Christmas art books

The only halfway festive offering in this year’s crop of art books is Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino’s Fra Angelico. Even in these secularised times, Angelico is still a favourite in the Christmas card stakes. First and foremost, however, this is a major scholarly reassessment of the artist’s career, but it also doubles as the catalogue of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which closes at the end of January. For all that it is lavishly illustrated and gorgeously produced, it makes few concessions to non-specialists, but that does not mean it is not worth persevering with. A generation ago, Angelico’s oeuvre had been pared down by an access (and possibly excess) of art historical caution: here, in contrast, the old guard may feel that anything goes, but nobody could regret the parade of fascinating newly rediscovered works on offer.

The blond tonalities and spatial harmony of Angelico must have appealed to Piero della Francesca, even if he can at times seem more indebted to the monumental calm of Masaccio, but he is more obviously analytical in his approach to picture-making than either of them. In Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (Yale, £35), J. V. Field starts from the simple premise that it makes sense to study Piero’s art in the light of his mathematical work (he was the author of treatises on perspective, the regular bodies, and other topics). For those of us whose maths O-level is lost in the mists of time, some of the ensuing detail may be uphill work, but that is our fault and not Field’s. Tantalisingly, when Field’s calculations clash with art historical orthodoxy, as over the Williamstown Madonna, which he rejects, I am afraid I was unconverted. He very becomingly admits he has not seen the original, but having caught up with it a year ago in an exhibition in Milan, I am more than ever persuaded that it must be by Piero.

Paintings have long been the dominant art form in Europe, but Marina Belozerskaya’s Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Thames and Hudson, £60) represents a heroic fightback on behalf of the glories of bejewelled metalwork and enamels, armour, tapestries, and the like, which were tremendously prized in their day, and richly deserve a second chance.