This book is a collection of learned essays by various authors. They are split into two main sections, one of which is entitled ‘History, politics and humanism’, and the other ‘Patronage, cultural production and reform’. The title of the second section seems to me somewhat unsatisfactory, because of the vagueness of the idea of ‘cultural production’. The term might perhaps have been applied to the art market, but the art market receives no attention at all in this book, which concerns itself mainly with the patronage extended by Church and secular dignitaries to artists and learned men. Reform of the Church is indeed touched upon here in two interesting essays, by David Myers and by Alexander Nagel. The ugly realities of the Sack of Rome in 1527 are strikingly dealt with by Anna Esposito and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro. And there is an illuminating essay on the construction of a new sacristy in San Lorenzo, Florence, by Caroline Elam.

The book does seem to suffer somewhat from the oblique approach to their subjects adopted by some of its contributors. An example is George L. Gorse's essay on ‘Augustan Mediterranean iconography and Renaissance hieroglyphics at the court of Clement vii: Sebastiano del Piombo's “Portrait of Andrea Doria”’. This learned piece of art history does not seem to me to get very close to the political problem: it illustrates papal propaganda but does not sufficiently emphasise how empty that propaganda was. Its commemoration of the supposed military and naval strength of the papal alliance is a picture of how people in the papal court wanted things to look rather than an account of how they were.

The political realities were very different from the boasts of the publicists, as has almost always been the case. In the example that Gorse has chosen to illustrate it is fairly clear that Clement vii and his allies in the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century faced naval problems that proved too hard for them to solve. The Christian powers allied to the head of their Church were unable to guarantee the safety of the Mediterranean seas, either against the Moslem corsairs or against the over-mighty naval strength of the Catholic emperor, Charles v. Andrea Doria, in his capacity as admiral, was one of the key defenders of the papal alliance, but he failed to make a decisive difference to the naval balance of power. Even on the imperial side, where resources were more plentiful, naval matters were hardly better. In 1535, in a different Mediterranean sector than that occupied by Doria, the huge fleet of Charles v had to abandon its attack on Moslem Tunis and sail back to Sicily with its mission unfulfilled. If such a powerful force was inadequate for the task it was meant to perform, then that of Doria was pitifully so. The struggle for supremacy of the seas required vastly superior forces to those that Doria could muster, and his fleet made no appreciable difference to the balance of power. I think it would have helped the reader if Gorse had explained the difference between the way in which Doria's advocates defended him, and the facts of the case.