"As with any scholarship that treats its material with sensitivity and thoroughness, here the subject justifies itself and the reader is motivated to keep reading-both within the book and without. That, after all, is perhaps the highest praise one could offer any new work, particularly one that disentangles such a beautiful can of worms." * European History Quarterly * "Deftly traversing a wide range of sources, Lockhart shows how the animated statue ties together a rich late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world of musical theater, aesthetic theory, nationhood fantasies, sciences of the body, and notions of self. . . . by the end, one is left wondering not what animation and plasticity have to do with music, nor in what respect late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy matters to broader music historical developments, but how we ever thought we could understand this period or the longer history of aesthetics without attending to the statue that comes to life. Like the ruin pictured on its cover, this work seems destined to endure." * Journal of the American Musicological Society *