For visuals promoting the brands forthcoming Fall/Winter 2023 collection, the Italian fashion Ferragamo brought on photographer Tyler Mitchell to capture Renaissance-inspired visuals shot at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Director Maximilian Davis’s second campaign as the house’s newly appointed director features models donning sleek Ferragamo clothes before backdrops printed with Italian paintings from the Uffizi’s collection. In a statement announcing the Uffizi collaboration, Davis said, “The Renaissance is hardwired into Florence.”
Works from the 15th and 16th centuries were among the scenes that appeared in his images for Ferragamo. Models were posed in front of canonical subjects: Italian nobles, biblical figures, and Tuscan landscapes visible in works like Botticelli’s The Annunciation of San Martino alla Scala (1481) and Piero della Francesca’s Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (1467–72). At various points, Mitchell also serves as a model.
Over the past few years, Mitchell has gained a following for his imagery that have centered Black subjects, ranging from the famous to unrecognized. In 2020, Mitchell joined the roster of Jack Shainman Gallery; he was just 25 at the time. Not long beforehand, he’d been the subject of a traveling museum exhibition that opened at the Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and traveled to New York at the International Center of Photography in 2019.
Mitchell’s work has collapsed divisions between the worlds of fashion and art. In 2021, Mitchell told Art in America that he leans on his background in filmmaking to inform his art and commercial projects, saying, “I think of myself as basically a director.”
