The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-01-10
CHILDREN OF FLORENCE.

NhAbH hAIN VI IuUNLHVLi
 The piazza outside the Church of the Santissima Annunsiata, where for four and a half centuries childhood depicted in its most beautiful and at the same
 time it's most pathetic aspect, has looked down upon the busy life forever hurrying by, is perhaps the place of all others in Florence where the inveterate loafer unwilling to leave the sunshine and satiated for the moment with the treasures of church and picture gallery may feel justified in lingering. It may be added that the steps under the gracefulh arcade which faces the Inno- cent Hospital offer an obvious and de- sirable resting place. An incessant stream of life flows daily through the piazza, trans laden with country peo- pie returning from market bound for the heights of Fiesole and with city folk alsoh, perhaps only going couple of hundred yards, for nobody in Flor ence walks if he can drive; with long carts of the country rattle after them, carrying twice as much of humanity as they are intended to hold. And yet this square, one of the busiest in the city, retains a curious atmosphere of repose. Possibly it is because the traffic never passes nor diverges from its course to disturb the harmony about 1t, but is rather like a stream flowing through quiet meadow. At least this is how I have found it on week days. On Sunday and on festas, when the fashionable world fiocks to the Church of the Annunziata and to the Chapel of the Innocent, it is an- other matter.
 A few children are generally playing, but in a quiet and orderly fashion, about the bronze and marble sea mon- sters of Tacea, which serve as foun- tains. Upon the right the great bronze statue of Duke Ferdinand the First seated on his horse gazes forever at a blank window in the palace, where once the bust of his lady smiled back at him. Theirs was surely meritori-
 ous dilatoriness, for had the wooing been conducted with the heat and fer Wer extolled by youth another bloody crime would have been added to the domestic history of Florence. So there
 he stands, a mighty monument to the negative virtue of delay! But it is the lovely facade of the Founding Hospi- tai, the spedale degl' Innocent, which gives its chief beauty and character to the piazza. To all those who know Florence it is sufficiently familiar. The long harmonous lines of Brunelleschfs design suggesting rare combination of strength and simplicity, the wide shallow steps, the rounded columns, and above the arches, the della Rob- bia medallions of the swaddled babies, the blue of the porcelain contrasting very graciously with the sad gray of the stone. Each exquisite representa- ton of helpless infancy differs from the other each instinct with life and grace and pathos. For more than four hundred years the coloring of these medalionshas withstood wind and weather, for did not Luca find out the secret-which he transmitted. to his nephew Andrea, among whose early work the medallions have been classed
 -of beauty in external decoration which could safely be used 'dore sono acque? Tn the courtyard of the hos pital over the ,!oSnd arches of the cloisters, the design of the swaddled -sssFiias -ssa Res aHepeated; but here, though the delicate blue and gray coloring is { the same, the babies are only painted upon plaster. Above them on the up- per story, painted in the same manner are the instruments of the passion, the cock of the iBiggallo, and repeated at intervals the porta the gate, which is 1 the badge of Silk Workers.
 The building of the Spedale degl h. nocenti, which may we'll, both for age and beauty as well as for scientific de- velopment, stand before all the found- ling hospitals of the world is not so old as the. actual society. for manu- scripts containing lists of regulations for such a society for the protection of | founding children dated in the twelfth century exist among the archives of Florence. But in the fifteenth century, in 1421, owing to the eloquent appeal of | Leonardo Bruni, the famous scholar and secretary of the republic, who, as his monument in Santa Croce tells us, enjoyed the sunshine of favor in the 1 palace of Cosimo de Medici,' the hos pital as we see it to-day was actually | founded There is perhaps no stronger testimony to the Florentine love of lit- i tie children than is to be found in the names of the great masters of that magnificent period who gave their work to adorn with exquisite and ten- der sentiment the refuge of destitute and nameless infancy.
 In the gloom of the cloister, over the ! entrance to the Church of the Innocen- ti, gleams beautiful della Robbia re- lief of the Annunciation, surrounded with it's lovely garland of cherub. heads. Tn the church itself, behind the altar Ghirlandajo's Elaboration of the Magi," with the two little murdered innocents who, kneeling in ther white robes before the Saviour, have entered | into glory, conveys the same feeling of { gentle compassion for the young and | helpless which is the dominating note | in all the decoration of the hospital We find it again in the pictures in the board room, in the work of Piero di Cosimo, Ghirlandajo's predella, and in that most tender picture of Filippo Lippis. in which a boy angel brings the Christ Child to the Madonna It repeats itself in the minutest detail of decoration in the interior, Il the winged heads of the putti over the doorWays; and there is always the same sense of 1, n ,,,,o,,,- with py11n a1Incabi'c hold and