Christmas art books
David Ekserdjian
Art historians do not normally adorn the front page of the Times in the line of duty. Anthony Blunt managed it, but that had nothing to do with his day job. David Alan Brown recently scaled the heady heights, but the reasons were unimpeach- ably professional. His Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (Yale, £35) attributes parts of a painting of 'Tobias and the Angel' in the National Gallery, universally agreed to be from the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, to his most celebrated pupil, Leonardo da Vinci. That kind of bombshell is bound to receive a mixed reception, but more generally this is a high- ly detailed and well argued presentation of the fruits of intense visual scrutiny.
Staying with the Renaissance, Joanna Woods-Marsden has chosen a theme as opposed to an individual artist for her Renaissance Self-Portraiture (Yale, £45). This is not a long book, and one would have been happy for it to have been longer. The whole question of why private patrons and the ecclesiastical authorities were con- tent to allow painters and sculptors to include their self-portraits — and indeed their signatures — in religious scenes is not addressed, but is of the greatest impor- tance in the context of the rise of the artist in this period. Nevertheless, the quality of the works discussed is consistently high artistic morons seem to have shied away from self-portraits — and what Woods- Marsden has to say about them is invari- ably absorbing.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Kunsthis- torisches Museum in Vienna (Sidra, £42) was published in conjunction with an exhi- bition on the whole family, but represents a marvellous introduction to its most distin- guished member. There are paintings by Pieter Bruegel in other collections, but over a quarter of his works are in Vienna, and they include such unequalled master- pieces as the 'Hunters in the Snow' and the `Peasant Wedding'. Klaus Demus's admirable commentaries are accompanied by superb illustrations, many of them of telling details, which underline the extent to which Bruegel's poetry was based on painstaking observation. What is more, they reveal him as that supreme rarity, a genuinely amusing artist.
Succulent details, here backed up by x- rays, paint sections and the like, are also on offer in Jonathan Brown and Carmen Gar- rido's Velazquez: The Technique of Genius (Yale, £25.95). This seems like an obvious idea — a collaboration between an art his- torian and a conservator to explain how a great painter realised his artistic vision but it has seldom been attempted. As long as it is done with as much clarity and good sense as is the case here, one can only hope it has a numerous progeny. Normally art books are a substitute for standing in front of the originals, but only someone on a lad- der could get this close to Velazquez's brush strokes.
Delacroix by Barthelemy Jobert (Prince- ton, £45) is a substantial and well-illustrat- ed monograph on an artist who somehow never fails to surprise. There is so much more to him than the handful of romantic showpieces would lead one to suspect, and Jobert's inclusion of numerous preparatory studies, many in watercolour, allows one to see how icons like the 'Women of Algiers' came into being.
Jane Kallir's Egon Schiele: The Complete Works (Thames & Hudson, £95) has a large number of postage-stamp-size reproduc- tions, but could not realistically do other- wise, given the extent of his production. Two hundred and five new items have been added to this definitive catalogue raisonnd, and 245 new illustrations. Schiele is per- haps unique in his ability to shock, not so much on account of his disturbing subject- matter, but rather because of the lyricism with which he records it. Dying young may well have been a smart career move — he was 28 — because it is almost impossible to imagine what he would have done next.
It is to be hoped that almost nobody still denies that photography is an art, but any lingering sceptics could do a lot worse than start their conversion course with Vicki Goldberg's Jacques Henri Lartigue: Detail of Leonardo's 'Annunciation' in the Uffizi, Florence From Leonardo Da Vinci: Origins of a Genius by David Alan Brown Photographer (Thames & Hudson, £45). Lartigue, who was born in 1894, did not die until 1986, but this selection is confined to his early years, and includes nothing later than 1930. An unerring gift for composi- tion, combined with an unforced sense of the bizarre, meant that from the age of ten onwards Lartigue was creating images whose instinctive surrealism makes Magritte and Dali look distinctly laboured.
Big museums almost invariably offer a variety of catalogues these days, from the decorative to the demanding. The Cleveland Museum of Art's Masterworks of Asian Art (Thames & Hudson, £45) is a combination of both, in the sense that the non-specialist has to wrestle with a certain amount of technical language, but the pieces themselves are dazzling. Perhaps because America has lacked the colonial interests that have determined so much of our national collecting of Asian art, Cleve- land's holdings are admirably balanced. Much of the credit for the consistently high standard, however, must go to Sherman E. Lee, who was successively curator, associ- ate director and director of the museum.
Smaller establishments, in this country as elsewhere, tend to be less well served, but Christopher Wright's Renaissance to Impressionism: Masterpieces from Southampton City Art Gallery (Lindsay Fine Art, £25) is intended to be the first in a series of guides to our provincial museums designed to change all that. Handsomely produced, it effortlessly makes the case that museums of this calibre house consid- erable treasures; in this instance a late Giovanni Bellini did not quite make the grade for a colour illustration.
Sienese painting has always — at least since 1400 — suffered by being cast as fuddy-duddy compared with the art of its go-ahead rival, Florence, canonised as the home of the Renaissance. As a conse- quence, a good number of the sumptuous illustrations in Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, Alessandra Angelini and Bernardina Sani's Five Centuries of Sienese Painting: From Duccio to the Birth of the Baroque (Thames & Hudson, £55) are likely to prove unfamiliar, even to specialists, and there are some marvellous surprises. An early panel attributed to one Rinaldo da Siena is by the same hand as the National Gallery's latest acquisition, only the third 13th- century painting to enter the collection.
Few of these lavish tomes are exactly stocking-fillers, but books in Thames & Hudson's 'World of Art' series cost only £7.95 each. The latest crop includes Bonnard by Timothy Hyman and Mary Cas- satt: Painter of Modern Women by Griselda Pollock, both artfully designed to coincide with exhibitions and deserving to increase the standing of their respective subjects. By contrast, Bruce toucher's Italian Baroque Sculpture covers a field in which there are few even half-familiar names. The result is a most enjoyable wander through some decidedly unknown territory.
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