Artists were in a particularly frustrating position, for they knew of the existence of various treatises on painting and sculpture in the ancient world, but not one of these had survived. The earliest writing about art thus began, with Cennino Cennini, by compiling the principles that could be derived from contemporary practice, including techniques and recipes. The first properly theoretical treatise, that is one that goes beyond pragmatic lessons to general principles – Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura (1435) – draws on both poetics and rhetoric to develop ways of thinking about the formal elements of a picture as well as the process by which it is created by the artist.

Alberti was in a different position when it came to writing his most substantial work, the De Re Aedificatoria (c.1443–52), for which he could refer to Vitruvius’s substantial and surviving De Architectura, the work which later inspired what is perhaps the most famous image of the Renaissance, Leonardo’s so-called Vitruvian Man. But both he and all subsequent early modern writers on art supplemented the available theoretical sources with ideas and principles that could be inferred from the many stories about celebrated artists and their works to be found in authors as various as Cicero, Philostratus, and Lucian.

By far the most important in this regard was Pliny the Elder, whose monumental Natural History was a veritable encyclopedia of science – and a compendium of assorted mirabilia – that fascinated the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Pliny’s treatment of minerals and metals led naturally to a discussion of their use in sculpture and painting, and it was these books (33-37), that became the richest source of tales about the great artists of antiquity. The works themselves had to be imagined on the basis of Pliny’s description, for virtually the whole of ancient painting had perished, and although many sculptures survived it was not until centuries later that some of them were plausibly matched with the names recorded in the Natural History. This is why the discovery of the Laocoön in 1506, and its immediate recognition as one of the masterpieces praised by Pliny, was doubly momentous.

Pliny preserved a vivid image of the personality and artistic character of the greatest painters and sculptors of antiquity, described some of their most important works, and recorded the most celebrated anecdotes about their lives, their practice, and their relations with patrons. All of this was like a precious ore to be mined by Renaissance authors looking for technical information, inferring practical procedures, and sometimes coming up against tantalising hints that could not be fully worked out, like the question of the mysterious dark glaze called atramentum.

Significantly, at a time when artists and art theorists were attempting to demonstrate that painting and sculpture were liberal arts rather than crafts or trades, Pliny supplied valuable evidence of stories about the high esteem in which great artists had been held by the most powerful monarchs: those concerning Alexander and Apelles were the best known of all, and even inspired contemporary rulers to behave towards their greatest artists in a manner that implicitly cast them in the flattering role of Alexander.

Most important of all, of course, were the anecdotes from which aesthetic principles could be inferred. The most famous of these was perhaps that of Zeuxis, who was asked to paint a picture of Helen of Troy for the city of Croton; as there was no single model equal to standing in for the most beautiful woman in the world, he asked the citizens to bring him the five most beautiful girls in the city and then selected and combined the best features for each. Almost as well known was the story of how Timanthes, in painting the sacrifice of Iphigenia, had expressed various degrees of grief on the faces of those present, but because that of Agamemnon was impossible to picture he painted him veiling his head and left the ultimate pitch of anguish to the imagination of the audience.

An author whose presence in early modern art is so pervasive both in theory and in practice clearly deserves a thorough study, and Sarah Blake McHam’s book covers most of this material very effectively. It is thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, with many sumptuous illustrations; it is also clearly written, free of jargon, and on the whole a pleasure to read. It is certainly a reference work that any art history library will want to own, particularly useful for its treatment of several particular topics, including the history of both the manuscript tradition and then the printed editions in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as Vasari’s use of Plinian anecdotes in the decoration of his houses in Arezzo and Florence.

A work of this scale and indeed ambition will always have its flaws, and a fellow author may well hesitate to cast the first stone, especially when dealing with comparatively small matters, like the puzzling spelling of Crotone for the ancient city of Croton, or even the repeated mention of the epitaphs with which Vasari concludes his lives as epigraphs. More serious, however, is the faulty translation of Latin passages in several cases. Most egregiously, McHam fundamentally misconstrues the inscription on Mantegna’s tomb, mistaking the adjective ‘bronze’ in aenea… simulacra for the name of Aeneas. Here the manifest nonsense with which the author ends up should have alerted her that something was wrong.

Almost more alarming is her apparent failure to recognise that Botticelli’s primary iconographical reference in the Birth of Venus is the extraordinarily famous statue of the Medici Venus. From the art-theoretical point of view, it is equally disturbing that she can discuss an inscription characterising Apelles as a ‘silent poet’ without seeming to realise that Simonides’ characterisation of painting as a muta poesis and poetry as a pictura loquens was perhaps the single most famous ancient maxim about the ‘sister arts’.

Such mistakes show that while one can no doubt trust what the author says specifically about Pliny and his immediate impact, one cannot necessarily rely on her wider grasp of either ancient art, modern art, or early modern art theory. Perhaps what is most surprising is that this should be the case in a book published by Yale University Press. We cannot blame McHam for not knowing everything about a vast field, but we can ask why readers and editors failed to help her correct errors and supplement gaps in her broader knowledge of the subject.