In the opening three chapters of her study of late medieval painting in Cologne, Brigitte Corley sets the stage with impressive scenery and a promising cast of characters. Sancta Colonia was a beautiful city of relics, pilgrimage, trade, learning, and spectacular imperial visits, in which various groups—archbishops, patricians, and city councilors—competed for power and prestige. Shifts in power resulted in fluctuating “patterns of patronage” that left behind a rich material culture of altarpieces, chapels, and liturgical objects. As Corley writes: “As political power changed hands…so patronage changed its initiators and its agenda. The archbishops primarily expressed spiritual and worldly power, the patricians were concerned with social status, commemoration and redemption, and the councillors reflected civic pride” (34). Although this summation of patrons and their goals is perhaps too neat, one might expect it to be expanded thoroughly in the six chapters that form the bulk of Corley’s book, with the key players and their various political, religious, and social interests serving as the main interpretive framework. Instead, the author’s focus shifts indecisively between patrons, paintings, and functions, resulting in the lack of a cohesive narrative or argument. Indeed, the book’s title is misleading, in that it implies perhaps a synthetic socioeconomic, religious, and cultural history of function and reception. Yet, while patrons (and more rarely, viewers) are sprinkled throughout, the author is mainly interested in artists, or more specifically, artists and their styles. Even the choice for the book’s frontispiece, the Virgin of the Rose Bower, is indicative of this emphasis. This image is one of the most famous paintings from Cologne, a “masterpiece” usually attributed to Stefan Lochner, but it cannot be linked to a specific patron.

The book’s goals are articulated in strictly utilitarian terms—“to facilitate access to this material” (8) and to provide “a useful base for further research” (255). Corley decides on a “traditional survey with a mainly chronological approach,” since the “consistency and diversity of art in Cologne…is linked to a historical sequence of patronage and to consecutive foreign stylistic influences” (47). Based on her stated goals, the author no doubt offers a valuable summation of the scholarship in combination with her own masterful analyses of key works. Corley’s eye is finely attuned to nuances of technique and production, whether it be the preparatory underdrawing, the characteristic brushwork of a certain painter, or the distinctive punchwork used by a certain workshop. Especially impressive is her focused study of the main artistic figures of the period, with separate chapters on “The Master of St. Veronica and the Courtly Style” (chapter 5), “Stefan Lochner and the Dombild Master” (chapter 7), and “The Master of St. Bartholomew” (chapter 9). Her attribution of works normally thought to be by Lochner to the anonymous Dombild Master is perhaps her most original scholarly contribution. Also, Corley demonstrates the value of some relatively new techniques of analysis, such as infrared reflectography and dendrochronology, in arguing dating and authorship and providing a fuller picture of workshop practice (although the results of these techniques are at times presented as overly positive, “scientific” proof.) As a reference tool, the book is complete with a bibliography and appendices that include English translations of guild regulations, short biographies of the archbishops of Cologne and other important patrons, and a list of paintings by location. Equally useful are the many fine illustrations in both black-and-white and color.

In the epilogue, Corley briefly points to alternative approaches, suggesting that a “thematic approach is always seductive and would have been appropriate” had a “traditional survey” been available in English (255). The implication is that a “traditional survey” was the only option and thus is beyond critique. And although the conventional, chronological approach that Corley chooses to follow seems reasonable, the result is a predictable series of discussions about dating, attribution, relative quality, and the rise and fall of various “masters.” Corley never acknowledges that her narrative of style, dependent on the methodology of connoisseurship, is based on certain values and assumptions. Therefore, her book is a missed opportunity to engage critically with traditional methods and to redirect the course of future research. There are moments when the author seems to offer some correctives, such as her suggestion that the relationship between Netherlandish and German painting was one of “reciprocal influences” (157), her reasoned dismissal of attempts to connect named artists in the archives to specific works (133–34), or her minicritique of “school” as a notion that leaves no room for influence and variety (256). But Corley does not engage in a reflexive examination of her own practice. Even her rhetoric reveals a thorough commitment to outmoded and restrictive models of stylistic development; in one passage, style is discussed as “distinct dialects of a common language,” with “roots” and “growth” that “cannot be demonstrated by separate grafts, although its seeds can be discerned…” (75). Furthermore, she never situates her project in relation to important contributions to the study of late medieval and Renaissance painting, north or south. Thus, there is no mention of the work of Leo Steinberg, Michael Baxandall, Barbara Lane, or Jeffrey Hamburger (to name just a few surprising omissions). These bibliographical absences indicate the degree to which Corley is ultimately disengaged with the socioeconomic, theological, liturgical, monastic, and hagiographical aspects of her subject.

