27 FEBRUARY 1926, Page 22

Mr. E. V. Lucas has written five booklets on great

painters (Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Franz Hals, each 5s. Methuen.) with that easy grace and insight into essentials which always informs his -work and makes him so charming a guide. The illustrations are excellent. Lucrezia Crivelli leaves the Louvre to come to lite in the pages of the Leonardo da Vinci booklet, and meets our glance with those- frankly modern eyes of hers—eyes that for all her youth seem to hold secrets more profound than Mona Lisa's. The latter, by the way, does not sit amid her rocks in the frontispiece, as we expected. Mr. Lucas is never banal : instead of La. Gioconda he gives us a beautiful reproduction of a probably genuine Leonardo—a Madonna and Child—which is now in'

Russia.. * * * *