Books: Good to Look At

More readily than ever before the U.S. book buyer is paying handsomely for books that are big, beautiful and well-made. Most of them are picture books, especially art books, and they appear, naturally, in time for Christmas. Timing aside, some of them are excellent. Each of the following sampling can easily justify its publication, and even, in most instances, its price.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (518 pp.; Reynal; $35) is one of those rare books that does justice to a man of genius. It is more than just big and beautiful, and its appeal does not stop with art lovers, for Leonardo may well have possessed the greatest creative intelligence in human history. The paintings alone (La Gioconda. The Last Supper, Portrait of a Young Woman) would have been quite enough to ensure his place in world art—and the major ones are here, in color, on pages large enough to illustrate his mastery, his humanity and his imaginative understanding. But the book also includes hundreds of drawings, the sketches for inventions that range from military catapults to flying machines, proof of his restless talents as anatomist, engineer, geographer, mechanical wizard. This volume, the work of many expert hands, explores the heart, the mind and the life of the foremost man of the Renaissance, and is worthy of its subject.

GREAT FLOWER BOOKS, 1700-1900, by Sacheverell Sitwell and Wilfrid Blunt (94 pp.; Collins: $50), is one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most expensive books of the year. Its illustrations are the work of the great botanical artists of two centuries, and the flowers stand lushly on pages 1½ ft. high and more than a foot wide. The book derives further elegance from the graceful and handsomely printed essays of Flower Enthusiasts Sitwell and Blunt.

KINGDOM OF THE BEASTS, by Julian Huxley and W. Suschitzky (159 pp.; Vanguard; $ 12.50), is the next best thing to a safari, or long afternoons spent at a zoo. The photographs are unusually fine and Zoologist Huxley contributes crisp and informative notes as well as a highly readable essay on the mammal world.

OUR LITERARY HERITAGE, by Van Wyck Brooks and Otto Bettmann (246 pp.; Dutton; $8.50), makes up for its uninspired text by providing a rich collection of 500 drawings and photographs that add life and interest to U.S. letters, from Ben Franklin to Robert Frost.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THE BIBLE, by Marc Chagall (Harcourt Brace; $25), is really a poem in etchings and lithographs (133 in all) to celebrate the myths and meanings of the Old Testament. The drawing is rough and bold, almost primitive, but intentionally so, to picture the time and to convey the responses of a driven people who found God in a harsh desert. Deliberate, also, are the Old Testament characters, made to look like medieval ghetto figures, and the animals that might have been drawn by cave dwellers to illustrate a great saga. These powerful, often dreamily tortuous drawings are full of the awe, the stern morality in which their origins were themselves steeped.

THE BIBLE IN ART (239 pp.; Phaidon; $8.50) shares only occasionally Chagall’s restless habitat between ecstasy and agony. It is a spectrum of art, inspired by Old Testament themes, that begins with paintings fromthe Roman catacombs and covers more than 14 centuries before it comes to rest with the all but serene Biblical painting of Rembrandt. The contrasts are fascinating: between the somber faith of the Spaniards and the Gallic directness of the French, the controlled warmth of the Italians and the austere faith of the Germans. It is a brilliant sampling that shows, among other things, how national character, as well as time and place, alters the face of Christian art.

BEFORE BARBED WIRE, by Mark H. Brown and W. R. Fenton (254 pp.; Holt; $10), draws on the work of L. A. Huffman, who was perhaps the best of the photographers who tried to document the old West. Here are 124 splendidly direct and realistic pictures devoted to cowboy country and life in the ’80s and ’90s. Informative text, a fine piece of Americana.

THE ANATOMY OF NATURE, by Andreas Feininger (168 pp.; Crown: $5.95).These pictures of a great photographer prove that the camera eye has better vision than the human eye. A celestial galaxy is caught, and a sense of vast mystery with it; a nautilus in cross section conveys the wonder of architecture in a simple skeleton. Technically remarkable.

THE GLORY OF ROMANESQUE ART (351 pp.; Vanguard; $15). In the minds of many visitors to France, what lingers longest is the richness of its Romanesque architecture, the combination of religiosity and dedicated workmanship that lives in Chartres, at Mont St.-Michel, in Vezelay. These 271 photographs are rich evidence of the legacy left by the great architects and sculptors of 11th and 12th century France, the marriage of mass and grace, of glory to God and man’s determination to create for posterity.

ATLAS OF THE BIBLE (165 pp.; Nelson; $15) actually lends a new dimension to Bible reading. Its maps pinpoint the geography of Old and New Testament history; its hundreds of photographs lend a sense of life to the setting; its synthesis and summary of archaeology and Bible history put a firm floor of factual meaning under the text of the Bible itself.

PICASSO, by Frank Elgar and Robert Mailllard (315 pp.; Praeger; $5), is as ingenious as it is instructive. It follows the great Spaniard’s endlessly experimental career from boyish leanings on older masters to the unpredictable individualist of old age who still defies simple analysis. The book does this in parallel critical and biographical commentaries that are expertly illustrated by the pictures appropriate to each page. A valuable attempt and this year’s real bargain among art books.

FROM INCAS TO INDIOS, by Werner Bischof, Robert Frank and Pierre Verger (77 pp.; Universe; $ 10), and THE ANDES, by Claude Arthaud and François Hébert-Stevens (185 pp.; Vanguard; $12.50), contain some of the year’s best photographs. Peru and the Andes generally run to pure drama, in nature as in man. A child, an old woman, a street scene become as majestic in the work of these cameramen as the towering mountains.

LIVING DESERT and AFRICAN LION (73 pp. and 75 pp.; Simon & Schuster; each $10), are taken from the vivid True-Life films made by Walt Disney. These are some of the most exciting animal pictures ever made—the snake caught as he stalks his prey, the lynx brought to bay atop a towering cactus, the lion arrogantly sizing up his observer. For the text of Desert the line-up of writers includes such first-rate names as Marcel Aymé, Albert Camus, François Mauriac, André Maurois.

LORENZO GHIBERTI, by Richard Krautheimer (457 pp.; Princeton; $30), is probably the most thorough study yet made of Ghiberti, the great Florentine master in bronze. Like many an artist of his time (15th century), he was a canny businessman, a humanist of many interests. Recently, his claim to genius was further burnished when the bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence were cleaned to let his massive skills shine forth. The variety and richness are dazzling: floral decorations of great delicacy, Biblical figures running a noble gamut of facial expressions, the metal exquisitely worked with a poet’s imagination.