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Public Faces in Private Places: “Growing Up in a Renaissance Palazzo”

Public Faces in Private Places: “Growing Up in a Renaissance Palazzo” October 24, 2024
Style of Perugino, “Madonna with Two Saints,” 1494. The Hyde Collection.
Style of Perugino, “Madonna with Two Saints,” 1494. The Hyde Collection.

The typical approach to the interiors of Italian Renaissance palazzos emphasizes the houses’ public dimensions: as expressions of prestige, power, wealth, of family pride.  “Growing Up in a Renaissance Palazzo: Childhood in Italy, 1400-1600,” on view at The Hyde Collection through January 5, takes a different tack: the palazzo as an intimate space in which the individual’s life unfolds from childhood to adulthood.

Curated by Dr. Penny Howell Jolly, Professor Emerita of Art History at Skidmore College, in collaboration with The Hyde Collection’s Curator of the Permanent Collection, Dr. Bryn Schockmel, “Growing Up” explores what it was like to come of age in a wealthy mercantile family in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Florence. Paintings, sculptures and decorative arts from The Hyde’s permanent collection are interspersed with works on loan from institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

“Visitors will encounter everything from portraits of children with their caregivers to objects such as a child-sized breastplate and The Hyde’s own gilded cassone, a chest likely commissioned for a young woman in preparation for marriage,” a press release states.

With one or two exceptions, the works on display do not in themselves picture family life or domestic space – an artistic development for another time and place – as much as they do the cultural reference points or touchstones that reconciled families to their prescribed duties – to give birth to children, to educate them in the appropriate virtues and to raise them into adulthood and, if the children were males, into the civic life of an aristocratic republic.

Some of those touchstones were classical, products of the rediscovery of the ancient world – a common definition of the renaissance – others were Christian – stations in the life of the holy family. For example, conception and pregnancy might be apprehended through the annunciation, as represented here by a version of Botticelli’s Annunciation, this one a 1492 tempera on panel, acquired by Charlotte Hyde in 1924. (A better-known version, the Castello Annunciation of 1489, can be seen in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It was created for a family chapel, as was, presumably, the one owned by The Hyde.)

In the absence of family portraits, a painting such as Madonna with Two Saints, a 1494 work also owned by Charlotte and Louis Hyde which portrays Mary as a dutiful mother, might be displayed.  

Family portraits take center stage in a small, complementary exhibition, “Growing Up in Hyde House,” which looks at the early 20th-century childhood of Mary Van Ness Hyde, known as Nessie, the only child to be raised in Hyde House. Through a collection of heirlooms, artwork and everyday objects, visitors are offered insight into Nessie’s childhood, as well as that of her cousins’, Sam and Polly, who grew up in the home nearby. Items, including toys, clothes, and books, will provide a unique glimpse into the life and times of children who called these historic houses home. For more information, visit hydecollection.org.

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