Volume 36, Number 11 · June 29, 1989
Los Olvidados
By Bernard Knox
The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
by John Boswell
Pantheon, 488 pp., $24.95
One of the most popular tourist attractions of eighteenth-century Venice was the all-girl orchestra and choir of the Ospedale della Pietà, for which Antonio Vivaldi, appointed director in 1714, wrote music in such prodigious quantity that much of it lies still unpublished in the National Library in Torino. The girls were foundlings. Abandoned by their families, brought up in the charitable institutions of the Catholic Church and trained as musicians, they were eventually married off with a dowry provided by the Serenissima, or assigned to a convent. The large audiences at the concerts saw the girls only from a distance, through convent gratings, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743, managed to get a closer view. A friend who was one of the governors of the Ospedale invited him to a meal with the musicians. Jean-Jacques went there full of anticipation, feeling an 'amorous trembling' but was cruelly disappointed when he saw the 'angels of beauty' close up. 'Sophie was hideous…. Cattina…had only one eye…. Bettina…was disfigured by smallpox. Scarcely one of them was without some notable defect.'[1] It was all too clear why their parents had abandoned such unmarriageable girls to the care of the Church.
Review, 4167 words
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