Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects). The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s status as “presbiter,” or priest. As Plesch points out, Canavesio always signed his works with his priestly profession as well as his name. Accordingly, she organizes the book into chapters according to the rhetoric of preaching. This means that the cycle is surveyed from beginning to end more than once, which may at first feel redundant. But this repetition is unavoidable, since the author’s primary concern is to give as comprehensive a reading as possible of each panel as well as of the cycle as a whole. Certainly any scholar who has recourse to this volume in the future will welcome...