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Saints, Miracles and the Image: Healing Saints and Miraculous Images in the Renaissance. Sandra Cardarelli and Laura Fenelli, eds. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. iv + 318 pp. €120.

Although Chen is right to note that broader stylistic changes affected confraternal works of art, his interpretation of this shift is predicated on the notion that artists like Signorelli and Rosso were “driven . . . by artistic preoccupations more than concern for devotional utility” (178). One of the strengths of Chen’s book is its willingness to accept that confraternal practices and iconographies varied considerably, and that “meaning is generated as much in reception as in production” (26). Seen in this light, his analysis of Signorelli’s banner seems uncharacteristically circumscribed, rooted in a sense that the late medieval banner was more functional than the sixteenth-century version that replaced it because the earlier banner was a “bland rendering of the sacred event” that did not distract the devotee (171). This reader, however, was more interested in what the substitution might reveal about changing objectives and emphases within the confraternity. If, as Chen suggests, the new banner was at odds with the company’s rituals, one is left wondering why the confraternity adopted it. In his discussion of Rosso’s Sansepolcro altarpiece, Chen provides an answer to this question in that particular case: the bishop intervened with the confraternity on Rosso’s behalf. Taken as a whole, Chen’s book does an impressive job of presenting a series of studies that offer a view onto the large and varied terrain of the Italian flagellant companies’ art patronage. Chen is to be commended especially for his inclusion and careful analysis of objects that art historians sometimes overlook. The author not only pays close attention to manuscripts and their illuminations, teasing out their relationships to confraternal rituals, but also examines painted necrologies, confraternal robes, and other elements that made up the visual environment inside the oratory. In so doing, he offers a clearer glimpse of what the confratelli saw and did as they donned their hoods and came together to act out their penitential rituals.