“This rich and illuminating study bridges a gap in the art-historical scholarship, namely, that of a comprehensive treatment of early Italian pastoral painting that takes into its purview complex associations between and among geographical localities, pastoral poetry, painting, sculpture, and, importantly, both imagined and real green spaces. Cranston’s original and valid insights emerge in every chapter; her range of reference earns her the reader’s confidence, while her handling of the various motives and interpretations of the elusive pastoral ‘mode’ is creative, subtle, and, ultimately, convincing.”
—Kristin Phillips-Court, author of The Perfect Genre: Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy