This artfully constructed and well-written book offers an exhaustive analysis of a broadsheet printed in Rome in 1555 and commissioned by the powerful Castilian cardinal, Juan Àlvarez de Toledo. It depicts in word and image the torture and martyrdom in London and York twenty years earlier of the Carthusian fathers who refused to take the oath acknowledging Henry viii as head of the Church. At the heart of the broadsheet Dillon identifies references to the Nicodemite belief in justification by faith alone shared by Reginald Pole, Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo Buonarroti and their intimate circle. She maintains, furthermore, that details in the broadsheet illustrations derive not only from Michelangelo's late works: in particular the frescoes of the conversion of St Paul and martyrdom of St Peter (both in the Cappella Paolina, where newly elected popes first received the obedience of their cardinals), but also from drawings made by members of the artist's inner circle. She also identifies in the depictions of the drawing and quartering of the friars references to the latest anatomical treatises by Andreas Vesalius' contemporaries Reoldo Colombo and Juan Valverde, before identifying the Spaniard Gaspa Becerra as the artist and the Frenchman, Nicolas Beatrizet as the engraver. Dillon concludes that the broadsheet was created specifically for Philip of Spain, who had recently been crowned consort of Queen Mary of England, before observing that as: ‘the only image of the English Catholic martyrs of the Reformation to be produced in Queen Mary's reign and the first to be created according to the dictates of the Council of Trent [i]t laid the ground rules and offered a template for all future martyrological iconography both Catholic and Protestant’ (p. 299). As Margaret Aston showed in her tour-de-force of richly contextualised iconographical exegesis The king's bedpost (1993), such a microhistorical approach can reap rich dividends. That Dillon is ultimately less successful than Aston derives not from any weaknesses as a historian. As is to be expected from the author of the meticulously researched and judiciously argued Construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1535–1603 (2002), Dillon leaves no library, archive or museum unvisited to provide the reader with a scrupulously researched argument. The problem lies more in the author's determination to read visual details in a way that unduly privileges ‘source text’ over what is actually there in the image that has allegedly been influenced. Such an approach is evidenced not only by Dillon's insistence on identifying architectural background details with specific Roman buildings, but also by her argument that in the depiction of the dismembered corpses of her martyrs we see ‘scenes from a dissection theatre transposed to scenes of execution’ (p. 228). Concerning the former, the correspondences that she identifies are for the most part wishful thinking (as evidenced particularly in her misidentification of the Pantheon). As the use of architecture in the backgrounds to such prominent and accessible Roman frescoes by Raphael, Perino del Vaga and Giorgio Vasari shows, artists more often than not depicted such details in the spirit of classical reminiscence rather than topographical accuracy. Similarly, the depiction of the eviscerated corpses of the martyred Carthusians is closer to the generic representations of dismemberment by Antonio Tempesta in his illustrations to Antonio Gallonio's Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio under the Roman emperors (1591) than to the more naturalistic (though still idealised) illustrations found in Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543). On one level, such objections do not substantially impact on Dillon's central argument: that a broadsheet depicting a brutal event from the early English Reformation was commissioned with information supplied by an English cardinal (Pole) by a leading Spanish counterpart (Àlvarez de Toledo) from a fellow-Spanish artist (Becarra) who was close to the circle of Michelangelo and that this testifies to the (hitherto underemphasised) importance of the English dimension to the Counter-Reformation from the latter's inception. However, its rather reductive, even at times literalist, reading of what constitutes evidence of artistic influence does run the risk of finding direct, ideological links in places where we might simply be talking about the pervasive nature of Michelanglo's influence on how artists represented the human body during this period in and beyond the Italian peninsula. Moreover, Dillon's determination to nail every item of circumstantial evidence to make her case does make the book longer and more complicated than necessary. For example, the whole section on anatomy and medical practice forming chapters xii–xvi, though containing much painstakingly-researched and accurate information, could have been heavily edited (or even cut) without detracting from the main thrust of her central argument.