A selection of recent art books

With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing they want to do is to provide a simple guide to the material for visitors to their show.

A case in point is The Early Dürer by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Thames & Hudson, £40), which is brim-full of cutting-edge and often revisionist scholarship, but is written by specialists for specialists. Moreover, given that it weighs in at over 600 pages, even Arnold Schwarzenegger would probably prefer to read it in the comfort of his own home, rather than lug it round a gallery. As it happens, an altogether better bet for the general reader is Dürer by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Phaidon, £17.95), in which an established authority provides an admirably lucid overview of the life and work of one of the greatest and most various of all renaissance artists. We may even forgive him for his coyness in translating the phrase ‘der erst puseran’ (the first bugger) inscribed on Dürer’s drawing of the ‘Death of Orpheus’ as ‘the first lover of boys’.

The subject of Gabriel Metsu, Life and Work: A Catalogue Raisonné by Adriaan E. Waiboer (Yale, £50) is not exactly a household name, and yet the finest of his works — such as ‘Man Writing a Letter’ and ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ — come within touching distance of the unsurpassable miracles of Vermeer. Like that pair of panels, the author of this once-in-a-generation study is at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, so has the good fortune to see them whenever he wishes.