In presenting his new book on the representation of heaven in Renaissance and Baroque art, Martin Kemp tells his readers that the project has a personal dimension. It is, as he indicates, a continuation of the project on “optics and European naturalism” that he published in 1990 under the title The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (12). Although the purview of the present book is somewhat more limited, it covers a great deal of territory. Beginning with an introduction to “divine optics” in Islamic and Christian writings, Kemp situates Dante as an inheritor of those traditions, and inventor on that basis of a vision of heaven that would have a profound effect on European art in the coming centuries. He then shifts to the discussion of those paintings that contend with Dante's vision, ranging from fifteenth-century illuminations of the Commedia to the ceiling paintings of seventeenth-century Rome.

As a survey of the pictorial representation of heaven and divine light in European art from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, Kemp's book does an admirable job of bringing together materials and observations that are likely to generate interest for an educated general audience. It is written in a lively, often personal voice that makes it accessible. The book is also splendidly illustrated with high quality color images. Even without the text, the carefully curated images tell a story. In some ways the author does for his reader what blockbuster exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues do for their audiences. Kemp poses an intriguing question, satisfies the desire for narrative exposition, and does so with sufficient latitude to allow for informal perusal of the materials presented.

What holds the book together is the authority of a scholar with a longstanding investment in the study of optics and perspective as scientific endeavors that both underpin and define Renaissance art as a precursor of modern science. For Kemp, the situation of Dante vis-à-vis the subsequent development of Renaissance representations of heaven as divine light is analogous to the position of Einstein with respect to the development of nuclear physics. The choice of Dante as the protagonist makes sense in the context of this rehearsal of a familiar pattern in the history of ideas, but it does not hold up to scrutiny. While Kemp's exposition of Dante's treatment of light and vision in Paradiso is compelling, it offers no robust definition of Dante's vision as distinct from the author's. The problem is predicted in the introduction, where, by way of a methodological statement, Kemp tells us that, while he is “naturally interested when there is evidence of Dante's impact on the artists” he discusses, he is “also dealing with a more general diffusion of Dante's vision” (13). As the text proceeds, the former interest proves to be an accessory to the latter. Evidence of Dante's impact on artists is sometimes taken to be so obvious as to require no examination, as in the case of illuminated manuscripts of Dante's writings, and sometimes presented as an inevitable result of the fact Dante and a given artist, such as Ghiberti, both came from Florence.

Perhaps the strangest circumambulation of potentially rich grounds for exploration in the quest to find Dante's vision occurs in the sixth chapter, in the section on Ludovico Cigoli's experiments with perspective and perspective machines (198–202). Here Kemp points to the painter's friendship with Galileo Galilei (whose works include a consideration of the shape, location, and dimensions of Dante's Inferno) to secure the connection between Cigoli's pictorial experiments and Dante. The treatment of Galileo as a supporting character in this portion of Kemp's story is perplexing. As Eileen Reeves documented in her book on the correspondence surrounding Galileo's observations of the heavens, the relations between seeing, understanding, and representing the heavens were very much in dispute at the time (Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo [1998]). Those debates involved artisanal practices in ways that escape Kemp's vision. I wonder how much richer his account of Cigoli's experiments might have been if it were in discussion with the expanding literature on artisanal epistemologies.

There is no doubt that books directed to a general reader are necessary to the survival of specialized fields of study, and that their authors deserve our thanks for having the courage to stand above the scholarly fray, be selective, and say what they think in light of their experience and accumulated knowledge. For all its merits, however, Kemp's story feels oddly insulated from the contemporary currents and challenges of Renaissance studies as a vital and evolving field of inquiry.