Word: phaidon
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...BOOK THROUGH FIVE THOUSAND YEARS Edited by H.D.L. Vervliet. 496 pages. Phaidon. $60. This scholarly volume contains a sentence that should be carved inside the skull of anyone who approaches a gift-book counter in the next few weeks: "A good book badly printed is infinitely more valuable than a bad book beautifully printed." Fortunately the maxim is not mocked here. The text, by several authorities, is for the general reader who wants to learn. Title notwithstanding, less space is devoted to the bound book than to its precursor the manuscript, whose history is far longer and richer. From Mesopotamia...
...some of their treasures on display at the National Gallery in honor of the program. It was a dazzling show, the quality of which can be measured by the brooding Giovanni Bellini from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City (see color). In further commemoration, the Phaidon Press has published a handsome book on the Kress Collection with text by Professor Charles Seymour Jr. of Yale (Art Treasures for America; $12.50). It is the curtain raiser for the complete seven-volume catalogue still to come...
Other standouts range from ARP (Museum of Modern Art; $4.50) to VERMEER (Phaidon; $10). Oriental art gets a lion's share of publishers' attention, with 2000 YEARS OF JAPANESE ART (Abrams; $25) and CHINESE PAINTING (Universe; $10) among the handsomest efforts. Pelican Books offers a monumental study, ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY: 1600-1750, for $12.50. Collins has a NEW TESTAMENT (de luxe, $50) exquisitely illustrated with tipped-in reproductions from medieval manuscripts, and Praeger a compendium of ARTISTS' TECHNIQUES ($12.50). New York Graphic provides a large Henry Moore sketchbook of HEADS, FIGURES AND IDEAS...
...Ferrara. One of the most impressive feats of art sleuthing by X ray is reported by John Walker, director of Washington's , National Gallery, in his book, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara (Phaidon; $6.50). Sleuth Walker tackled one of the world's great masterpieces, Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods (see color page), now at the National Gallery, managed to prove through X rays what no scholar could hope to do with the naked...
...comeuppance in middle age when his Communist leanings proved to have been a flirtation with the devil. Thereafter, he turned from adventuring and novel writing to art criticism, became the most eloquent, arrogant, febrile, haunting writer in the silent world of art. His new Saturn: An Essay on Goya (Phaidon; $10) illuminates a dark genius with lightning flashes of insight...