The stunning mosaics that illustrate the story of Creation in the church of San Marco in Venice are the focus of Penny Howell Jolly's compelling and provocative book. Scholars of medieval art have long been interested in the Genesis mosaics because they copy a nearly destroyed fifth-century illuminated Greek manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis. But instead of seeing the mosaics as a vehicle for reconstructing a lost cycle of paintings, Jolly presents them as a social document revealing the essential misogyny that existed in thirteenth-century Venice.