Tony Green’s book is the first publication in two decades to focus on Poussin’s two important series of paintings depicting the Seven Sacraments, and it is the only scholarly work to concentrate on them exclusively. Green examines each of the fourteen paintings, considering questions of style and iconography, as well as the theological and physical contexts in which they were made and viewed. The Sacraments, firmly associated in art-historical scholarship with Poussin’s classical style and his studies of Roman and Early Christian culture, were also products of post-Tridentine Catholic environments. To address these factors, Green relies on an impressive array of primary sources and on admirably close scrutiny of the paintings. In every case he remains attentive to the fact that the painting belonged to a larger series of works. That attentiveness leads him to perceptive observations about the details that link the works together: a servant exiting to the left of one scene might provide a visual connection to another scene in which a servant enters from the right, suggesting, perhaps, that they were intended to hang beside one another. With such close observations, supplemented by seventeenth-century descriptions of the series, Green attempts to reconstruct the arrangement of the Sacraments in the residences of their original owners, and to evoke something of the experience of viewing them in those configurations.

The book is based on Green’s dissertation, written while he taught at the University of Edinburgh in the 1960s and under the guidance of none other than Anthony Blunt, the acknowledged Poussin authority. This academic lineage—and the proximity to the paintings from Poussin’s second series of Sacraments in the National Gallery of Scotland—must have provided Green with a particularly fertile environment for developing his ideas.

The book is structured in two major sections, each of which examines a Sacraments series. Each section is divided into seven parts; each part corresponds to a painting in the series. Discussion of each painting is subdivided into short chapters that address the individual works and related topics: firsthand descriptions by seventeenth-century viewers, preparatory drawings for the paintings, and iconographic problems associated with them. Green discusses the first series, painted for Cassiano dal Pozzo, in the sequence in which he argues they were arranged in the patron’s house. He presents the second series, commissioned by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, in the chronological order that Poussin painted them. He then closes the book with a short chapter on the arrangement of that series.

The advantage of this structure is that it demands rigorous, systematic attention to each work (from both the author and the reader). But the focus on individual paintings, presented in sequence, makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions about them as a group, or to target larger scholarly problems pertaining to two or more paintings. And the structure also yields unfortunate results for some of the paintings, such as Chantelou’s Marriage, which closes the section on that series. The effect is anticlimactic—after thirty-six pages on Ordination from series and twenty-one on Eucharist, the meager eight devoted to Marriage make the painting seem uninteresting (and Green uninterested in it). After reading 339 pages at this point, readers may be disappointed to find no interpretive conclusion.

Green’s writing style takes a variety of forms. He presents scholarly arguments, offers testimonials of his personal experiences conducting research, makes authoritative pronouncements on historical figures’ states of mind, and weaves colorful, imaginative—sometimes ekphrastic—descriptions of historical events cast from the point of view of one of the participants. These varied tactics surely make the author a fascinating lecturer, and indeed the text reads very much like transcripts of oral presentations. One imagines the pleasure of listening to Green lecture, accompanied by color slides of the paintings, drawings, and prints referenced. For readers, however, especially readers of such a lengthy text, the rhetorical effects are less engaging.

Green targets a broad audience, hoping to stimulate nonspecialists’ interest in an artist too often considered overly intellectual and visually dry. This objective may account for his decision not to use the conventional apparatus of scholarly writing, a choice that ultimately has an unfortunate result. General readers and students will find this book difficult to read, and specialists will find it difficult to use. There is no explanation of the methodological framework, and neither the acknowledgments nor the first and last chapters disclose much about the author’s intellectual milieu. The book contains no footnotes or endnotes. Instead, Green uses short, parenthetical references to authors’ last names and dates of publication. These references, frequently quite cursory, include no page numbers; a scholar’s intriguing argument hinted at in Green’s text requires considerable additional effort before readers can begin their own research to investigate it further.

When translating primary sources in Italian and French, Green chooses not to use traditional block quotations, but instead translates freely, phrase by phrase, in the body of the text. There are a number of problems with this approach. First and foremost, it makes arduous reading, and the decision to alternate original language and English with italic and roman type does not help, particularly when the English translation (in roman) includes titles and foreign expressions printed in italics. Furthermore, there is no reference to other or fuller translations of the sources. This will have little impact for readers who do not care how other Poussin scholars might have translated a particular passage, or who already know, but it may frustrate readers who work through Green’s translations and become intrigued by the content and language of the primary texts.

The book’s illustrations present another obstacle. Presumably it was prohibitively expensive to print color reproductions of the fourteen paintings. Green includes an entire, separate chapter explaining the problems associated with color reproductions, and, indeed, these works are difficult to reproduce in color. But the poor-quality black-and-white reproductions included here—as well as their order, placement, and identification—are puzzling. Images are often mislabeled, sometimes because they are printed in a format too large to permit placing the caption beneath the image or even on the same page. Green chooses to print both versions of each sacrament together on facing pages, permitting comparison between the first and second series. But this order has nothing to do with that of the text on either of the two series, and it undermines Green’s interesting arguments. Expense was probably also the reason for placing all the reproductions at the end of the book, but discussions that pay such close attention to the imagery in the paintings and drawings really do demand to be read in closer proximity to the illustrations.

Despite the difficulties of presentation in this book, Green does succeed in conveying his enthusiasm for Poussin’s work and in reminding his audience that these two series of paintings reward those willing to devote serious attention to them.