Lorenzo G. Buonanno is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

"This book could become fundamental for the study of Venetian Renaissance art. The discussion reaches across art forms, showing their remarkable interdependence even when the practitioners of painting and sculpture were assigned to separate professional organizations, and elucidates the ways sculptures may have worked in their physical, spiritual-devotional and theoretical contexts." Alison Luchs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C."This manuscript relies on sensitive visual analysis, on the study of ritual and ceremony …, on the analysis of religion and liturgy in Venice, on the consideration of Venetian history and literature and language, and on the reading of a range of textual sources …. This study is, in a word, interdisciplinary. More than anything else, however, it focuses on the artworks themselves, arguing that, to comprehend fifteenth-century Venetian sculptures, we must consider their spectacular material forms, which are often remarkably crafted, as well as the techniques used to fashion them." Amy R. Bloch, University at Albany

• Introduction 1. Stone Mediators 2. Dreamworlds and Studioli: Sculptures for the Imagination 3. Making and Breaking 4. Signed in Stone