ABSTRACT
In the 1950s Ernst Gombrich initiated the revaluation of Florentine fifteenthcentury domestic paintings through his discovery that the cassone painter Apollonio di Giovanni was the 'Tuscan Apelles' eulogized by the humanist Ugolino Verino.1 My revaluation of cassone and spalliera paintings concerns their employment of costume to place ancient histories in a Florentine ver nacular. Dress ordered these painted narratives, and guided the viewer to the meaning of each panel. The continuity of the methods used by fifteenthcentury artists to contextualize their historical paintings is striking, despite the stylistic and functional discrepancies between their work. Below I shall examine several representations of the Rape and Reconciliation of the Sabine Women to demonstrate how domestic paintings of the ancient world used the symbolic language of dress to convey models of behaviour to the various members of the Florentine patrician household who viewed them.
