Douglas N. Dow’s Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform is a welcome contribution to scholarly literature on the under-researched topic of the relationships between Florentine art, devotion, and religious reform in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As Dow observes on the first page of his introduction, the works, authors, and patrons that he examines have not simply been largely overlooked; they seem actively to have been avoided by scholars more preoccupied by earlier trends and later developments (1).

Dow’s strategic response to this lacuna is a series of tightly focused case studies of artistic programmes commissioned around the same time for three different Florentine confraternities. Respectively, these are a fresco programme of the apparitions of Christ for a confraternity of priests, the “Congregazione di Gesù Pellegrino,” executed in the late 1580s by Giovanni Balducci and overseen by the archbishop of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici; a series of sculpted figures of the apostles produced in the early 1590s for the main chapel of the lay flagellant confraternity of San Giovanni Battista, called “the Scalzo”; and a cycle of frescoes depicting the martyrdoms of the apostles created between 1585 and 1590 for the small atrium of the oratory belonging to the lay flagellant confraternity of Santissima Annunziata.

Each case study blends minute historical inquiry into the circumstances of the commission with formal analysis of the works themselves. Dow adopts this interdisciplinary approach because he does not take for granted that Tridentine reform always or necessarily had a major impact on artists. His purpose, therefore, is not simply to document how the reformist agenda of the Tridentine church irresistibly colonized contemporary artistic representation, and how this message was then mediated to lay and clerical audiences. He consistently grounds his analysis “in the specifics of the works and the groups that commissioned them, rather than in the Tridentine decrees or the treatises that attempted to establish new practices for sacred art” (2–3). By this means he exposes independent currents of local devotion which, while they might have run parallel to, or have been in general agreement with, the universalist agenda of the Roman church, may not have been directly linked to it. Apostolic Iconography’s chief strengths, indeed, are its sensitivity to the quality and texture of Florentine devotional experience in this period, as well as the light it sheds on how specific communities of priests, lay confratelli, and consorelle may have been expected to interact with the images and objects that surrounded them in confraternal meeting places.

Following the introduction is a brief opening chapter in which Dow introduces several themes that will inform the case studies themselves. He outlines the “erudite” reformism of the archbishop Alessandro de’ Medici, whose belated ceremonial entrance to Florence in March 1584 occurred after a decade spent as archiepiscopal absentee landlord in Rome. Dow portrays Alessandro’s intervention in Florentine affairs after this date as a sophisticated process of negotiation with local political and religious realities, and explains how this process related to the archbishop’s supervision of the three confraternities in question. Dow explains that confraternities, popularly regarded as a thorn in the side of church authorities, were actually ideally suited to embody and advance church reform, in particular because of their identification with Christ’s apostles. In this period the reformist church associated itself with the apostles as part of its appeal to the past, to the simplicity of the early church, and in an attempt to establish the continuity of this tradition in the sixteenth century (in contrast to “schismatic” Protestant sects, which were seen as breaking with tradition). As lay institutions, the confraternities could first and foremost serve a propagandistic end in this context. In addition, the devotional practices of confraternal members were frequently modeled on the portrait of the apostles’ piety, devotion, and charity as found in the Bible. Because of this, confraternities could exert an influence on the quality of lay experience that was as real as it was symbolic.

In relating the legendary origins of the priestly Florentine congregation of San Gesù Pellegrino, chapter 2 explains this community’s dual purpose as “a hospice for ecclesiastical pilgrims” and as provider of medical attention for sick priests (24). A member himself, archbishop Alessandro was dissatisfied with the congregation’s meeting place and hired the architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio to renovate and redecorate in late 1584. It was also the archbishop who devised the iconography of the frescoes of the resurrected Christ’s various appearances to the apostles, and of two altarpieces, which the artist, Giovanni Balducci (Il Cosci), then executed for the building’s interior. In Dow’s analysis, the episodes chosen for these works carried a universalist message, but would at the same time have had a local resonance because they emphasized the charity and compassion that were the original inspirational precedents for the congregation’s foundation.

