Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
What the Frescoes Said
By Ingrid D. Rowland
The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena
by Lina Bolzoni,translated from the Italian by Carole Preston and Lisa Chien
Ashgate, 220 pp., $124.95
When Lina Bolzoni chose the title The Web of Images for her book (in Italian, La Rete delle Immagini), she was thinking all the time of another Web, the one that has been changing our way of responding to the world. The connection she makes to our own age is subtle, however: as its primary purpose, The Web of Images traces the ways in which the medieval equivalent of mass media conditioned Italian society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially through public painting and public preaching. She focuses much of the book on Pisa, where she lives today, surrounded by powerful works of medieval art that once, as she shows, would have brought to mind an equally powerful complement of words.
Review, 3682 words
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