Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America. Edgar Peters Bowron, ed. The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. xvi + 186 pp. $69.95.
place and patronage. While each chapter merits study, general and specialized readers alike might gain from an exploration of the open-access website that houses the database connected to the volume: http://continentallegories.univie.ac.at. The database, a necessary supplement to the overall topics and a few individual chapters, is well organized and contains excellent, high-resolution color photographs that supplement the research in the volume. This provides the added benefit of expanding beyond the confines of a work published in a traditional manner with a necessarily limited number of reproductions; it does not include all material represented in the volume (e.g., East-Central European examples). Searchable via place, a timeline, and index (using Iconclass codes for standardization), the database allows the reader to compare multiple images at the same site, or more than one artist active at a given site. It is a useful vehicle for connecting spatialtemporal material to narrative, with the caveat that the data presentation in the volume sometimes weighs the discussion down and subsumes the main ideas; at other times it provides insight into time-space phemonena. One of the main contributions of this well-researched volume is the editors’ participation in the further refinement of these useful and often groundbreaking methodologies.