Lauren Jacobi is the Clarence H. Blackall Career Development Associate Professor of Architectural History in the History, Theory + Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Daniel M. Zolli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at The Pennsylvania State University. He is a specialist in late medieval and early modern European art, with a particular focus on fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.

• Introduction, 1. Generation and Ruination in the Display of Michelangelo's Non-finito, 2. The Sacrilege of Soot: Liturgical Decorum and the Black Madonna of Loreto, 3. Sedimentary Aesthetics, 4. 'Adding to the Good Silver with Other Trickery': Purity and Contamination in Clement VII's Emergency Currency', 5. Tapestry as Tainted Medium: Charles V's Conquest of Tunis, 6. Bruegel's Dirty, Little Atoms, 7. Leakage, Contagion, and Containment in Early Modern Venice, 8. Contamination, Purification, Determinism: The Italian Pontine Marshes, 9. Colonial Consecrations, Violent Reclamation, and Contested Spaces in the Spanish Americas, 10. Contamination | Purification, Index