The thirteen chapters that constitute this book started life as conference papers delivered at two panels of the Renaissance Society of America on ‘The Renaissance idol’. In their ten pages of introduction the editors present the work as effectively carrying on from Michael Camille's Gothic idol, by considering whether, in the wake of Protestant iconoclasm, the revaluation involved in condemnations of idolatry was intrinsically linked with fresh valuation of works of art. Does understanding the form of the idol bear on, even play a ‘crucial role … in positing what counted as art’? (p. 10). Readers may find plenty of illustrative matter to ponder in contributions that range from China, Japan and the Congo to America and Europe, looking at objects as diverse as a seventeenth-century wax ex-voto of a woman's breasts to a West African ivory salt cellar made into the reliquary of an eighteenth-century poet. The breadth and diversity of subject matter and recurring discussions of the theme called for editorial intervention of a kind that was evidently not applied, and as a whole the book might be regarded as exemplifying the shortcomings of today's academic publishing pressures. There are illuminating contributions on Pieter Saenredam's perspectives of church interiors as ‘sites of memory’, consciously recording the reshaping of sacred and civic spaces, and on Sixtus v's treatment of the Roman columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. The book is fully illustrated, to the extent that one item, The Trinity by Hieronymus Wiericx, is reproduced three times. This helps to explain why The idol in the age of art weighs in at over two pounds.