Christy Anderson is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of TorontoAnne Dunlop is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University in New OrleansPamela H. Smith is Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University in the City of New York

'…shows the reader that engagement with the particularities of medium can lead to the richest of interpretations.'Renaissance Quarterly

• Part I:Matter1. The matter of the medium: some tools for an art-theoretical interpretation of materials – Ann-Sophie Lehmann2. The matter of ideas in the working of metals in early modern Europe – Pamela H. Smith 3. On the origins of European painting materials, real and imagined – Anne Dunlop 4. Gold coins and gold leaf in early Italian paintings – Irma Passeri Part II: Practices5. The ‘Genealogy of Jean le Blanc’: accounting for the materiality of the medieval Eucharist – Aden Kumler 6. Lead white’s mysteries – Spike Bucklow 7. Material distinctions: plaster, terracotta and wax in the Renaissance artist’s workshop – Eckart Marchand 8. Rocks and reverence: Inka and Spanish perceptions of stonework in the early modern Andes – Carolyn Dean Part III: Cultural logics9. Precious stones, material beings: performative materiality in fifteenth-century northern art – Brigitte Buettner 10. Carving life: the meaning of wood in early modern European sculpture – Christina Neilson 11. Arti povere, 1300–1650 – Michael Cole 12. Polish stone, Venetian glass, and red Hungarian marble: the materials of a Renaissance chapel in Jagiellonian Poland – Katie Jakobiec 13. Reveal or conceal: chopines and the display of material wealth in early modern Valencia and Venice – Elizabeth Semmelhack 14. Entanglements of body, text and stone: the crafting and connoisseurship of inkstones in eighteenth-century China – Dorothy KoIndex