The aim of this book is to provide a “complete, exhaustive, and systematic art historical study” of the Dominican college of San Gregorio, Valladolid (306). The college was established in 1487 by the prelate Alonso de Burgos. Readers of this Journal will be familiar with the building, now Spain’s Museo Nacional de Escultura. Especially remarkable is the mesmerising Astwerk façade, populated by armed savages benignly standing to attention, heroes fighting vicious beasts, and putti playing among pomegranates. The nineteenth-century writer José Maria Quadrado captured the imaginative richness of this teeming forest of sculptures when he described it as the brainchild of “fantasy, excited, in those years, by the discovery of the New World” (quoted, 73). Diana Olivares Martínez unravels this dream-like complexity with unfailing rigor, marshalling an impressive range of visual, literary, and documentary sources to analyse not only the much-discussed façade, but also the lesser-known spaces behind it, notably the monumental staircase and porticoed pavilion.