As its title suggests, Iris Wenderholm’s new study focuses on what she calls the “intermediary altar image” created by fifteenth-century Central Italian artists to enhance the affective piety of the devout observer. She focuses primarily on works of mixed media found in Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches. Returning to Jacob Burckhardt’s esteem for the antagonisms between religious and aesthetic issues in his classic study of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy (1893–94), she examines humanist sources concerned with verisimilitude achieved through scientific innovations and study of classical art in the context of the mendicant reform movement. She also brings to her study a range of theoretical concerns, especially reception theory prominent in contemporary German scholarship.

The author appends a catalogue of 128 altarpieces, many now dismembered, and discusses original location, identifies lost elements, locates dispersed pieces, relevant sources, critical literature, and, when possible, a photograph. The publication draws upon a May 2004 dissertation completed at the Freien Universität Berlin with Rudolf Preimesberger and Klaus Kruger. Reworked and polished, it forms volume 5 of I Mandorli, published by the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence–Max-Planck-Institute. The Institute’s many significant publications include a number that reconstruct lost art from archival and critical sources, notably the Kirchen von Siena, that clearly informs this present publication. While Wenderholm’s text contains some repetition and excess detail typical of dissertation work, it is a significant contribution to scholarship.

The author carefully defines the terms and unusual structure of these altar-pieces so long in limbo between the medieval reliquary altar and the Cinquecento single-medium altarpiece that reflected the paragone prioritizing painting or sculpture. She argues convincingly for the intermediary aspect of these predominantly Quattrocento projects which reveal a greater concern for three-dimensionality and spatial issues than did earlier iconic representations. The choice of sculpture found in most of the projects echoes the early value of terra cotta as the clay God chose to create mortals, and of wood Nicodemus carved into a Christ crucified. Such sculpture, enhanced with polychrome and set before or flanked by a pictorial context, appeared to become a spatial continuum encompassing the devout viewer. For example, the Nino Pisano and an anonymous painter, Crucifixion with Mary and John (1365), Filippino Lippi and Benedetto da Maiano’s reconstructed Bernardi Polyptich (1482/83), and Pontormo’s Archangel Michael and John the Evangelist once surrounding a now-lost central sculpture (1519) suggest not only the beauty of original projects, but also the nexus of theoretical concerns discussed at the time. Such sculptures eventually began to be replaced with marble and bronze, the media preferred by the ancients as in Francesco Botticini and Antonio Rossellino’s St. Sebastian Triptych (ca. 1476) or even Michelangelo’s Pieta (1497–1500), originally in Santa Petronilla and very probably in a pictorial setting, as others have noted. The author persuasively concludes that the intermediary altarpiece’s mixed media promoted an aesthetic strategy, a contrapposto, with the visual realm of the worshiper, who experienced a veritable tactile presence of the holy image.

In the final section of the book, the author turns to the fusion of art and cult in the sculpted crucifixion, often with an earlier and venerated history, reestablished in a new, pictorial setting particularly associated with the Observant Franciscans in Umbria. The image’s verisimilitude, the viewer’s devotion, and the religious reform with emphasis on the Real Presence prompted such works as Pietro Perugino and Giovanni Tedesco’s Pala di Monteripido (1502–04 and ca. 1460). While the Franciscans clearly commissioned prominent examples of such devotional imagery, the author might have considered more the theoretical contributions of the Dominicans. Although she reconstructs such altarpieces as Mariotto Albertinelli and Giacomo Cozzarelli’s Borghesi Altarpiece (1509–11/12) in Siena and makes passing reference to Giovanni Dominici, this final section would have benefited from the inclusion De modo orandi (1280s) collected by Bolognese followers of Saint Dominic and illustrated (Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana MS. Rossiano 3), which had such impact in the Quattrocento, as demonstrated by Fra Angelico’s work at San Marco in the 1440s.

At various points throughout the discussion the author touches on the transitions that emerged as the aesthetic focused on naturalism shifted toward the greater idealization prompted by Neoplatonism that underpinned the paragone of the sixteenth century. The Fra Bartolomeo-Donatello Pugliese-Triptych (1425–35 and ca. 1498) first reconstructed by Wilkins exemplifies something of this shift. Overall, however, the greatest contribution of this book is the retrieval of stunning projects long dismembered that combined media, enhanced religious worship, and created powerful aesthetic results.