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...