Piero's ouevre has never seen such handsome representation in book form. Razor-sharp, large-format illustrations, including details printed at full-bleed on forearm-wide pages, permit intimate inspection of works which even in person can sometimes only be viewed distantly in dim church-light.

Quibbles include some tenuous conjectures about the development of the artist's thinking (which, if the author is taken at face value, includes the Zohar). It's too bad that more progress hadn't been made on the newly-restored Arezzo frescoes at the time of publication. But these aside, this is as definitive and gorgeous of a presentation of Piero as one could fairly ask for. Simply a beautiful book.

You have to be really into Italian art and Early Renaissance to get the feeling of this wonderful book. The way it's lavishly printed makes you happy almost as much as you would see the originals. I would recommend this to an art lovers as a second choice after the site tours.

This book reads somewhat like a badly written PhD thesis. It results from collecting quantative information about religious cycles in churches, shoving them into a mathematical tool, and calling the results a book. The subject of narrative in art is fascinating, for an insightful book see: Andrews, Lew. Story and Space in Renaissance Art : The Rebirth of Continuous

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521646634/qid=945708301/sr=1-14/002-9101355-4400266

Read my review with the following caveat: I have absolutely no training in art history and most of my reading in art has been in the field of icons.

This book is useful in providing a structuring principle for the visual art in Italian Churches - I had previously only seen materials about the organization of the visual art in Orthodox Churches. I appreciated the time range of the book as it covers both the conquest of the Eastern Church by Islam (sending Eastern Christians fleeing to the West) and the split between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The description / interpretation of the narrative scenes is sufficiently detailed to teach a neophyte how to recognize the event being portrayed. After the world tour of art from Assisi, the section on Assisi gained clarity as I had actually seen art from a church discussed. I would have preferred more colored plates and could have done without some of the detail of the computer work supporting the book. But the latter may be important to the intended audience.