Clothing, charity, salvation and visionary experience in fifteenth‐century Siena

This article investigates the use of clothing as a liminal object, capable of moving across the boundary between the mortal and immortal worlds. The significance of clothing within the changing consumer culture of Renaissance Italian society, and the legislation surrounding it, has been discussed by a number of recent authors. I consider a different, but connected, aspect of clothing: depictions and descriptions of supernatural apparitions relating to clothes. Despite notable changes in the perception and uses of clothing, 1215–1545 (from the Fourth Lateran Council to the opening of the Council of Trent) can be seen as a unified period of religious devotion dominated by belief in the resurrection of the body, purgatory and the cult of saints. These beliefs contribute to considerable evidence suggesting that for those living in Latin Europe dress existed on two planes – the material and the spiritual. Focusing on the fifteenth‐century decoration of the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena – by artists including Domenico di Bartolo, Vecchietta and Giovanni di Paolo – this article explores the tensions inherent in the changing relationship of clothing and adornment to the mortal and immortal body. Cordelia Warr is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Manchester. She has worked on female patronage during the fourteenth century and is currently completing a monograph tentatively entitled Crossing Boundaries: Physical and Spiritual Clothing in Italian Art 1215–1545.