Dolphins intrude into the arts from early in mankind’s attempts to represent the world around him; so much so that, by the second millennium bc, they appear to have become almost commonplace, and yet are always a delight to behold. The surprise is not that this elegant book has appeared but rather that such a compendious and lavishly illustrated volume has not appeared before. A point that requires to be made at the outset is that this book is largely concerned with art works from around the Mediterranean, and is strongly centred on the classical world and Italy. Avery takes a gentle trawl through the various media in which dolphins appear. Chronology has been mostly abandoned in favour of themes, with Avery taking us swiftly in the opening pages of the book from the Minoan civilization in the eastern Mediterranean to the London of 1975. This perhaps underlines one of the main points to this book: it takes delight in the images of dolphins in their multifarious guises, alongside connections to be made between classical depictions and those produced by the artists of the Renaissance. The boy, or a cupid, on a dolphin represents a widely familiar image but it is unlikely that many of us would be aware that, as an image, it has been almost constantly in vogue for three millennia; although following the collapse of the classical world and through the Middle Ages it fell out of favour.

Avery has uncovered images of dolphins ranging from Minoan frescos to Greek black-figure pottery and coinage to especially dramatic Roman dolphins in mosaics in Delos and Tunisia; many come from Pompeii – and especially notable are those in the frescos there; thence to the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical world. In discussing the Renaissance, Avery has largely confined himself to Italy, beginning with the 1440s before moving swiftly to Mantegna, Dürer and Raphael, thence (if briefly) to Mannerism and Rubens. A substantial portion of the book is given to the symbolic use of the dolphin in Christian art. Avery tells us that dolphins in classical antiquity are psychopompic, serving as companions or bearers to the heroic dead on their journey to the Elysian Fields. For Avery, it is in this psychopompic guise that dolphins reappear in Renaissance art. Dolphins are to be found amongst the all’antica details of the terracotta tombs across East Anglia – for example, at Layer Marney, Oxborough and Braconash – but they also occur on Lord Marney’s prodigious house at Layer Marney and Sir Richard Weston’s house at Sutton Place in Surrey. Avery relates the classical tale of Arion’s rescue by dolphins after having been tossed overboard from his ship by pirates; a story that is more convincingly drawn into Christian symbolism with its clear-cut and obvious references to salvation and the Resurrection and to Christ the Saviour than a supposition that dolphins represent funereal companionship. It is probably the case that the references to dolphins, with or without putti, in schemes of work such as those at Basing, the hospital of St Cross and in Winchester Cathedral (all in Hampshire) were intended to be symbolic of Christ, with an emphasis on the Resurrection. However, given the profusion of use of the motif in so many varied contexts – and one is mindful of their ubiquitous presence all along the Loire in the early sixteenth-century carvings that adorn the châteaux of kings and courtiers – it remains a possibility that dolphins were simply just another playful motif nonchalantly disposed by designers of all’antica decorative schemes.

Dolphins from French art, aside from a divergence to explore the use of the dolphin as a heraldic symbol for the Dauphin, are not discussed here except for a brief reference to dolphins in French art of the seventeenth century. And yet dolphins teem in French art from the 1490s, inspired by Italian Renaissance art, and are encountered at every turn, from ecclesiastical settings to carvings on the timber frames of merchants’ houses in Rouen. There are whole schools of dolphins that adorn French ecclesiastical woodwork that surely deserved mention here. Avery shows a fine carving of dolphins that are set either side of an urn, or chalice (?), from the church of Santa Maria di Staffarda near Turin. Strikingly similar settings of dolphins appear in the chapel stalls from Gaillon, now at St Denis in Paris, and again in the stalls at the hospital of St Cross in Winchester. Dolphins were also enthusiastically adopted in other English settings, especially so by the 1520s and 1530s, and can be widely seen in carvings on bench ends in Devon and Cornwall. Avery provides a portrait of King Darius who is shown wearing a helmet crowned with a dolphin – this is an image that recurs, if ineptly, quite often in Devon.

Although a minor detraction is that none of the figures are numbered, which does the academic reader a disservice, this is a fine book, which has been lovingly compiled and that brings together a mass of information and images that many will find helpful.