Sacred and secular texts and images in the Quattrocento refer constantly to the color white, more than any other color. Even in a treatise on charity, which was associated with red in the Renaissance, the theologian Fra Giovanni Dominici mentions white more often.1 Dominici writes of being washed as white as snow, white roses, ivory, and marble, white and black making gray, white as a spiritual color, the purity of white, a vision of a white beloved, how white can paradoxically be black, our delight in seeing white among a variety of colors, knowing something is white as a kind of knowledge, black crows becoming white, a white mountain, absolute white as opposed to a range of whites, and white pearls.2 Likewise, the Franciscan priest Bernardino da Siena, in one set of sermons alone, refers to a vision of a white horse, the white light of divine revelation, the bleaching of women’s hair, a dirty white shirt, white makeup, white coal, white tallow, and other white objects and ideas.3 In the first canto of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, white is the complexion of the beautiful Angelica, the color suitors turn when they see her, that of pearls encrusted on armor, and the drapery worn by people and horses. White can signify a host of unobtainable ideals and quotidian realities in the poetry, treatises, sermons, chronicles, and other texts of the period. White is both the color of unsullied purity and of sexually alluring flesh, of the light of heavenly revelation and of laundry.