It’s yellow, not green, that’s the colour of jealousy

Making attributions to Leonardo da Vinci, the great art historian Adolfo Venturi once remarked, is like ‘picking up a red-hot iron’. Those who wish to avoid injury, he advised, should exercise great caution. Whether or not the scholars who attributed the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to the great man are now suffering from badly burnt fingers — not to mention the buyer who paid $450.3 million for it — is a question of informed opinion.

On the whole, Carmen C. Bambach, the author of the monumental Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale, 4 Volumes, £400) votes against. In Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings in Detail (Prestel £65), Alessandro Vezzosi, also a noted authority on the artist, is more guarded. One thing is certain, he concludes unanswerably: whatever it is, it remains the costliest work of art on earth and thus a tribute to the stellar status of Leonardo in this year, the 500th anniversary of his death.

Bambach’s study is weighty in every sense, running to an imposing — positively daunting — 2,350 pages. The 1,500 illustrations are superlative, and it is full of valuable observations, whether or not one concurs with her judgments. The Prestel volume is more digestible and physically lighter. For readers of art books these days the danger is not burnt fingers but slipped discs.

Taschen also comes up with some heavyweight productions — proudly marketed as ‘XXL’ — in Rembrandt: The Complete Drawings and Etchings and The Complete Paintings (both £150). In these, the emphasis is not on text, but on reproductions of high quality and impressive size. In the case of the drawings, which were often done on scraps of paper, they are often far larger than the originals. David Hockney — famously a believer in bigger pictures — is an enthusiastic fan. He’s right: here are Rembrandt works on paper as you’ve never seen them before.