Biography

Florence Buttay studies Renaissance profane and sacred iconography. She earned her PhD from the University of Paris Sorbonne, with a dissertation on the allegory of Fortuna in French and Italian Renaissance. She recently contributed to the first volume of Figures of Chance (dir. Anne Duprat, Fiona McIntosh and Anne-Gaëlle Weber), with an article titled « Chance in Literature and the Arts » (Routledge, 2024). She also traced back the life of an unusual traveler by analyzing his illustrated manuscripts in Storia vera di un impostore. Giorgio del Giglio nel Mediterraneo del Cinquecento (Officina libraria, 2022).

Project Summary

The shirt was an undergarment worn universally—albeit in various ways—throughout Renaissance Europe, to which numerous medical, moral and magical functions were attributed as a “second skin.” This multidisciplinary project lies at the intersection of visual and material studies, drawing on a corpus comprising both graphic and plastic works from a wide range of cultural contexts such as altarpieces and master paintings, widely circulated engravings, illustrations in manuscripts and printed works, as well as texts and preserved textiles. Its aim is less the history of a garment than the history of its representations, as it was regarded as a second skin. At the crossroads of art history, history of the body and religious history, the aim is to conduct both an iconology of the shirt and on the shirt, since it is itself a medium for representations. The study covers three areas: the devotional aspect, focusing on the miraculous signs and images on the skin and shirt; the medical aspect, focusing on the medical uses of the shirt and the depiction of injury; and the social aspect, examining the role of the shirt in the portrayal of men and women in Italian Renaissance.