The Mirror of the Gods. How Renaissance Artists Rediscoverd the Pagan Gods.

Oxford University Press, Oxford (...), 2005. XI,465p. Richly ills.(B&W and some full-colour pictures). Hard bound. ?This book is most valuable for its overview of a vast field - the reception of classical mythology throughout European art and literature from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. It surveys the literary sources that spurred the revival of interest in the pagan gods and categories the types of artistic objects - domestic furnishings, painting, sculpture, prints, tapestries, manuscripts, and majolica - where their images appeared. Bull conclues that Hercules, Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus, Diana, and Apollo were the most frequently depicted, and accordingly devotes a chapter to each. The final chapter analyses the selection pattern attributing it to individual choices of patrons interested in astrology, and hence planetary deities, and in subject matter involving amorous encounters or exotic animals. The epilogue explains the thematic distribution in terms os mythology supplying what Christianity eschewed, an imagery of sexuality, fertility and secular power. (?) His large scope allows Bill to make a number of interesting general observations. He frames his remarks about mythological art in the Renaissance and Baroque periods by contrast with its Greco-roman origins to underscore the very different circumstances in the later epoch, where no one believed in the pagan gods and very little precise information survived about their imagery?s ritual use and display. (?) Bull contends that mythological visual imagery appeared mostly in what he characterises as secondary locations: domestic furnishings such as marriage chests, majolica, birth trays, and small boxes for jewellery and other precious objects, temporary decorations for festivals or triumphal entries, prints, and sculptures for fountains and gardens. (?) Readers will profit from the separate analyses of the six deities most favoured in European iconography ca. 1400-1700 and the summaries by their myths? literary sources. Everyone will enjoy his lively writing and the accompanying abundant, if poor quality, illustrations, but scholars will be frustrated by the sparse endnotes.? (SARAH BLAKE McHAM in Renaissance Quarterly, 2006, pp.239-241).