Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images

Cardinal Paleotti (1522-97) completed two of the five volumes he had planned for Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane and had them published in 1582. There was a Latin translation in 1594, a new edition of the original in 1961, and a recent translation into modern Italian, but this is the first English edition. Historians and art historians have written much about the work, says Paolo Prodi in the introduction, because it foregrounds the relation between art history and religious, cultural, and political history and between images and the use made of them. He says it also compels scholars to rethink an entire epoch conventionally denoted by the sequence Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)