Religious art notoriously defies neat categorisation. For historians of religion, sacred images provide vital clues to the religious beliefs and devotional behaviour of the society that produces them. Art historians, on the other hand, will study their iconography and evaluate their historical and aesthetic significance. Museums, for their part, are uncertain how to display them in ways that suggest that they are something more than aesthetic and historical artefacts. Over the winter of 2009–10 two museums, the National Gallery in London and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, simultaneously responded to the challenge by organising exhibitions devoted to Spanish religious art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The National Gallery Exhibition, The sacred made real, which juxtaposed paintings and polychrome sculptures in order to display their interaction, proved to be an unexpected popular success, with visitors clearly moved not only by the aesthetic quality but also by the sheer spiritual energy of an art with which many of them were unfamiliar. By comparison, the Indianapolis exhibition, Sacred Spain, contained relatively few sculptures, but included among the seventy-one objects on display a remarkable selection of paintings designed to reveal the nature of devotion in Spain and Spanish America in the age of the Baroque. The handsome and lavishly illustrated volume under review is the catalogue of this exhibition. In addition to the catalogue entries themselves, the volume contains seven high quality essays based on fresh research, which provide original and fascinating insights into the ways in which artists on both sides of the Atlantic approached the task of creating aesthetically acceptable images that would stir beholders to devotion. The authors show how delicate the assignment proved to be, as artists tried to balance the conflicting demands of the authorities, insisting on the need for post-Tridentine ‘decorum’, the wishes of private patrons with elevated tastes, and the fervour of a public anxious to deck out cherished cult images in ways frequently decried as inappropriate. Although the essays approach the subject from different angles, the picture that emerges is a coherent one. In particular, the authors explain how artists, in their determination to elevate their own professional status, liked to emphasise the identification of artistic with divine creativity, which in certain instances was thought to require no human intervention, as happened with the miraculous apparition of the famous Mexican image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Reports of images moving, sweating, bleeding and weeping, provided further evidence of the hand of God at work in the world. But artists were active participants on many different fronts, reporting, for example, on the antiquity and authenticity of venerated local images, or helping to rewrite sacred history by constructing plausible images of saints for whom no known visual record survived, as for St Pedro Nolasco, the founder of the Mercedarians. Much more than merely a catalogue, this is a volume rich in information and ideas, which has much to offer anyone interested in understanding how the study of art can illuminate the study of religion, and how the study of religion can illuminate art.