The Gates of Charity: Images of City and Community in the Early Modern Dutch Orphanage

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, Dutch charitable institutions were the subject of international praise and the object of civic pride, and their public façades communicated a message of central importance to its citizens. In this essay, I examine the iconography of seventeenth-century “gates of charity,” focusing on the almoner’s orphanage in Gouda and the Holy Ghost orphanage in Leiden. I relate them to other orphanages in the Dutch Republic to show developments in their iconography. The façade decorations demonstrate the responsibilities of the city as benefactor, the expectations of its citizens and the supposed effects of charity upon the community. At the gates, the worlds of the rich and the poor collided. Here, charity could flourish making the community a mirror image of the heavenly realm. The gate portrays the perfect society as one that assists its poor and strengthens its communal ties.