The concept of family honor in Quattrocento Florence has traditionally been associated with the ruling classes. Young, nubile females, dressed in the best garments that money could buy, pious, veiled matrons and cittadini resplendent in their red robes provided visual examples of a virtuous model of social perfection. This article though, through new readings of the artistic texts found in the Oratorio dei Buonomini di San Martino, Florence, will illustrate how females from the middle and artisan classes played an equally important role in communicating these ideals.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Hughes-Johnson, S., (2025), "Fashioning Family Honour in Renaissance Florence: The Language of Women's Clothing and Gesture in the Frescoes in the Oratory of the Confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino in Florence", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Confraternitas

Original publication: Hughes-Johnson, Samantha. “Fashioning Family Honour in Renaissance Florence: The Language of Women’s Clothing and Gesture in the Frescoes in the Oratory of the Confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino in Florence.” Confraternitas 23 (2): 2013. 3-31. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.