waiting area, a stage, and a reception room. As with other loggias, access here was at ground level or via a few steps, and, on closer inspection, offers only a semi-public space: at nightfall, or in case of danger, it can be closed off from the street with high grilles.

Ospedale degli Innocenti asserts a completely new loggia architecture. In its configuration, regularity, and symmetry, the loggia set new standards for the entire institution. Brunelleschi, reinterpreting antiquity, uses Corinthian columns instead of bundle or polygonal pillars. But more than just the columns represent a clear break with Gothic forms: the vaults are designed as flat suspended domes, without ribbing.15 The loggia is elevated like a temple above an open staircase that matches its length, enabling round-the-clock accessibility.16 when the access stairs of a building become a device of topographical organization of public space,” (Labics and Isidori, The Architecture of Public Space, 270).]

In the transition to the modern era, changes in the public sphere became apparent. While pre-modern European cities knew “occasional” public spheres—local spaces that were accessible to certain groups of people for a limited period of time—in the early modern period, these spaces of political communication were socially expanded and spatially defined. This means that public space has never been merely a side effect of private property, but requires cultural creation. The public sphere must be actively created, located, and delimited.17

With the Ospedale, Brunelleschi radically expanded the claim of the public sphere upon the city’s imagination: in the mediation zone between outside and inside, between public and private, between locus publicus and locus secretus, the architect established a new yardstick for accessibility, legibility, and hierarchy.18 Brunelleschi elevated the medieval hospital loggia from an intermediate space into a monument, with a claim to prestige. The cascade of steps created a connection but also a demarcation. As Andreas Tönnesmann writes:

Nowhere else had accessibility and the ability to convey space been translated so succinctly into the design concept of a building. Features such as the continuous open staircase or the wide opening of the arcades, and ultimately also the classicising formal language, are less determined by the range of functions of the hospital than by the demands and requirements of the surrounding urban space.19

Ospedale degli Innocenti also had a significant impact on the subsequent evolution of the surrounding area: Brunelleschi’s aim, according to Ludwig Frommel, had been to use the arches and steps to bring the Piazza SS. Annunziata closer to the arrangement of an ancient forum, in line with Alberti’s arguments.20 After 1516, the architectural form of Brunelleschi’s loggia was repeated on two further sides of the square, and—in a move that claimed prestige perhaps owed to the Arte della Seta—the square was itself subsequently centered with the addition of a monument to Grand Duke Ferdinand I, cast by Pietro Tacca in 1608, thus tying both the square and its charity back to the Medici prince.21

The motif of the loggia, which Brunelleschi had so thoroughly revised and reformulated, was not only used on the outside of the building, but also on the inside: the large inner courtyard of the Foundling Hospital repeats the design and height of the loggia.22 In other words, the public aspect associated with the loggia is carried over the dividing line between locus publicus and locus secretus. Thus the inner courtyard, as a place of education and training for the parentless children, is perceived as a place of public interest, public responsibility, and public welfare, and is marked accordingly in architectural terms. The square, loggia, and inner courtyard at the Ospedale share the same architectural expression. The care of the Florentine city-state’s neediest—its orphans and foundlings—is presented as a thoroughly public interest, both inside and out.

Courtyard of Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. Photo: John Samuel/Wikimedia Commons.

The privatization of a public motif

With the loggia of the Foundling Hospital, Brunelleschi invented a new type of charitable architecture. He ennobled the most vulnerable members of the population of Florence, bestowed a temple motif upon them, and provided a loggia accessible around the clock. By repeating the same motif on a public square and in the hospital courtyard, he emphasized the collective public responsibility for the foundling children as images of the Christ child. Ospedale degli Innocenti thus made a social problem visible and legible, and at the same time offered a solution: good republican rule takes care of all those in need, even unwanted and abandoned children.

Within the political structure of the Republic of Florence, the city’s up-and-coming banking families such as the Medici and Rucellai were unable to openly express their aspirations for power, but they were indisputable in the language of stone.23 The architectural vocabulary so convincingly reworked by Brunelleschi was immediately adopted in the private sector as emblematic of public life: the Medici and Rucellai quickly adapted the motif of the Foundling House loggia for their private buildings. Brunellechi’s iconography, in which collective welfare resonates strongly, now ennobled private family palazzi with the cloak of political service.

Until 1517, Palazzo Medici had a loggia that opened out over the corner at the intersection of Via de’ Gori and today’s Via Camillo Cavour (formerly Via Larga). Commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Michelangelo closed it with two kneeling windows (finestre inginocchiate). Their massive round arches are still recognizable. When designing the inner courtyard, the Medici’s house architect, Michelozzo, even used the slender Corinthian columns of the Ospedale, which he also integrated into the adjoining garden for the design of a garden loggia. The Rucellai family, who were related by marriage to the Medicis, went even further: around 1455, a new façade combined various existing buildings of their family palace on Via della Vigna Nuova. However, the narrowness of the street made it impossible to build a loggia on the external façade. Giovanni Rucellai therefore also acquired the small triangular plot of land opposite, at the junction with Via del Purgatorio, on which the missing loggia was built. Such projects can be understood as a direct expression of the claim to benevolence and care, and a decidedly public claim, in the sense of Magnificentia, at that. Reciprocally, this also cemented a public claim to private buildings.24 The architectural motif of a hospital loggia as a synonym for the public, the common good, assistance, social responsibility, and a secure, healthy state was so striking and powerful that it was usurped for the adornment of private buildings and for furthering private political interests.