Growing Up in a Renaissance Palazzo

What was it like to be a child during the Renaissance? Growing Up in a Renaissance Palazzo explores what it meant to be a child in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, through paintings and objects from The Hyde’s permanent collection, alongside works from the Yale University Art Gallery, Worcester Art Museum, Vassar College Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, New York Public Library, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Clark Art Institute, and more.

Works depicting all stages of life, from infancy to adulthood have been carefully curated by Dr. Penny Howell Jolly, Professor Emerita of Art History, Skidmore College in collaboration with The Hyde Collection’s Curator of the Permanent Collection, Bryn Schockmel. These include portraits of children with their caregivers, a young girl learning to play the clavichord, a child-sized breast plate and gauntlet, and colorful pages from a Book of Hours. The life events marking the transition into adulthood are also shown in works such as Portrait of a Lady with a Rabbit and The Hyde’s own gilded cassone, both of which would likely have been commissioned for a young woman in preparation for her marriage.

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