The catalyst for this volume was the exhibition Private Prayers: Medieval and Renaissance Objects for Personal Devotion, held from September 23 to November 19, 1995, at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Its editors, who also contributed to the volume, have brought together thirteen methodologically diverse essays that examine the relationship between images and lay and clerical devotion in Italy from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. In the foreword, the editors make it clear that their goal was not to tailor the book’s contents to the exhibition, but rather to produce “a collection of studies that examine relations between images, the faithful, and the faith” and to “offer glimpses of ideas and beliefs that were to have a long history” (9). As such, the book is quite successful and will be of interest to students and scholars whose work concerns Italian medieval and Renaissance art, religion, music, gender and patronage studies, and social history.

Two of the essays in the volume are in Italian, the rest are in English, and while the majority focus on paintings, images in other media such as mosaic and prints, as well as large- and small-scale bronze, marble, and wax sculptures, are also considered. A brief introduction by Henk Van Os, in whose honor the exhibition was held during his tenure as visiting professor at the University of Georgia, precedes the essays. Following these chapters is a checklist of the works in the show, but the book is not a traditional exhibition catalogue, as the checklist illustrates only eighteen of the sixty-three works displayed and it does not include descriptive or analytical catalogue entries for those works. Furthermore, while the essays are concerned predominantly with various aspects of art and devotion in Italy, thirty-one of the objects exhibited were not of Italian provenance, but came instead from locales as diverse as France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Austria, and even Guatemala. That said, the subject of the last essay, Victoria Markova’s “Simone dei Crocefissi: A Little-Known Triptych in the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection,” is a painting included in the exhibition that is part of the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy begins with three essays that explore various aspects of the lives and cults of holy women as they are presented in the hagiographical and visual traditions. The last of these, Janet G. Smith’s “Santa Umiltà of Faenza: Her Florentine Convent and Its Art,” also draws on the very rich primary source of Umiltà’s own “sermons” in discussing her life, miracles, probable patronage activities, and the posthumous development of the saint’s iconography. Of special interest is Victor M. Schmidt’s discussion of Saint Catherine of Alexandria’s vita, scenes of her life, and the ways in which they inform our understanding of the nature of individual devotion and the domestic display and use of small-scale religious paintings in late-medieval Italy. It is unfortunate that there are no known paintings that record the Blessed Umiliana de’Cerchi’s use of images and relics in her private devotions as described in her vitae. But in “Images, Devotion, and the Beata Umiliana de’Cerchi,” Hayden Maginnis amply documents this, as well as another important aspect of popular devotion to her cult: the presence of ex votos at the beata’s place of burial in Santa Croce, Florence.

The use of sculpted ex votos at saints’ shrines is further discussed in Fabio Bisogni’s engaging and informative “Ex voto e la scultura in cera nel tardo medioevo.” Through an analysis of miracle books, saints’ vitae, canonization records, and painted images, he undertakes the difficult task of tracing the history, use, and appearance of an extraordinary variety of wax objects that were such an important part of the devotional paraphernalia one would encounter on a visit to a saint’s tomb or in a miraculous image. These works ranged from whole human figures to disembodied arms, legs, eyes, and feet; crutches; animals; small ships—some complete with crews—and even reproductions of specific ailments such as hernias and hemorrhoids! In a brief essay that is concerned with the considerably more expensive medium of bronze, Paul Barolsky interprets the highly polished surface of Andrea del Verrocchio’s Doubting Thomas for the Mercanzia niche at Orsanmichele as the sculptural embodiment of divine illumination and spiritual grace.

