Short notices
The Great Age of Fresco Millard Meiss (Phaidon £11). After the Florence flood of 1966 and by way of thanks from Italy to those who helped in the restoration of the Florentine patrimony an exhibition of Italian frescoes was sent to Europe, to London and to New York. Modern techniques enable frescoes, which, painted onto wet plaster, form part of their walls, to be stripped and cleaned and transported—and reproduced. This beautiful book allows us some vision of the prodigious frescoes produced during the Italian renaissance by the greatest sequence of painters that—or any other—period and area has contained. We are indebted to Dr Meiss and his publisher to have grasped an opportunity which will not again occur.
Mosaics Ferdinando Rossi (Pall Mall Press £6). A useful scholarly survey, on a chrono- logical basis, of the technique and art of decorating walls, floors, tables, altars, columns and almost anything by sticking pieces of stone onto their surfaces. By the nature of things more stilted than fresco work, mosaics, as for example in the cathe- dral at Monreale, achieve astonishing colour.
Frans Hals Seymour Slive (Phaidon 2 vols: Text £5 5s, Plates £6 5s). At a time and place when painting was very much a trade, and correct apprenticeship was served, the Haarlem Guild of St Luke trained and turned into a superb tradesman the delightful and uncomplicated portraitist Frans Hals. Poor throughout his life, but seemingly for most of the time cheerful, the life and the works (and we know far more of the works than of the life) of the Dutch seventeenth- century master are here discussed and repro- duced.
The French Impressionists and their Century Diane Kelder (Pall Mall Press £2 10s). A slight and light account this, obvious in its selection of illustrations and trivial in its text, which begins The nineteenth century was one of the most complex and exciting periods in the history of mankind'. Fancy that.
The Nineteenth Century Edited by Asa. Briggs (Thames and Hudson £6 6s until December 31, £8 8s after). For strong coffee tables and light reading. As it says in the front, 668 illustrations, 211 in colour, 457 photographs, engravings, drawings and maps. A kind of children's encyclopaedia of the nineteenth century, for grown-ups. Extremely harmless, Sargent Richard Ormond (Phaidon £6). Harmless, too, yet clever, very clever, John Singer Sargent, admirably here celebrated by his great-nephew (who, however, remains undazzled by his great-uncle's dazzling tech- nique), is a man who moved from the nine- teenth into the twentieth century and be- longed to neither. Had he not been such a social success—had he, indeed, been a trades-
man, pure and simple, like Frans Hals—his posthumous reputation would have been far greater than it is, and his paintings possibly even better than a surprisingly large number of them were.
Canaletto. Bruegel. The Van Eycks. Mane!, Vermeer (Classics of World Art. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 40s each). Difficult to see pre- cisely whom these books are aimed at, they are nevertheless good value in that you get a lot of colour for your money, adequate introductions to the painters, and catalogues of works. Owing to an elaborate system of symbols which are attached to each cata- logued picture, the back end of each of these books looks like a Good Food Guide. Never- theless, such symbols provide a great deal of information, provided you can be bothered to work them out.
Roman Trier and the Treveri Edith Mary Wightman (Ruper Hart-Davis £4). Arising, it seems, from a D.Phil thesis, this is never- theless just about sufficiently illustrated, if not quite far enough removed from its source, to qualify as of general interest. Gregory of Tours wrote how St Wulfiliacus caused the overthrow of a pagan statue of Diana somewhere near Yvois in the sixth century. Now Miss Wightman comes along and puts Gregory in his place: 'Some such incident certainly took place in the woods near Bollendorf, where a relief with inscrip- tion to Diana was carved out of a lump of rock; the upper part of the relief has been deliberately hacked off—and as a monu- ment to Christian zeal it compares with the Altbachtal statues, or the Venus from St Mathias. If Gregory's geography is correct, this was not the work of Wulfiliacus, but it could be connected with a later missionary, the Northumbrian Willibrord (late seventh- century) whose abbey at Echternach is only a mile or two away across the river Sauer.' This book is a monument to Miss Wight- man's zeal.
French Prints of the 20th century Roger Passeron (Pall Mall £6 10s). A beautifully produced introduction to engraving, using as illustration the work of modern French en- gravers in many styles from Renoir to Ber- nard Buffet, excellently reproduced. A very attractive book.
Castles of Europe William Anderson (Elek £10 10s). A perfect Christmas present, not unduly expensive, to give anyone interested in castles or more generally in the military and social history of mediaeval Europe. A painstaking and well-written account accom- panies some very beautiful photographs, many in colour.
The Edwardians J. B. Priestley (Heinemann 80s). A neat. cosy, rather anodyne survey of the years from 1901 to the outbreak of the first world war. Too much has been written on the oeriod, some of it much more in- teresting than this. To be unwrapped at Christmas and sent out again as a New Year present.
Romantic England: Writing and Painting 1717-1851 Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 90s). After The Edwardians' this could be called 'The Wordsworthians'—there is the same kind of colloquial facility with a complicated subject, and the same uneasy balance between text and illustration. Work- ing from the Gothic prefigurings of Pope through to Pugin's dreams for a Gothic re- vival, Peter Quennell concentrates on the kind of domestic trivia that is supposed to bring these writers and painters comfortingly to our firesides. Within these limits the text is competent and the illustrations well chosen; though black-and-white .eproduc- tions of paintings like Turner's 'The Snow Storm' are a complete waste of space.
Landscape and Antiquity: aspects of English culture at Stourhead 1718 to 1838 Kenneth Woodbridge (Oxford £5). This very attrac- tive book might sound specialised, but in fact tells us more about 'romantic' England of the same period than Quennell's book. Attitudes towards art and landscape charac- terised by Reynolds's discourses are brought to life against the background of perhaps the most beautifully landscaped of all English country estates: and the second part deals with early field archaeology carried out among the barrows and earthworks of Salis- bury Plain. A well-produced book, in which text and illustration complement one another very satisfactorily.
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