Paul Johnson
This has been an exceptionally good year for art books. Three in particular have won my admiration. The most sumptuous is a study of Uccello (Thames & Hudson, £60), written by two Italian art scholars, the brothers Franco and Stefano Borsi. The international nature of this publishing venture means that the volume contains exceptionally high quality colour reproduc- tions at a price which, by today's standards, is reasonable. The many problems of Uccello's oeuvre are debated with panache and learning and the way in which the authors place him against his historical background is illuminating. Then there is a fine, big biography of Toulouse Lautrec by a young American art scholar of formidable talent and promise, Julia Frey (Toulouse Lautrec: A Life, W eidenfeld & Nicolson, £25). Frey has discovered a mass of unpublished letters written by Lautrec to his relations and for the first time we can grasp the significance of his family background to his life and work.
Just published is Fiona MacCarthy's William Morris: A Life for Our Time (Faber, £25), a massive, multi-sided book about a massive, multi-sided man with hands of genius and feet of clay.
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