LAUSR

yet—even if the author makes abundantly clear that the altar relief as such becomes gradually more alien to Bernini’s all-encompassing approach to decoration—there is little actual indication that Bernini was “programmatically hostile” (198) toward relief sculpture. Underlying the author’s argumentation is a more profound problem—namely, the idea that sculptural relief is “annulled by the human eye” (68) and, as such, is not much different from painting. Though this idea is apparently upheld by Galileo (209), it is safe to say that Galileo’s is neither the last word on the working of human perception nor on the perception of relief. As a matter of fact, by presenting Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne as a work with “a single point of view” and accordingly “understood as a pictorial relief” (71) the author—unknowingly, it seems—takes a position in an ongoing discussion about the perception of sculpture that has focused on precisely this work but has come to very different conclusions. Even if here we are of course no longer speaking about altar reliefs, the book would have profited from a more profound understanding of the way in which sculpture, and relief sculpture in particular, is actually perceived by the viewer. All this is not to say that this book does not present a number of valuable insights. Still, to do justice to the striking rise and fall of the altar relief in Baroque Rome, another thread will need to be spun, one that lets these works really speak for themselves.