"The literature on Gerolamo Savoldo, an extraordinary painter of portraits and religious scenes from Brescia, Italy, is dominated by questions of 'influence,' where the unique features of his art are explained away by reference to their sources in Venetian or Lombard or Tuscan painting. In Painting With Demons , Fried asks why Savoldo (ca. 1480-1540) 'imagined the pictorial arena in . highly charged, partly somaticized, intensely relational terms.' Viewers of his work feel themselves engaged not only visually but physically. For example, the hands in Savoldo's compositions foster what Fried calls 'empathic projection.' Beholders are also assailed by Savoldo's suggestions of a haunted cosmos--facelike structures in rocks and draperies, demonic physiognomies that seem to snarl and gape. Savoldo's world is one where the sacred is elusive.

Fried's argument that such preoccupations arise from an early absorption of the art of Netherlandish artists like Hieronymus Bosch is utterly convincing.".