The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy. Stephen J. Campbell. Louise Smith Bross Lecture Series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. xxii + 352 pp. $65

Grosso modo, the project is meant to bring to the fore a series of artists and works of art from what has typically been construed as the hinterland of Italian Renaissance art history: artists like Girolamo Alibrandi, Cesare da Sesto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Girolamo Romanino, Moretto, and, perhaps most exemplarily, Lorenzo Lotto, who earns pride of place in the subtitle; and places like Messina, Naples, Recanati, Jesi, Varallo, Bergamo, and Brescia. Through geographically framed case studies, the rest of the book asks us to rethink the relationship between center and periphery and challenges the dominant narrative told about sixteenth-century art in Italy. Both the artists and the locations have quintessentially been seen as peripheral, but Campbell demonstrates that both artists “produced a highly distinctive and innovative religious art that is clearly aware of—while maintaining distance from—the increasingly dominant workshops of the major centers” (103).