Chapter 3 addresses the confraternity of San Giovanni Battista, nicknamed lo Scalzo, best known today for the monochrome frescoes of John the Baptist’s life that decorate the walls of the company’s cloister. Executed in the early sixteenth century, this programme includes two scenes by Franciabigio, but is mostly the work of by Andrea del Sarto. Much less well known is the series of smaller-than-life-size statues of the Virgin Mary, Saint John, and apostles, of terra cotta or similar material, that was designed for the Scalzo’s main chapel. Dow is forced to conjecture as to the medium, appearance, and disposition of these statues because only one (of Saint John himself) appears to have survived, and the chapel in whose niches they were displayed has been destroyed. Rather than treat this serious limitation as an obstacle, however, Dow exploits it as an opportunity to analyze the inventive ways that the Scalzo, like other confraternities, acted as a patron to its own members in the commissioning of these and other objects, and by contracting a range of mundane but equally necessary services. It emerges that as members of the confraternity the artists who were involved in this commission were able to parlay their professional expertise into fee exemptions. In short, they derived a financial advantage that facilitated the practice of their lay devotion, while the cash-strapped confraternity paid little or nothing for the figures themselves. As Dow demonstrates, it is even possible that this arrangement allowed the artists to contribute terra-cotta models that they were using to design large-scale and costlier statues for commissions that had nothing to do with the Scalzo. This eminently pragmatic arrangement reveals the extent to which everyday economics and patron/client relations blended with the city’s culture of lay devotion.

Chapter 4 examines the atrium frescoes of the confraternity of Santissima Annunziata. The programme alternates scenes of the apostles’ martyrdom with grisaille depictions of virtues. Including the virtues, there are twenty-four scenes in all, painted by five artists, of whom the principal and “least obscure” contributor, as Dow puts it (105), was Bernardo Poccetti. Most of chapter 4, which is the longest of the three case studies, consists of refined—and deceptively simple—formal analysis. Having sketched the artists’ careers and canvassed the possible reasons for their employment by the confraternity, Dow moves from scene to scene, as a contemporary lay viewer might have been expected to engage with the programme. He minutely inspects the inscenation of each episode, the range of geometrical and trompe l’oeil effects used to unify individual scenes, and the visual devices by which they were linked to adjacent frescoes. In doing so, Dow establishes skilfully how the designers of the programme and the artists collaborated to dissolve the barrier between fictive and real space. By such means, he argues, the programme metaphorically “collapse[d] the distance between the apostles and the lay brothers . . . erod[ing] the spatial—and, ultimately, temporal—separation between the confratelli in the atrium and their penitential prototypes represented in the frescoes” (152). The burden of Dow’s subtle argument, to which one cannot do justice in a brief review, is that this complicated artifice encouraged active participation in the programme’s representations of apostolic suffering, and that this in turn would have encouraged viewers to meditate on the message that salvation could be achieved through trial and suffering (150ff).

Apostolic Iconography is meticulously organized, although I am not sure whether the book required the large number of short sections (some not much longer than a page of text) into which each chapter is divided. Adopting a slightly different approach might have privileged more such excellent interpretative sections as “The Commingling of Space and Time in the Frescoes” (150ff), which tend to emerge rather late in proceedings. I asked myself also if the history and reconstruction of the Scalzo’s meeting place, which is relegated to an appendix, might have been incorporated in such a way as to frame Dow’s spatially inflected discussion of the confraternity’s sculptural programme.

Indeed, this important, lucid, and elegantly written book is in part a product of the spatial and sensory turn that has driven much recent research. It will be of interest not only to art historians but also to scholars in other disciplines who are concerned with the process by which traditional forms of devotion, and the desired ends of Church reformers, converged and mingled with the city’s artisan culture and patronage relations. In a wider sense, Dow’s evocation of the resulting mélange, and his explication of how urban culture took visual and spatial form, teaches us more about how citizens, including non-elites, inhabited and negotiated the early modern European city.