Antonia Fondaras recounts the 1471 catastrophic conflagration at Santo Spirito caused by the pyrotechnics of a special presentation of the Pentecostal play by the Compania di Santa Maria delle Laude. As a distinguished Augustinian Hermit priory, housing a famous library and studium generale, the new church rising from the ashes presented an opportunity for discursive altarpieces funded by wealthy and powerful families of the Oltrarno. Building on earlier foundational research, often targeting the relationship between the artist and patron, Fondaras shifts her focus to the choir altarpieces located at the church crossing near the high altar and the friars’ choir, identifying them as the locus of Augustinian devotion and liturgical practice. She leads the reader through a complex investigation and explication of the interrelationship of aspects of these altarpieces, including the composition, iconography, and architectural placement within the multilayered Augustinian context.

In the three chapters of part 1, “The Influence of the Friars,” the author provides critical, fundamental information. She reinforces the importance of the Augustinians as a Mendicant order, and demonstrates the relationship between the building of the new church, specifically the choir, and the architectural tenets of the Augustinians. Chapter 3, “The Santo Spirito Format: Fashioning Sacred Space,” closes this section and establishes the friars’ engagement with the choir altarpieces using a compositional formula linking them to the architectural space while promoting relevance to their community.

Fondaras expands her investigation in part 2, “Art and Meditation in the Santo Spirito Choir,” analyzing four choir altarpieces in their chronological order. Each discursive altarpiece merits its own chapter and, she argues, each fulfills its goal of stimulating devotion and meditation. Each altarpiece is linked to an artist and patron—Sandro Botticelli commissioned by the banker Giovanni d'Agnolo de’ Bardi; Piero di Cosimo and the memorial chapel for Neri di Gino Capponi; Filippino Lippi presenting the donor portraits of Tanai de Nerli and his wife, Nanna; and Agnolo del Mazziere creating an image of the Trinity in the chapel of Matteo Corbinelli. The composition, content, setting, and style served as subjects for meditation, intellectual study, and devotional stimulation, requiring a rigorous process for the viewer. For the author and the contemporary viewer this is further complicated by the necessity of reintegrating the two altarpieces, no longer in situ, back into the architectural space, given that the Botticelli is in Berlin, Germany, and the Piero del Cosimo in the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

The author's examination culminates in chapter 7, “Faith and the Mirror of God: Agnolo del Mazziere's The Holy Trinity with Saints Mary Magdalen and Catherine of Alexandria.” She identifies this altarpiece of 1495–1502 as serving multiple purposes, including as a memory site, as the manifestation of the old church within the new, and as a model for contemplation on the two depicted saints and their relationship with Christ. The subject matter reinforces the association of the Trinity to the dedication of the old and new churches and serves to impress the importance of imago Dei on the viewer. The author cites an excerpt from Augustine's De Trinitate, “Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely” (307). Thus, the viewer is encouraged to embrace the affective and the cognitive connection to God with ongoing and transformative meditation and study.

Fondaras's conclusion emphasizes the choir altarpieces' intentionality in meeting the objectives of the Augustinian Hermit friars as well as those of the patrons. Her careful methodological approach serves as a welcome guide, given the complexity of the arguments and the required level of engagement expected of the viewer, past and present, and taps into the religiosity of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Florence. Her work contributes to the growing studies of Mendicant art, providing an appreciation and an analysis of the deep devotion, erudition, and high expectations of the Augustinians, their patrons, and all viewers entering and experiencing the choir of Santo Spirito.