Ospedale degli Innocenti

Posted by Kaushal (Groningen, Netherlands) on 24 July 2007 in Architecture and Portfolio.

The Ospedale degli Innocenti ('Hospital of the Innocents') was a children's orphanage in Florence, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. There was a door with a special rotating horizontal wheel that brought the baby into the building without the parent being seen. This allowed people to leave their babies, anonymously, to be cared for by the orphanage. This system was in operation until the hospital's closure in 1875.
Above each column is a ceramic tondo. These were originally meant by Brunelleschi to be blank concavities, but ca. 1490, Andrea della Robbia was commissioned to fill them in.The design features a baby in swaddling clothes on a blue wheel, indicative of the horizontal wheel in the wall where babies could be rotated into the interior. A few of the tondi are still the original ones, but some are nineteenth century copies.

The insignia of the American Academy of Pediatrics is based on one of the tondi.

Source: www.wikipedia.org

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