in their minds and then, through the imagination, in their bodies. It has often been claimed, and not without reason, that the decline of the idea of cult objects in the Reformation neutralized the power of the image itself, heralding in its place the idea of art and the social idea of collecting. Yet this is not the whole story. And what Gage examines here is the idea that paintings might act still as agents, possessing magical powers that could affect the health of all those who looked at them. It is easy to doubt such an account but, as Gage reminds us, there were texts enough in the sixteenth century and later that spoke of art as a part of the prevention of illness, this last being a topic especially debated in the Roman court where so much depended, politically and socially, on the health of the Pope. The healing powers of art had long been recognized; here Petrarch was an early witness. But now such possibilities were extended beyond the realms of language-this was what Petrarch was speaking of-to those of sight, as when it was suggested that certain colors, "greene and sky colours" as an English physician put it, were immediately beneficial. Such had been imagined by Marsilio Ficino, when he spoke of green as synonymous with life and youthfulness. But now, at this time, it was possible to imagine that landscape painting, as in Poussin and so many others, served not only as a surrogate for nature itself but, as Gage emphasizes, something to embody deliberate structures that could engender health, cheerfulness, and recreative effects. And this was not only for the individual beholder, but also for the civic body as a whole, as when Mancini defined history painting, the most public form of art, not only by its narrative, but also by its whole compositional structure. Here the frescoes by Raphael were perfect examples, showing significant actions in which the subsidiary figures are appropriately subordinate participants. "I do not know," Mancini wrote, "how to see what (more) can be desired in a painter" (128). There is much in this study, in what Gage herself calls its unexpected turns, of great interest: notes on the impressionable female imagination; the idea that physiologists might predict the span of life from the observation of what Mancini called a simple portrait; contemporary comments on the intellectual life of Rome; the depiction of monstrous forms; the idea that erotic images might be used in the bedroom to help the process of reproduction; and even the placement of pictures in a household. All this is laid out by Gage in crisp and scrupulous scholarship in a text that is exceptionally pleasant to read. All students of painting in Rome-and beyond-will need to take note of it.