Penny Howell Jolly offers a compelling and provocative reading of a single well-known work of art: the stunning mosaics that illustrate the story of Creation in the church of San Marco in Venice. Jolly studies the mosaics as a reinterpretation of the foundational myth of divine creation and male and female roles, and thus as a social document that reveals a great deal about the perception of relations between the sexes in thirteenth-century Venice.

In the end, she sees the mosaic as a highly misogynist revision of the Cotton Genesis directed toward a thirteenth-century audience. The book incorporates recent studies in narratology and feminist theology, as well as a discussion of how a medieval audience, unschooled in reading and writing, was visually literate and able to "read" these images.