For quite some time now it has been the academic ‘fashion’ to scrutinise and evaluate the rich albeit usually patchy material extant from Italian Renaissance convents of different backgrounds. There is a comparably large number of scholarly books and articles on nuns and mendicant sisters as artists, patrons and authors which gradually increase our overall understanding of the affiliations, familial links and obligations, procedures and influences which determined the internal and external life of a convent in a given town or city. Ann Roberts's book adds a further piece to the jig-saw. She explores the history of the Pisan convent of San Domenico, founded by Sr Chiara Gambacorta (Roberts persistently calls female Dominicans ‘nuns’; the correct designation is ‘sisters’). Chiara was descended from a wealthy and influential Pisan family; a widow after only three years of marriage, and against the wishes of her family, she managed to enter a Dominican convent. However, she was strongly influenced by the ideas of the emerging Dominican reform movement, and her then convent was not. Consequently she persuaded her father, Pietro di Andrea Gambacorta, the ruler of Pisa from 1363 to 1392, to build a new convent which was to adhere to the Observant interpretation of the Dominican lifestyle. In September 1385 the new community received the official approbation by papal bull. Despite the declining fortunes of her own family after her father's assassination, Chiara managed to create a flourishing community: her reputation for sanctity, and that of her community, attracted patrons from Pisa and beyond. Even after her death Chiara Gambacorta remained a persistent spiritual influence on the community she had founded. Roberts follows the history of the convent into the 1500s and convincingly shows how successive generations of sisters lived up to the lasting challenge their foundress posed. The process of canonisation the sisters initiated was not wholly successful, but in 1830 Chiara was officially beatified.

Ann Roberts, an art historian, focuses on the images which surrounded the sisters' daily lives. Following in the footsteps of Jeffrey Hamburger's works on nuns as audience, patrons and artists, she intends to ‘read the pictures as social and political documents’ (p. 3). The necessary source material Roberts finds in nineteenth-century inventories (prepared when the convent was dissolved in 1808 in the wake of the Napoleonic suppression of monastic houses), in an eighteenth-century guidebook for young men on their ‘grand tour’, and further archival material. In addition, she can have recourse to written material from San Domenico, the vita of Chiara Gambacorta, chronicles, letters and Nicola Zucchelli's 1914 monograph on the convent and its founder, providing material and documents which have been lost since, due to the upheavals of the twentieth century. Following up every available clue, Roberts tries to reconstruct the iconographic programmes which determined the enclosure in general and the different spaces within it in particular. She starts with the issues of convent architecture as providing an environment for strictly enclosed female religious, investigates the convent audience and its theological and spiritual demands, the impact of ‘an observant identity’ and the sisters' dealings with the world as members of the upper classes and as patrons and – Roberts claims – artists. In all this, Roberts concentrates upon images from the Pisan convent which are extant. She describes the individual pieces of art in painstaking detail; with the help of the nineteenth-century inventory she identifies those whose connection with San Domenico had hitherto been unknown and places them into their original environment within the community. For a non-art historian the lengthy descriptions of the art are at times a bit wearing, but really illuminating are Roberts's attempts at contextualisation; she refers to the Dominican constitutions and other legal and spiritual documents which guided the Dominicans' way of life and thus demonstrates the close relationship between the artistic programme and the observant lifestyle. Roberts could have elaborated on this subject; occasionally her remarks are over-brief and only fuel the wish for further insights into the interdependence of spirituality, lifestyle and imagery. In this context the reader wishes that the author had applied to her findings the research of Hans Belting on image and audience (for example The image and its public in the Middle Ages: form and function of early paintings of the passion [1981],1990). Belting's work, which is immediately relevant to the research Roberts has undertaken, is conspicuously absent from the bibliography.

The emphasis Roberts places on the imagery used in San Domenico is of course commended by her topic, but it may also have been caused by an overall lack of documentary evidence on the internal affairs of the convent. Chiara's letters and other written material testify that the women were – typical for adherents of strict observance – interested in the acquisition of books and had very able copyists and illuminators. However, Roberts's assumption that the Pisan sisters were accomplished artists who supplied their convent with art in times of need relies completely on internal evidence which cannot be corroborated by any further documentary proof. The fact that some female religious in other convents worked as artists and painters cannot per analogiam be transferred to the Pisan house. Usually the artistic exploits of sisters and nuns are mentioned in chronicles, necrologies, account books and the like, as are the activities of the women of San Domenico as painters of manuscript miniatures. The absence of remarks to this effect should have cautioned Roberts against assuming that the Pisan sisters achieved artistic feats similar to those of well-known sisters from other Italian Dominican convents. This, however, should not lessen Roberts's achievement. She has minutely scrutinised the spiritual history of a hitherto obscure convent and set it in the social and political context of Renaissance Italy.