Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe. Victor Plahte Tschudi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xv + 300 pp. + 8 color pls. $99.99.
scholarly attention from the church’s painted decorations to the tombs lining the floor. Expressions of the brotherhood’s ideals, the epitaphs employed a “rhetoric of humble nobility,” extolling the deceased for supposedly repudiating worldly acclaim (113). In one striking example, a “gentleman-in-waiting to Don Juan of Austria” was commemorated for choosing to be interred where “all would step on him” (109). Wunder’s culminating chapter considers the rebuilding of Seville’s oldest church: San Salvador, a converted ninth-century mosque. In contrast to Santa María la Blanca, San Salvador was reconstructed through small contributions collected over decades. Builders worked for free, and locals offered household goods such as furniture and clothing. Although the austerity of San Salvador’s exterior was a function of financial constraints, it ultimately contributed to the imposing character of the church and its surrounding plaza. While focused on Seville, this exemplary study will be of value to anyone interested in the material aspects of early modern civic culture. Wunder’s attention to craftsmanship is appropriately matched by the high production quality of the book itself, whose illustrations bring seventeenth-century Seville vividly to life.