What is clear from Corley’s book, however, is the richness of her subject, and the author should be applauded for collecting such a wealth of information on paintings, patrons, and contexts together in one volume. Unfortunately, a variety of potential themes and lines of inquiry are only fleetingly mentioned or are made subservient to the overriding narrative of style. Several times, the issue of portraiture is raised. Corley refers to a 1544 chronicle by Hermann von Weinsberg, who mentions a commission for an altarpiece: “And I have asked for all the faces of the figures to be portraits with the exception of Jesus Christ’s face, and in Mary’s picture is the face of my wife’s sister…, in St. John’s under the cross my wife’s son…” (183, n. 35). Indeed, “portraiture” as a historically contingent term and concept is an increasingly interesting area of art-historical investigation. While certainly connected to issues of status and commemoration (as Corley argues), how does portraiture communicate other goals and meanings, such as varying levels of spiritual access, genuine religious emulation, pious ambitions to commune with divinity, or the intersection of different historical moments? Other concerns involve setting and audience. While most of Corley’s attention is focused on paintings for a liturgical context, evidence indicates that some of her examples were designed for monastic and domestic settings (25), or even sold as readymade images (37). What are the implications of these radically different contexts on form and iconography? Other works discussed by Corley—panel paintings that served as doors to tabernacles (88), those that have relics tucked in their frames (61), and reliquaries originally embedded in the hands of their depicted figures (160)—point to little-explored multiple functions that complicate standard definitions of painting, altarpiece, and reliquary. Furthermore, such objects completely resist investigations motivated only by questions about the “artist” and “style.”

This is not to say that the formal and stylistic characteristics of late medieval painting in Cologne do not ultimately provide a compelling interpretive framework. Throughout her book, Corley wrestles with the different visual modes exploited, sometimes simultaneously, in her examples. She describes these in various ways—“profane” and “sacred” (99); “realism and artifice” (128); a “visual game of space creation and denial” (130); “luxurious display with truthful representation,” “the spiritual and the real,” and “courtly elegance and naturalistic description” (217); and “the real and the fictive” (220). It is in these seemingly conflicting terms that Corley might have found a way to focus her project and write a narrative of style that is about both the goals of artists and patrons as well as the experience of viewers. Instead, she subsumes this visual complexity under the traditional rubric of the “Courtly Style” and argues unconvincingly that the patrician class in Cologne seized upon this style for its “propaganda value,” that is, for the luxurious and ostentatious display of “gold grounds” and “brocades” that communicated their status (217). This reductive conclusion leaves out too much about patrons, artists, viewers, and context. Although Corley mainly perceives a “love for luxury” (230), the paintings also communicate a more complex desire for illusionistic detail and perceptual play with the goal of heightening both the meaning of the image and the viewing experience. For example, in a small painting of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Agnes by the Master of Saint Bartholomew, the depiction of a visionary encounter with divinity becomes both real and unreal through a panoply of spatial devices, including finely detailed textures, subtle modeling, cast shadows, a space-defining curtain, a distant cityscape, a window ledge over which the figures are thrust forward, and a life-size fly resting on a window sill (or is it sitting on the surface of the painting?). The detail of the fly suggests that “luxury” is not the only goal of these carefully rendered objects and spaces. Other works by Cologne artists also delight in spatial illusion, including feet that overlap ledges (244), painted light that corresponds to actual light in a chapel setting (248), and painted reflections of windows and human figures that exist outside of the image (137, 248, 251). Although such details clearly signal the space of the viewer and the intersection of vision and spirituality, these topics are left unexplored.

Finally, several editorial errors should be noted, including incorrect plate citations in the text (61, 119, 142, 145, 195) and switched plates (147, 245). Also, there are a few other irritations, such as quotations that are seemingly sprinkled in just for color (with citations of author and text only in the notes), some untranslated passages in Latin and German, and the lack of a map of late medieval Cologne.