Good news for the festive season — the inexorable rise of the virtual image on our computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones would appear to have done nothing to diminish the flood of gorgeously produced art books being published. This year’s selection ranges in time from the third century AD to now, and reaches all over the globe.
First up is Antony Eastmond’s The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £49.95), which is in essence a sumptuous anthology of 267 unusually carefully chosen highlights, bookended by a short but profound introduction and an exceptionally useful glossary. The selection naturally includes all the most celebrated works in a comprehensive range of media, but also manages to embrace some distinctly out-of-the-way goodies from Georgia and Armenia.
Donal Cooper and Janet Robson’s The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (Yale, £45, Spectator Bookshop, £37) also contains many beautiful plates, but is not exactly a holiday read. Its subject is the decoration of the interior of the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi, and above all an extraordinarily sophisticated investigation of its patronage and iconography. The most famous element of the basilica’s decoration, the fresco cycle of the life of Saint Francis, has long been an attributional battlefield —or minefield — between the Giotto and not Giotto camps, but here this seemingly insoluble problem is wisely left to one side.
By a happy coincidence, two books within my selection are devoted to miracle-working images, but effortlessly avoid stepping on one another’s toes. Megan Holmes’s The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (Yale, £45, Spectator Bookshop, £37) explores this fascinating and hitherto neglected subject with admirable clarity and insight. Its conception of the term ‘Renaissance’ is a generous one, ranging in date from around 1250 to 1600, and including Florentine territory as well as the city itself.
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