ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one historical example of a complex exchange of communications related to visual images of a woman's partially denuded body. Before examining the various religious and social resonances the Virgin's one bare breast was likely to have had in early Renaissance Tuscan culture, the chapter discusses some methodological assumptions. It explores the image of Mary with one exposed breast from three different perspectives: first, in the cultural setting of fourteenth-century Tuscany; second, in the context of publicly accessible religious meanings; and third, as paintings and sculpture among other contemporary depictions. The chapter gathers the religious, social, and visual contexts of Tuscan early Renaissance paintings of the Virgin with one bare breast in order to understand the messages likely to have been received by the original viewers of these images. Images of the Virgin with one bare breast both formulated and attempted to control one of the most awesome powers of women, the power to nourish.
