Taking objects—as opposed to people—as her protagonists, Leah Clark proposes an innovative approach to the history of collecting art in fifteenth-century Italian courts. Sharing the stage with Milan and Naples, the more familiar courts of Florence and Ferrara are crucial, but decentered, players in her narrative. The court of Naples, especially, is a font of vivid new stories, and it provides the most compelling evidence for Clark's key argument for objects as agents.

The “collecting art” in the book's title conjures a more limited, static, and passive role for objects than the one advocated in the book's pages. Clark in fact wants to change an art historical paradigm—to displace, or perhaps elbow aside, the heroic role of the patron, not to mention the artist—in order to garner a fair share of attention for the object as agent or actor. Her introduction makes this case, engaging with a wide range of theoretical approaches, including the anthropological, with Bruno Latour and actor-network theory emerging as her guiding light. A heaviness in this pleading, together with the author's repeated positioning of her own approach, especially in the wake of so much recent scholarship focusing on the mobility of objects and the relations between people and their possessions, reminds us that the book was born of a dissertation. Clark's book is manifestly successful when it lets her strategically chosen case studies shine in their particularity. Her fine-grained research is new, and it demonstrates how objects could operate in different roles in Quattrocento Italy.

The book is structured around four rich case studies. The first is the Cavallo, the spectacular bronze horse's head given by Lorenzo de’ Medici to the outsized Neapolitan courtier Diomede Carafa. Displayed in Carafa's courtyard, the gift horse took on a life of its own; Carafa would henceforth live in the Palazzo del Cavallo. Remarkably, scholars still have not definitively sorted out if the bronze is ancient or a piece by Donatello. The second case study examines networks of merchant bankers through the objects they distributed. It opens with an elaborate daybed, a lettuccio, that the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi commissioned to give to King Ferrante d'Aragona of Naples. This large piece of furniture, decorated with a scene of Naples, was expensive to make and transport. The impression it made led to another kind of exchange: the bankers later facilitated the travel of the lettuccio’s artist, Giuliano da Maiano, from Florence to Naples to design architectural projects for the king. Clark's archival research also brings to life a Quattrocento family drama in which Ippolita Sforza, Duchess of Calabria, who was given to frequent pawning and borrowing of money, pawned a jeweled cross to a Florentine merchant, who, in turn, sold it to Eleonora d'Aragona in Ferrara. Claiming that it had been sold without her consent, Ippolita wanted it back. She blamed Eleonora for buying it despite knowing its provenance. Eleonora defended her purchase, arguing that as the merchant was flogging it across Italy, she bought it to prevent public embarrassment to Ippolita. Clark's research into the correspondence documenting a family argument that entangled ambassadors and kings offers precious insight into conceptions of honor and reputation, as well as a rare glimpse into the lived experience, values, and emotions of distant historical personages.

An iconographic analysis of Ercole de’ Roberti's diptych, owned by the avid collector of religious painting Eleonora d'Aragona, anchors the longest chapter, which is a consideration of intertextuality in the court of Ferrara that feels like the center of this book. An appendix of Eleonora's inventories is enlightening. Clark insists on the formal analogy between the folding diptych and a book; she brings to light the plethora of copies and variations spawned by Eleonora's Roberti, buttressing her argument for the agency of objects.

Clark's study of the Order of the Ermine, founded by King Ferrante of Naples, not only explains why so many weasels appear in Renaissance art but also proves to be the book's most subtle and effective case study of diffusion and dissemination. Analyzing the deployment of the order's regalia, Clark shows how the ermine constituted a powerful sign that was circulated geographically, temporally, and across media. Like the ermine, the scope of Clark's book reaches well beyond collecting.