This two-volume set—study and catalogue—in Brill's Studies in Intellectual History series is a monumental achievement. The catalogue (available online at https://brill.com/view/title/55785) is a comprehensive census of all preserved Netherlandish religious paintings with devotional portraits from 1400–1550. It is, as the author points out, the basis for volume 2, which examines the spiritual dimensions of paintings with devotional portraits. The catalogue entries (almost all of which include small illustrations) are arranged alphabetically by artist and provide thorough documentation as well as compositional, typological, and iconographical data. In addition to describing the individuals, objects, and coats of arms in the pictures, the entries also note the gaze of the sitter, the environment, and the structuring of the pictorial space. The nineteen typologies used throughout the catalogue are laid out in the introduction; they include the possible locations of figures, with and without patron saints, on the inside or outside of triptychs and diptychs as well as the position of these figures in spatial relation to religious, hieratic, and narrative scenes. These typologies highlight the various boundaries between the different figures—sacred and secular—a key theme in the other volume. This arrangement also has the advantage of prompting the reader/viewer to careful consideration of the illustrations in both volumes.

The book volume of Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting examines the devotional implications of the portraits in religious works—the sorts of paintings documented in the catalogue. Though Falque occasionally looks to other places and other media, her main concern is with paintings made in the Netherlands from 1400–1550. In the introduction she makes clear the formal variety of paintings with portraits and neatly parses the “plurality of types” and their diverse functions. She also emphasizes her goal, “to understand devotional portraits as a way to grasp the relationship that men and women of the time envisioned with the celestial world and contemporary spirituality” (23). The book is arranged in five chapters that address these concerns: the first chapter explicitly addresses the role of format, composition, and pictorial devices in establishing the boundary between sacred and secular zones; the second analyzes the role of this spatial structuring for establishing levels of reality; and the remaining chapters examine this material in relation to pertinent spiritual devotions and meditative practice.

Chapter 1, “Ora pro me,” establishes the range of relationships among the figures portrayed, and the sacred figures and scenes that are the main subject of the pictures. Falque's analysis of the forms and locations of such portraits draws on a range of scholarship, but her own close looking provides the most useful guide. The examination is also enriched by opening up the range of works considered, both in the diagrams that show the numerical distribution of various formats and in the inclusion of lesser-known as well as famous works. This reach allows for a review of the most important literature but also provides the opportunity to probe the significance of particular pictorial problems and artistic solutions. The emphasis in this section, with some exceptions, is on triptychs for which the variations of scale, function, and patronage are noted, though it is the structure and composition of these works that dominate the discussion. Falque's attention to the role of architecture, grisaille, the double effigy, and clouds (among other elements) prompts attentive looking and a probing attitude.

Falque's emphasis on format and composition sets up the second part of this chapter—“Devotional Portraits, ‘Levels of Reality and the Structure of the Pictorial Space’”—which examines the distinct relationship between sitter(s) and protagonists of the main religious scene. These relationships are spelled out in subsections as: works of dialogue, works of presentation, works of participation, and fragmentation of the picture space. Within this framework she considers specific compositional and pictorial devices as means by which artists could articulate distinct levels of reality, the boundary between the sacred and secular in these works with figures shown at prayer. Her close reading of such painting as a spiritual journey, though unexceptional, goes beyond generalities to provide guidelines for appreciating the ways in which such pictures might work for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century viewers.

The remaining chapters of the volume lay out the relationship between a composition and pictorial devices used in religious pictures with portraits and devotional texts. As Falque notes, she intends “to show that texts and images are grounded in the same devotional culture and that each can be used to interpret the other” (110). Taken together, chapters 2–4 lay out a sequence of themes that move from the spiritual journey, to the spiritual ascent, and finally to the union with God. This arrangement has the advantage of looking at themes in devotional literature together with associated visual motifs. For example, chapter 2—“Via ad Deum”—which investigates the theme of the spiritual journey, considers the path, the garden, and the domestic space as settings in pictures that align with like imagery in spiritual guides. According to Falque, such shared understanding would encourage the individual portrayed within the painting to visualize the path to salvation, a place of divine encounter, or the house of the soul. The number of pictures which contain such motifs makes for a convincing case that such images would trigger associations drawn from devotional traditions.

Chapter 5, “In spiritualem quondam armoniam,” specifically addresses—as stated in the subtitle—“The Role of Images in Meditative Practices in and the Devotional Portrait as a Support of Meditation.” This chapter considers the role of prayer as well as the relationship between spiritual guides and pictures that is a major theme of the book. The emphasis here is on the writings of Geert Grote (d. 1384). He, together with Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen (d. 1398), Florent Radewijns (d. 1400), Jan Ruusbroec (d. 1381), and other members of the Modern Devotion, play an important role throughout this study, and together provide a rich compendium of visual metaphors that also appear in pictures. Nonetheless, by frequently using the term image for both the words of meditative guides and pictures, Falque misses the opportunity to consider how the differences between mental images and physical objects might play out in a devotional context

This is not to undercut the more important point that such devotional metaphors would be widely understood by the patrons of religious paintings in this period, but to question whether the interplay between these texts and images was so straightforward. In establishing more definitive connections it might be useful to consider examples when a member of a particular religious order is shown and how particular Cistercian, Franciscan, or Dominican spiritual traditions might come into play. In any case, the rich resources of traditional religion (in which the members of the Devotio Moderna were well versed) suggest a viewer who looked with the eyes of faith. For such a religiously conditioned imagination the response to a literary or pictorial source would quite likely not require translation from text to image, but rather a mutual stimulus for devotional rumination.

That said, in these volumes Ingrid Falque provides the reader with both the incentive to look with renewed attentiveness at the role of the portraits in Netherlandish religious paintings and the resources to return to these pictures with a renewed appreciation of their rich possibilities.