From 1510 to 1526, all four interior walls of the Cloister of the Scalzo in Florence were frescoed with a monumental, chiaroscuro fresco cycle by renowned Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530). The cycle consists of twelve scenes from the life of John the Baptist, four allegorical figures of Virtues, and an entirely fictive architectural framework that organizes the space of the open-air atrium. The paintings were commissioned by the flagellant Florentine lay confraternity of St. John the Baptist, called the Scalzo. Situating Baxandall’s “period eye” in a period body, this dissertation examines the multiple ways that the cycle’s monochromy may have activated overlapping networks of meaning-making, both cognitive and physiological, when experienced by a confraternity member in ritual context. To demonstrate, analyze, interpret, and even test the limits of possible embodied experiences, I begin each chapter with a passage of “critical story-telling,” a third-person, omniscient, fictional narrative that, across the dissertation, follows the ritual experience of “the brother” into and out of his confraternal space. Demonstrating the narrative structure to be used throughout the dissertation and establishing cultural and geographic context, Chapter I follows the brother as he begins his journey through the streets of Florence before dawn to the Cloister of the Scalzo. In Chapter II, a historical and artistic contextualization of the chiaroscuro cycle is foregrounded by an imagining of the brother’s entry into and experience in the cloister before morning services. Viewership of the claustral cycle is considered alongside that of its proper formal and spiritual precedents, Italian and Flemish monochrome painting, which promoted the perception of the decorated cloister as a physically and spiritually liminal space. Following the brother through his flagellant rituals, Chapter III considers the possibility for the brothers’ emergence into the cloister after services to activate a symbolic, synaesthetic light metaphor that was experienced by the body. This metaphor related to significant liturgical features of Christian worship as well as to contemporary ideas about the symbolism and potential perception of divine light. Assessing the potential for transgressive sexual relationship between members, Chapter IV explored the possibility that monochromy’s association with transcendence as well as its apparent pictorial artificiality elevated the perceived decorum of Andrea’s images, allowing him to execute erotic compositions that underscored the need for close but ultimately-chaste homosocial relationships that contributed to the stability of Florentine society. The brother’s participation in an art-theoretical argument among members introduces the final chapter of this dissertation, which explores embodied viewership of the cloister as a potential masculinity- and identity-constructing performance. This dissertation thus demonstrates that color perception was integral to early-modern people’s experience of ritual, their awareness of differences in ontologies, and their assessment of propriety, especially relating to gendered identity-construction. It furthermore shows that by regulating the kinds of human interactions and social performances possible in front of images and in the built environment, color perception can be construed as an early-modern hermeneutic for the negotiating of identity in space and the maintenance or dismantling of social order.