To an exceptional degree, Anne Leader's book is valuable on two levels. It places the Florentine Badia so fully and successfully within its historical setting that it serves as an excellent introduction to monastic life and reform in a late medieval or early Renaissance Italian city. Having achieved that goal, Leader proceeds in the rest of the book to a detailed account of the architecture and art of the Badia, showing how a building project served the interests of monastic reform, and arguing an arresting thesis about the attribution of the frescoes.

Leader begins with the inauguration of the Benedictine Observance at the Badia: after years of decline under a series of nonresident commendatory abbots, the monastery came in 1418 under the authority of Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni, who brought sixteen monks with him from the reformed monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua. Like many reforming abbots, Gomezio gave practical and symbolic support to the invigoration of the monastery by rebuilding portions of it, remodeling others, and commissioning a series of frescoes that were executed in the cloister between 1435 and 1439. The paintings depicted the life of Saint Benedict, as told in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, but focused largely on scenes that highlighted the miracle-working charisma and authority of the founder (and, by implication, of the abbots who succeeded him in monasteries governed by his rule). As Leader makes clear, this was one in a series of Italian monasteries that commissioned fresco cycles depicting Benedict's life, and the houses featuring these cycles (San Miniato al Monte and others) were generally working within the context of late medieval reform movements. The reformed Dominican and Franciscan houses in Florence are well known and much studied; the Badia has in comparison been somewhat neglected and little understood, despite its long-standing importance in the religious life of the city.

The interaction between the monks of the Badia and the city that expanded around and beyond their property is a theme that Leader explores in depth, giving a richly articulated sense of how a powerful monastery related to the urban elites, protected its properties from encroachment, enhanced its earnings by renting choice locations to artisans, and cultivated diverse patronage that is reflected largely in burials and records of lost burial sites. Reconstructing the fifteenth-century monastery complex is a process of painstaking detective work, complicated by the radical restructuring of the seventeenth century, but aided by the vestiges left in place and by surviving drawings. History of religious orders and of ecclesiastical architecture are much in Leader's debt; she gives us a wealth of insight into the workings of an order which often suffers neglect because it is not seen as representing the vanguard.

Having laid out the institutional and architectural history of the Badia, Leader turns in chapter 5 to the iconography of the cloister frescoes. It is chapter 6, however, that is likely to make the greatest splash with its conclusion that Fra Angelico designed the frescoes before he turned to his more famous work at San Marco. The conclusion is announced much earlier in the book, and at the outset Leader's attribution may seem neither quite original nor altogether plausible. What makes it more impressive and more convincing is the variety of ways she makes the case. Most importantly, she compares in detail the sinopie (or underdrawings) and the completed paintings, and, with extensive evaluation of both, she argues that the painters who executed the work misunderstood the underdrawings and carried out awkwardly what had been sketched with confident mastery, which suggests that an artist of Fra Angelico's stature did the sinopie and left the overpainting to less skilled assistants in his workshop. This conclusion is buttressed by documentary evidence, by comparison with the composition, technique, and iconography of other work by Fra Angelico, and by analysis of other work by his known assistants in which some of the same awkwardness can be seen, as in the finished work at the Badia. Is the argument irrefutably established? No, but it is ably made and amply supported.

If there is a problem with the book, it is a tendency toward repetition. We are told more often than strictly necessary that the reformers tended to exaggerate the decline they reversed, that the frescoes highlight scenes that illustrate the authority of the abbot, and that depiction of a book underscores the importance of the rule. This is a minor and pardonable flaw in an otherwise remarkable book.

In an epilogue that surveys the postmedieval history of the Badia, Leader concludes by telling of the Brothers and Sisters of Jerusalem who now serve the monastery and its church, enriching it with their deservedly renowned liturgy. The monks and nuns now at the Badia serve as custodians of its architecture and art. My own experience is that when a visitor wishes to see the cloister and its frescoes, the request meets with gracious permission. The history of the institution is thus well served, both by the complex's current residents and by its latest scholarly analyst.