Not surprising in a book concerned with devotional art, four of this volume’s essays consider the functions, sources, and meanings of Madonna and Child images. For example, James G. Czarnecki proposes that the relatively rare iconography of Giovanni del Biondo’s Standing Madonna and Child in the Vatican Pinocoteca (ca. 1380) is closely linked to that of the Madonna della Misericordia. It is undeniable that this funerary painting does promote Mary’s efficacy as an intercessor and includes iconographical references to the Madonna of Mercy and the Woman of the Apocalypse, but this study overlooks its more apparent debt to Hodegetria images that the artist and/or his Florentine patron(s) could have known from Byzantine ivories, coins, manuscripts, and metalwork, or from their sculpted Northern Gothic offspring (see, for example, Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds., The Glory of Byzantium: Arts and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997], cat. nos. 85, 86, 305, and 331). In the following essay, Shelley E. Zuraw argues convincingly that papal appropriation of popular devotion to miracle-working Byzantine Madonna icons in Rome explains why that city, unlike Florence, failed to produce a significant number of independent marble relief sculptures of the Madonna and Child during the fifteenth century. Rome, icons, and public ritual are also the focus of Gail Solberg’s study of Sienese painter Taddeo di Bartoloís Madonna Avvocata icon at Orte (1420) and its sources. This painting, which is derived from an Avvocata icon at Spoleto, is still carried through the streets of Orte every August 15 as part of an elaborate ceremony that is related to a similar procession which took place on the feast of the Assumption in medieval and Renaissance Rome. The subject of Andrew Ladis’s essay is the work of another Sienese artist, Domenico di Bartolo’s Madonna of Humility (1433). He shows that the painter’s harmonious combination of image, light, word, and song was an innovative way of both celebrating the Virgin Mary and encouraging individual prayer.

Saint Mary Magdalen, that ultimate exemplar of personal piety and penitence, figures prominently in the essays of Rolf Bagemihl and Jeryldene M. Wood. The former, who considers Nicholas Fromentís Raising of Lazarus in the Uffizi (1461), a Northern painting that was once located in the Tuscan convent of Bosco ai Frati, is a valuable addition to the discourse on the relationship between Northern and Italian art and Medici patronage in quattrocento Florence. Using Titian’s striking Penitent Magdalen at the Pitti Palace as an example of the kind of painting Federico Gonzaga of Mantua commissioned the painter to make for Vittoria Colonna in 1531, the latter essay examines its meaning for an individual female viewer. It does so by exploring the parallels between its function and imagery and the idea of female excellence as it is set forth in Colonna’s poetry and letters. Wood addresses many of the same issues that Marjorie Och discusses in her contemporary study, “Vittoria Colonna and the Commission for a Mary Magdalene by Titian” (in Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins, eds., Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001], 193–223). However, rather than proposing new ways to look at the painting’s patronage history as Och does, Wood focuses on presenting the Penitent Magdalen as a visual counterpart to Colonna’s diplomatic responses to the sixteenth-century literary discussion on gender. In “Attention in Court: Visual Decorum in Medieval Prayer Theory and Early Italian Art,” Robert W. Gaston also explores the relationship between literary sources and devotional art and the ways in which they elicit and enhance a viewer’s response. He does so by discussing the significance, meaning, and importance of attention and gaze in Italian religious paintings and how they relate to early Christian and medieval prayer theory and liturgical texts.

Although it is something of an anomaly in a volume whose title suggests an exclusively Italian Renaissance focus, Raffaele Argenziano’s study of the nineteenth-century French creation of the cult of “Saint Napoleon” and its attendant imagery is a fascinating look into the political and visual machinations behind the promotion of a fictitious early Christian martyr. With another shifting of chronological and geographical gears, the book concludes with Markova’s essay cited above, which places Simone dei Crocifissiís small triptych depicting the Madonna and Child enthroned in the early part of the fourteenth-century Bolognese painter’s career. At the end of this essay there is a brief bibliography that provides suggestions for further reading, but it would have been more helpful to the reader if endnotes, like those that follow the other essays in the volume, had been supplied instead.

There are a number of typographical errors throughout the book, the quality of many of the images leaves something to be desired, and the inclusion of dates in the captions for the illustrations would have been helpful. Overall, however, this volume is a handsome, reasonably priced collection of compelling scholarship that is sure to stimulate further discussion of the relationship between art and devotion in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.