Many of us have had the experience of walking into a little-known church in a quaint European town where we were so intrigued that we considered conducting research on the church’s elaborate decorations. Unlike most of us, who recognize the daunting nature of such an undertaking, Véronique Plesch has spent the last decade documenting, investigating, and analyzing the extensive fresco cycle by Giovanni Canavesio in the church of Notre-Dame des Fontaines at La Brigue. This church, located about eighty kilometers north of Nice, is home to the most well-preserved of four extant fresco cycles completed by Canavesio in the 1480s and 1490s. While Canavesio’s work is not first-rate aesthetically, his iconographic and pictorial innovations are of great interest because, in addition to being a painter, he was also a priest.

Plesch analyzes all four of Canavesio’s Passion cycles but focuses primarily on the cycle at La Brigue. Using contemporary painted narrative cycles and printed Passion cycles by Israhel van Meckenhem among others, the author situates Canavesio’s La Brigue cycle within the former duchy of Savoy, which has its own rich artistic traditions as well as acting as a site of confluence for both Northern and Italian styles. Additionally, and very helpfully, throughout the book the author links the iconography of Canavesio’s Passion cycles to local Passion plays, along with liturgical and homiletic literature. In addition to addressing iconographic and literary sources, the author also examines numerous aspects of the culture within which the fresco cycle was produced and viewed; these include devotional practices, religious heresies, and the production and consumption of artwork. While the focus of the book is monographic, it is decidedly encyclopedic in its scope.

Plesch begins by discussing Canavesio’s oeuvre and situating his work with that of his Savoyard contemporaries. Documentary evidence for the artist’s work at La Brigue and the chapel itself is included. The archival research is impressive and will be of great use to others working on art produced in the area. The second chapter describes at length each of the chapel’s narrative scenes. This cycle of twenty-five narrative scenes (including one remarkably gory depiction of Judas that graces the book’s cover) will become familiar to readers of the text because the author repeatedly returns to it in enumerating individual elements of the artist’s style, iconography, and other details.

The remaining five chapters are divided into individual rhetorical concepts, each of which may have been familiar to Canavesio through his training for the priesthood. Plesch refers to the first of these concepts as elocutio, or pictorial idiom. This chapter explores the idea of Canavesio as an “expressionist,” a term applied to him by several previous scholars. Citing some of the unusual aspects of the artist’s style, the author investigates the nature of his pictorial innovations, seeing them as deliberate attempts to lead the viewer through the cycle to produce an empathic or emotional response.

Chapter 4 centers on the idea of imitatio. Here the author discusses the sources from which the artist borrowed and how he altered these sources to suit his own artistic vision. The artist knew and appropriated ideas from prints by Northern artists (including Israhel van Meckenhem) and his Savoyard contemporaries. This chapter offers an interesting look at the working methods of artists who flourished outside the cultural centers that dominate most art-historical studies. Canavesio turns out to be an eclectic borrower who appropriates some ideas wholesale while altering others and incorporating his own innovations to achieve a multivalent synthesis. Plesch’s case study opens up avenues for similar investigations of lesser-known artists.

Inventio, the selection of narrative scenes, and dispositio, their placement within the liturgical and architectural setting, are investigated in the fifth chapter. Plesch takes the reader again and again through the cycle, each time discussing the various choices and elements. This chapter and the next, which deals with amplificatio, or iconography, tend to drag. There is a repetitious quality to the structure of these chapters in which the individual scenes are repeatedly revisited. Adding to this problem is the numbering and placement of the figures and plates; in order to follow the author’s arguments the reader must frequently refer to a set of images placed at the very beginning of the text. The figure and plate numbers are also a bit confusing, and, because there are a number of Canavesio’s Passion cycles referenced, a certain amount of diligence is required when looking at the captions to be sure that the correct image is being studied.

Chapter 7 focuses on the tituli—speech-scrolls and labels that appear throughout the cycle. Here the author deals with the question of whether the texts or the images were intended to have primacy. The author untangles this often vexing question through an analysis of literacy and reception. One question that might have been addressed at greater length is just who the audience for these frescoes was. The author tends to treat the audience as a single group when in fact local devotees and visiting pilgrims might have experienced the narrative and its details quite differently.

The final chapter is the most important, as it is here that the author addresses the function of the chapel. The significance of the artist as a priest is considered in this chapter along with many other essential details. The links between confession, penitential literature, the ars moriendi, and the Economy of Salvation are addressed within the context of contemporary preaching and sermons. For those who work on this material, the chapter provides numerous important and little-known sources. The problem of how images were used by priests during sermons, for which there is very little evidence, is seen in relief through the author’s examination of the artist’s alter-identity as priest. Canavesio’s training for the priesthood may have enabled him to frame the narrative scenes, some of which differ from canonical Passion cycles, within the pastoral goals encouraged by the Church. It would have been helpful if the author had provided a bit more reflection on exactly how much freedom artists actually had to invent within such cycles and how many of the unusual details might have been requested by their commissioners.

The final chapter includes a number of important contextual investigations. The decoration of the chapel at La Brigue has a profoundly anti-Semitic slant, and the treatment of local Jews in the former duchy of Savoy is linked to the institution of the Monte di Pietà. This is the financial organization that took over the Jewish occupation of money lending, thus removing any social function or opportunity for Jews in many late medieval communities. Local Waldensian heretics are also seen to have inspired some of the more unusual iconographic aspects of the fresco cycle narrative. Finally, the ways in which the cycle would have acted to prompt memory through its rhetorical architectural settings and vivid imagery provide a particularly good example of the phenomenon that Mary Carruthers and other scholars have identified as essential to medieval devotional concerns. The last chapter is exceptionally interesting, and the book might have benefited from having had some of this material integrated into earlier chapters. This is especially true of the anti-Semitic nature of the chapel’s decoration. It stands out in high relief in the author’s analysis of the chapel, but is only really addressed in the final chapter.

Appendixes include analyses of the three other extant fresco cycles by Canavesio in the region and the Savoyard Passion cycles listed in the text. For those working in the area, or on narrative cycles in general, these provide a very useful compendium.

All things considered, Véronique Plesch has produced an innovative monograph on a little-known but intriguing artist. Giovanni Canavesio was situated at a number of crossroads: geographically, stylistically, and theologically. An artist living in a frontier region, he stood with one foot in the Middle Ages and one in the Renaissance. His dual identity of artist and priest make it likely, as Plesch convincingly argues, that his work provides evidence about contemporary pastoral and devotional concerns. Scholars working on any number of currently hot topics—such as medieval anti-Semitism, memory, performance, and narrative—will find much to chew on in this lavishly illustrated and carefully considered text.