The first edition of Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations covers the Man of Sorrows, a type of image oftentimes labeled as ambivalent for its dyophysitic content as well as its complex functions and meanings. Many of the ten essays were contributions to a symposium at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2011, held on the occasion of the exhibition Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; the Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art, shown at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art. The book’s structure is well conceived, passing from terminological issues to essays grouped according to geographical location, roughly maintaining a chronological order. After an implicit caesura, the second half features studies on the Venetian world, where the image of the Man of Sorrows was particularly widespread and remained important well into the seventeenth century.

Exegete John Sawyer aims to shed light on the complex reception history of Isa. 53:3, part of which involves the coining and use of the art historical term Man of Sorrows. Thus he highlights the questionability of the linkage between text and image, which to a certain degree implicitly lies beneath this interdisciplinary approach. Colum Hourihane then gives an introduction to terminological challenges and provides comparative iconographical analyses by contrasting the Man of Sorrows with related subjects (Ecce Homo, Christ Mocked, Christ of Pity) that aim at fulfilling similar devotional needs. Grażyna Jurkowlaniec gives an overview of the contemporary naming of this iconographical trope and its evolution and proposes scholarly emancipation from those terms. Her analysis of the subject’s dissemination in the Western thirteenth century indicates that two independent appropriations of the Byzantine formula in Italy and Central Europe occurred, and she discusses their respective development.

Moving on from iconography to social anthropology, Mitchell M. Merback seeks a functionalist interpretation of the Man of Sorrows in the contexts of its ritual action and the underlying therapeutic benefits. These rituals comprise the devotion to Christ’s blood and the relationship to charitable giving, as well as modes of self-reflexive progress. Susan Boynton addresses the Man of Sorrows as an accompaniment for manuscript service, prayer, and music books and determines symbolic meaning through the affiliation of text and image. Ensuing from different iconographic variations of the Akra Tapeinosis (utmost humiliation) in the late Byzantine Empire, Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromilides turns to developments in Venetian Crete, a region of heightened interchange between Byzantine and Western traditions. The author discusses the mendicants’ involvement in the subject’s diffusion and its proximity to Cretan poetry. The essay introduces the book’s strong focus on Venetian art. Following Norman Land’s interpretation of Giambono’s panel in the Metropolitan Museum, William L. Barcham further explores the conspicuous iconographic diversity and complexity in this artist’s oeuvre, which comprises six versions of the subject that significantly broadened iconographic options for subsequent artists. Lyle Humphrey’s interest in late medieval Venetian mariegola miniatures leads her to first discuss flagellations and crucifixions as confraternal subjects before then considering the Man of Sorrows in connection with Eucharist chalices as a principal image of such statute books from around 1500 onward.

While the Man of Sorrows is typically discussed in terms of late medieval iconography, the two concluding essays address its persistence in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Catherine R. Puglisi’s elaborate and highly informative contribution on Paolo Veronese marks this shift toward early modern interpretations of the image. She takes into account the achievements of artists like Moretto da Brescia or Giampietro da Silvio who reintroduced the Man of Sorrows at a time it had practically been overcome. Puglisi proposes there was a close artistic exchange between Federico Zuccari and Veronese concerning contemporary modes of depicting the dead Christ in accordance with a fundamentally changed spiritual climate. Stefania Mason follows this approach and examines further Venetian representations in an attempt to demonstrate how Trent’s push for orthodoxy affected artistic and devout sensibility.

Though the clever structure makes this volume as a whole appealing even to readers less familiar with the subject’s massive body of literature, one may also encounter stimulating new insights. Most noteworthy, in the reviewer’s opinion, are, next to Puglisi’s broadening of the traditional temporal parameters, Jurkowlaniec’s discussion of largely unconsidered material and its appropriation in various devotional and artistic milieus.