For decades the rich, dense heritage of medieval and Renaissance Venice has offered historians, art historians, and social scientists an array of subjects and an evolving methodological arsenal for their analysis. Building on the work of previous generations, recent scholars have expanded our understanding of the manner in which a society can use its visual culture to construct a variety of identities: civic, religious, class, familial, and even individual, conveying messages that were normative as well as informational. Yet despite intense activity, monuments such as the thirteenth-century mosaics of San Marco have awaited the application of approaches that reach beyond the essential archaeological, stylistic, and historic analyses provided by such scholars as J. J. Tikkanen and Otto Demus, who identified and refined the relationship between the atrium mosaic program and the Cotton Genesis, a fifth-century manuscript now generally accepted as its essential iconographic and stylistic model. One new area of investigation has been opened by Penny Howell Jolly in her study of the Adam and Eve sequences of the atrium mosaics of San Marco in which she demonstrates that new and important insights are possible when feminist analysis and close reading are applied to monumental medieval images. Some of the...