Threads of Influence: Renaissance to Runway at the Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exhibition Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses reads less like a conventional museum experience than an imagined passage through the studio of an Italian fashion house. One readily envisions sumptuous textiles transformed into exquisite garments and ensembles, animated by mannequins and staged against the backdrop of Old Master paintings. Forgoing heavy-handed interpretive framing, Associate Curator of Fashion Darnell-Jamal Lisby invites visitors into a visual dialogue across time. By placing over 100 modern garments and accessories alongside Italian fine and decorative arts of the 15th to early 17th century, the exhibit makes a compelling case for the past as a generative source of inspiration.

It would be difficult to overstate the exhibition’s emphasis on visual impact. Renaissance to Runway privileges the audience’s embodied experience over the consumption of textual explanations, encouraging visitors to do the work of interpretation themselves, rather than relying on didactics. Some critics have voiced reservations, desiring more overt narrative guidance or contextual signposting to anchor the historical framework. While such additions might indeed assist in situating the objects temporally, these critiques risk overlooking the profoundly generative effect of Lisby’s curatorial approach, one that foregrounds visual and spatial interplay as a means of fostering intuitive, imaginative engagement with the past and present.

It is apparent that Lisby relies on the assumption that visitors arrive with at least a general notion of “fashion” and the “Renaissance.” Regardless of preconceptions, he utilizes visual storytelling to inspire audiences to think in new ways. Specifically, the exhibit encourages museum-goers to engage in what art historians refer to as “visual analysis.” This method of inquiry, in its most basic form, requires close looking and critical reflection. By placing modern and historical objects in conversation, visitors are prompted to point out their similarities and differences, thus coming away with the satisfying discovery that, yes, even contemporary fashion has roots reaching all the way back to the ancient world. In doing so, we witness how clothing designers, like all creatives, are entangled within a long history of artistry and craft from which they cannot be separated.

As I walked through the exhibition, I kept returning to what I consider to be one of the most iconic fashion-related monologues in cinema, featured in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Addressing her hapless assistant, Miranda Priestly—a character long understood to be a caricature of Anna Wintour, former editor-in-chief of Vogue—delivers a pointed reflection on the fashion industry:

“I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select out, oh, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic, casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”

The notion that influences “filter down” through creative and cultural industries holds a certain interpretive power; however, this exhibition gestures toward necessary layers of nuance that unsettle a largely top-down understanding. Indeed, the strongest moments in the exhibition are those that, rather than reinforcing a unidirectional flow from high art to fashion, invite visitors to reconsider how influence circulates, reverberates, and is continually reconstituted across time and media.^[1]

A particularly compelling example of this is the pairing of a white viscose evening dress from Ferragamo’s Fall/Winter 2023 “New Renaissance” collection with Jacopo Tintoretto’s oil painting of the Baptism of Christ (1580s). In the painting, Saint John administers Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River, and we observe the Holy Spirit descend in the form of a dove. While the Ferragamo dress does not evidently reference any garment depicted in Tintoretto’s painting, its fluid lines and smooth texture evoke the shafts of divine light emitted by the heavens and the trickle of water at the lower right of the composition, capturing the interplay of natural and spiritual forces. In conjunction with Tintoretto’s work, the Ferragamo dress appears more akin to baptismal robes than contemporary evening attire. The dress derives its elegance not from vibrant color or material excess, in contrast to some of the exhibition’s more lavish garments, but from the restrained articulation of its form: gentle folds cascade from a central V-neckline and delicately adorn the mannequin’s shoulders and upper arms. Here, we see that “influence” encompasses subtle visual correspondences in light, movement, and spiritual resonance, rather than through literal iconographic imitation.

The corresponding didactic provides a brief historical context, pointing out that the Biblical figures depicted in Tintoretto’s painting would, in reality, have worn coarsely-sewn garments, as opposed to the luxurious, silky fabrics the artist chose to portray. Throughout the early modern period, painters frequently embraced stylistic anachronisms of this kind, favoring ambiance and impression over historical accuracy. It is thus compelling that the exhibition includes a few ancient pieces, such as the marble Seated Figure of a Woman, which in turn would have been viewed and incorporated into the visual language of painters like Tintoretto when rendering their imagined Biblical garments. Once again, it is evident that “influence” is neither passive nor one-dimensional, but instead operates as a deliberate strategy in service of a broader artistic and conceptual aim.

The exhibition prompts reflection on the ostensibly straightforward concepts of attribution, genesis, and innovation, all terms that function as critical yet often loaded buzzwords within both art history and fashion studies. Considering the importance of these concepts in the context of the exhibition, it is no surprise that audiences have had a mixed reaction to the use of AI and technology at the beginning of the exhibition. “Renaissance Remixed” (2025) is an immersive digital projection created by video artists Francesco Carrozzini and Henry Hargreaves with the sound by Josh Burgess. The video loop combines real with artificially generated imagery to showcase a number of the garments in the exhibition.

The video certainly adds showstopping appeal, yet the CMA’s didactic information noticeably sidesteps any discussion of how AI operates within the broader questions of attribution and influence. This is a striking omission given the prominence of contemporary debates concerning artistic authenticity and veracity. The didactic lauds the video’s technical achievement in a celebratory tone, emphasizing its capacity to show visitors how fragile garments appear when worn on the human body—an emphasis that is ultimately ironic, given that the figures modeling the pieces are not human wearers but artificially generated stand-ins. Considering the exhibition’s otherwise highly effective investigation of the complex webs of creativity and formal resonance, the video is a missed opportunity for initiating discussion that would no doubt be laden with rich, interpretive possibilities.

I found myself wondering: What data informed the artificial generator’s production of these images, and how might they have introduced biases into its resulting product? Beyond representing CMA objects, did the software absorb and recombine their formal elements into the video’s broader aesthetic world? How, in turn, does this process complicate notions of the artists’ originality, and to what extent does this distinction matter?

The video is perfectly poised to spark conversations about how artificial intelligence participates within the structures of artistic production and source-gathering. This is the only aspect of the exhibition for which I found the minimal curatorial voice stalls a deeper exploration of otherwise poignant themes. Especially if the CMA decides to commission more artworks developed using AI, it would be fruitful for future interpretations to engage these topics without needing to suggest an “answer.”

The common thread connecting every artwork in the exhibition is an acknowledgement of the past as a source for inspiration: herein lies the value of history. Ultimately, Renaissance to Runway affirms the past not as a fixed point of origin but as an active, generative force that continues to shape contemporary creative practice. At a moment when questions of originality, authorship, and technological mediation feel particularly urgent, the exhibition offers a compelling reminder that creativity has always emerged through dialogue with what came before. The past and present are not linear, but always converging.

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^[1] Miguel John Versluys, “Roman Visual Material Culture as Globalising Koine,” in Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture, eds. Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 141-174. What I am suggesting here closely aligns with Versluys’ postulation of a process that he calls “aggregative cultural praxis,” in which a circulating and ever-growing body of symbols, motifs, images, concepts, etc. are continually reused and reinterpreted throughout history.