Pontius Pilate has become an increasingly attractive figure, no doubt because of his ambivalent character, part cynical Roman enforcer, part baffled intermediary and seeker after Truth. The Pilate ‘industry’ has gathered momentum in the last couple of decades in such works as Bettina Mattig-Krampe's Das Pilatusbild in der deutschen Bibel- und Legendenepik des Mittelalters, Andreas Scheidgen's Die Gestalt des Pontius Pilatus in Legende, Bibelauslegung und Geschichtsdichtung vom Mittelalter bis in die frühe Neuzeit, and Adrian Johns's Pontius Pilate, 20 BC–AD 36. But Colum Hourihane's mighty volume is likely to dominate anglophone study for the foreseeable future because it aims to provide complete coverage, and is tidily organised and comprehensively illustrated. Behind it lies the considerable resource of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton, of which Colum Hourihane is director. This enables him to provide an appendix of ‘Images in early Christian and late antique art’. In ten chapters Hourihane pursues Pilate through the primary sources and early writings, the early Christian heritage, and thence into the high and later Middle Ages. Like so many figures in the Gospels, Pilate is a man who has left few physical traces, but a rich legacy of images: he is all representation. This mobility of conception underlies in part his reformulation as a quasi-Jew in the twelfth century, a period of such tension and complexity in Christian-Jewish relations. A Roman governor becomes high priest. Hourihane's book is also necessarily an important addition to the range of literature on the passion of Christ. Pilate, precisely because he is such a blank canvas historically, becomes a screen onto which other prejudices and preoccupations could be projected. The study of his image becomes a barometer of change and development more generally. Though the pattern of such development is by and large familiar, Hourihane has given an admirable, thorough and balanced account of the representation of this enigmatic man, and his book is beautifully produced.