Maiolica before Raphael: Italian Ceramics before 1500. Elisa P. Sani, Matthew Reeves, and Justin Raccanello. London: Paul Holberton, 2017. 248 pp. £40.
considers. A fair number of the panel paintings that provide evidence for his analysis have been removed from their original settings, statues have been moved, and the number of guild residences that remain—only two of twenty-one structures extant in the fourteenth century—can hardly be viewed as a proper representative sample of the whole. Many of the works Bent describes are damaged or fragmentary. His analysis of context and significance frequently turns to likelihood or possibility. Moreover, the author also demonstrates a tendency to overlook elements or examples that may be significant but are, perhaps, extraneous to his interpretation of a painted figure or scene or to the system of interactions that he sees as central to the understanding of works of art. Thus, for example, he neglects to mention the inscriptions painted into the Double Intercession from the Duomo (plate xv) or an Allegorical Winged Figure from the Palazzo Arte dei Giudici e Notai (fig. 54), though he builds his interpretations of these same works from elements seen in each. Elsewhere, he identifies various sources for the motifs and figures of Masaccio’s Trinity, but fails to mention the greater tradition of Gnadenstuhl imagery that provides the essential core of that painted scene. These practices are not necessarily failings, however, but are indicative of Bent’s method: he is not concerned with inherent meaning, but allows for varied and shifting significances as they relate to different audiences from among the many populations of the city. He does not seek to supplant the work of other scholars who have posited meanings for the various works that comprise his study, but supplements those other studies with his own considerations of the different populations of society and their interactions with art in the public sphere. We learn, here, not only of works of art, but of the people of the Florentine Republic—of condemned criminals, prostitutes, merchants, government officials, guild members from the Arte della Lana and the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, laudesi, plague victims, the bishop and his entourage, the families of the newly baptized, and the would-be tyrant—and of how these and others lived lives shaped by images in an urban environment before the era of art.