Anthonis Mor (1516/21-1576/78), painter to Philip II since 1554, left the Spanish court for the Netherlands in the autumn of 1561. The circumstances of his departure remain shrouded in speculation. Long after Mor’s death Karel van Mander suggested that the artist fled jealous courtiers after he had touched the king with his maulstick. Mor refused Philip’s requests that he return to his court in Spain. However, in addition to portraying affluent burgers, particularly in Antwerp, Mor continued to receive a modest pension from the king and to depict members of the monarch’s family and administration. It is these portraits of Philip II and members of the Habsburg courts across Europe – in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Austria – that have become icons for the face of the largest empire Europe has known. Together with Titian, court painter for Philip’s father Charles V and an earlier portraitist for Philip, Mor established the court portrait format that would dominate European painting for two centuries.Born in Utrecht to a cloth-dyer and his wife and trained with the city’s leading painter Jan van Scorel, Anthonis Mor (whose name appears in at least twelve different spellings, in part because of his peripatetic life) became Philip’s painter through the patronage of the king’s powerful councilor Perrenot de Granvelle, Bishop of Arras. He was described and praised by Giorgio Vasari, and after his death by Karel van Mander. While tantalizing documents have come down to us – including record of the theft of drawings during an assault in Rome –< span style=”mso-spacerun: yes”> there is much we still do not know about the life of this extraordinary artist, beginning with the years of his birth and death. And although he is well known for his powerful portraits, haunting in their combination of sensitive faces on formalized bodies, the boundaries of his oeuvre remain unclear.After editing several important volumes on portraiture, and writing a number of superb essays on aspects of Mor’s work, Joanna Woodall has here produced this long-awaited and welcome volume – an expansive and personal meditation. Through ten chapters, each focused on a handful of paintings devoted to a different kind of mimetic project, Woodall explores “ how the Christian artist was challenged by theological, aristocratic and humanist discourses which constructed authority (both human and divine) in terms of difference from a materialist conception of body and nature.” (6) Some of her arguments are built upon informed speculation – Chapter 3, for example, is constructed around a painting of Saint Sebastian, dated 1552, which she attributes to Mor based on a trip to Rome that she argues may have taken place between March 1541 and 1544. Not all readers may follow or agree with the subsequent analogies she draws between images, or between lives. Nonetheless, Woodall ambitiously tackles a notoriously elusive but central paradox of image-making in early modern northern Europe: paintings whose subject ultimately renders the non-material spirit in luminous oil through exquisite attention to material detail. Weaving documented events with some conjecture, Woodall’s analyses extend beyond the asserted references of a work to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the inner life of the artist, his patrons and viewers, shaped by self-conscious associations and guided by an expansive understanding of friendship and the spiritual life during the Counter-Reformation.Several important studies by historians – Luuc Kooimans, and Johanna Maria Zijlmans, among others – have examined the central role played by friendship in the social cohesion of early modern European culture. While these authors have stressed the instrumental rather than affective aspect of friendship, Woodall’s chapters locate friendship in the spiritual sphere. She cites Alberti’s famous passage that draws an analogy between friendship and portraiture, “ Painting contains a divine force which not only makes the absent present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.” (16) Woodall then links friendship – here the foundational trope of painting – with spiritual union, quoting Augustine: “There can be no true friendship unless those who cling to each other are welded together by you [God] in that love which is spread throughout our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us.” (23) Each of her analyses posits an elaborate structure of analogical references, generated through her description of a process of both making and viewing images, particularly portraits, and grounded in references to the linked tropes of friendship and of spiritual, specifically Catholic, union, as understood in sixteenth-century Europe.   Examination of Mor’s Self-portrait of 1558 in Chapter One lays out Woodall’s associations and tensions, as well as analogies she articulates. That painting depicts the artist before an easel, brushes and palette in hand. What appears to be a powerful and iconographically accessible painting shows only a blank canvas before Mor. In place of an image, a trompe l’o eil paper affixed to the canvas bears a poem in Greek, celebrating the artist and signed by Mor’s life-long friend Dominicus Lampsonius. Woodall argues that the text may be understood as a mirror, standing in for the visual image of a painted portrait and thereby creating a tension between value produced by an expected image, immanently embodied, and the text written by a man. The poem, and by extension its author Lampsonius, becomes a mirror of, and for, Mor. Lampsonius is also an imagined viewer of the portrait itself, as is Mor, and even his patron Philip II, whose different subject positions are conjoined through friendship. Finally, observing conceptual similarities between Mor’s Self portrait and several contemporaneous images depicting Saint Luke painting the Virgin, Woodall suggests that “[al]though the Virgin is not visible in embodied form in Mor’s self-portrait, the virtue reflected in the unblemished mirror is implicit in … the glass-like surface created by the artist’s inspired command of oil painting.” (31)Subsequent chapters similarly explore their subjects through the tropes of friendship and spirituality, whose inherent tensions vary with their subject’s relation to Mor. These include: Mor’s earliest securely dated portrait, the 1544 Two Canons in Berlin; his powerful portraits of Granvelle, and the Duke of Alva, both of 1549; portraits of Philip II, his wife Mary Tudor, members of his court and extended family, which have become icons for the sixteenth-century Habsburg courts; and the affluent burghers of the Netherlands, where he spent the last years of his life. Woodall devotes a chapter to Francisco de Holanda’s Do tirar polo natural (On Rendering from Nature, or from Life) completed in 1549, shortly before Mor visited Portugal to portray members of the royal family.Although there is no documented connection between the author and the artist, at the least Mor would have encountered the environment in which it was produced, if not the man; thus an analysis of this fascinating text in light of the ideas circulating around friendship and mimesis is welcome. Another chapter examines Mor’s one securely attributed surviving religious painting, a remarkable Risen Christ between Saints Peter and Paul (ca. 1556 that includes a still-unidentified patron as Saint Paul, which Woodall tentatively proposes might have been a self-portrait. All in all, we can thank Woodall for an ambitious and provocative study, and Waanders for its stunning design and sumptuous presentation.Ann Jensen AdamsUniversity of California at Santa Barbara