In these 13 essays, contributors analyze pictures, sculptures, printed materials and ritual spaces from 1400 to 1800. They address the uses of allegory in the works of Michelangelo, Winckelmann and Casta paintings; allegories of place in Giorgione's depiction of war and rape in Renaissance Venice, the shaping of civic personification in the Pisa Sforzata and Pisa Salvata and political allegories in the redesign of Siena's Palio and Patron Saint in the fascist regime; the role of the audience in allegorical reading of a sixteenth-century life of St. Benedict, an allegorical dialog between political powers of different courts, marital might and romanticism; and allegory as carnal knowledge as found in Venus's milk, frontispieces depicting women's ambition and wet nursing in the New World. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)