David Ekserdjian

These days, it is easy to take it for granted that Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the most popular of the old masters, yet it was not ever thus. In my Baedeker’s Central Italy (published exactly 100 years ago), he is acknowledged as having been ‘the chief of the Naturalist School’, but it is pointed out that from the outset ‘it was objected that his drawing was bad, that he failed in the essential of grouping the figures in his larger compositions.’ The first major exhibition of his works — in what has only very recently been established as the city of his birth, Milan — did not take place until 1951.

The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is a spectacular case in point, which not only contains numerous gorgeous photographs of the paintings and carvings within them, but also some remarkable six-page fold-outs. Hawass is above all concerned with the subject-matter and meaning of these decorations, which were based upon such texts as the Book of the Dead, and proves to be an exemplary guide to their intricate iconography.

In the context of the visual arts, the notion of misunderstood genius is a comparatively recent one, and seems to be a by-product of Romanticism. In spite of such exceptions as Vermeer, whose current reputation stands so much higher than it did in his own day, in the main the Old Master canon remains startlingly unchanging. This state of affairs begins to change in the 19th century, and one unhappy consequence of what might be termed the Van Gogh syndrome is that we are now inclined to view artists who were outrageously successful in their own day with downright suspicion. Sir Thomas Lawrence is surely as good a case in point as one could hope to find of this topsy-turvy prejudice.

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.

This year’s crop of art books for Christmas is the usual mixed bunch, and if they have anything in common, it is their general lack of festive associations. The one exception is M. A. Michael’s Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Scala, £25), a beautifully illustrated picture book with an exemplary and truly instructive text, which includes the Magi not having a notably cold coming of it among its panoply of more and less familiar religious scenes. Naturally, the lion’s share of the images is of mediaeval glass, and they are accompanied by handy diagrams detailing exactly which pieces are replaced or repainted, but more recent additions, such as Sir Ninian Comper’s commemoration of King George VI and of the Queen’s coronation, also have their place.

The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which John Richardson’s ongoing Picasso is perhaps the most illustrious. In the specific case of Leonardo da Vinci, there is the additional problem of the seeming universality of his range of interests, above all in the direction of the sciences. Charles Nicholl’s approach is explicitly to start from Leonardo’s writings, not just about optics, anatomy, and so on, but also about such less elevated concerns as the day’s shopping list.

At the moment, a whole room of the Sainsbury wing in the Nation- al Gallery is devoted to Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-95), but even the author of this monumental, learned, and absorbing monograph would not claim that he is a household name. Perhaps he is too much of a one-off to merit that double-edged accolade, for all that his ‘Annunciation’ must be one of the most memorable pictures in Trafalgar Square. Long before Caravaggio was kicking up fusses over how his artichokes were prepared or the outcome of a game of tennis, the bad boy artist was a recognised type.

I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed - as I thought - to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty- gritty of how many lectures I would be giving, what titles I had in mind, and so on. I must have been all of 25, and had never given a proper lecture - by which I mean one without a written text - in my life. In retrospect, it strikes me that John must have been mad, or at least that if his trust did not lead to total disaster, then that only proves that he is one of those truly rare people whose guardian angel puts in a lot of overtime.

I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note. One of the minor pleasures of this collection is that literary and artistic celebrities have the same unflinching treatment meted out to them as drifters, and unless one happens to recognise the likes of William Burroughs, it is hard to tell which is which. After Avedon, the images in Richard Calvocoressi's Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (Thames & Hudson, £27.