Books

Magnum Contact Sheets go under the microscope

A heavyweight volume exploring Magnum Photos goes in between the contact sheets to celebrate a dying technique

Booksarchive

Maiolica explained through the world’s greatest collection of Renaissance decorative art

This book, linked to a current exhibition, explores the V&A’s unrivalled holdings

Booksreview

From the archive | Book review: How Caspar David Friedrich's star rose in the age of post-modernism

A magnificent visual record of the work of the German artist, who was virtually unknown before the 1960s, is matched by its scholarly text

Books: Francis Bacon, metaphysician

A new book considers the theological dimensions of the artist’s paintings

Forgeriesarchive

Books: The fake’s progress from a sign of genius to a nefarious act... and back again

The history and scholarship of art forgery, and a faker’s delighted account of a life of deception

Booksarchive

Book Review: Ford Madox Brown’s moment

This catalogue is the first comprehensive examination of the pre-Raphaelite artist’s career for half a century

Phaidonarchive

New owner plans digital future for Phaidon

Leon Black says art publisher to launch digital products

Booksarchive

Books: Raphael—all things to all ages

Three new monographs show the artist is still the equal of Leonardo and Michelangelo, if not so popular

Booksarchive

Books in brief: Paul Nash in Pictures

This book is a welcome reinterpretation of Nash for contemporary audiences

A tale of two ladies

Investigators sit neatly on the fence

Ottoman perspectives

This original and brilliant book describes how Western archaeology and archaeologists appeared to Turkish eyes.

Books: The ecumenicity of iconophobia

Christian, Jewish and Muslim anxieties about images

Booksarchive

Book Review: A decade of change between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic movement

An excellently wrought assessment of the cast of characters that defined the mid-19th century

Booksnews

From the archive | Caspar David Friedrich brought into focus in the first reliable catalogue raisonée of his drawings

The catalogue promises to be definitive and demonstrates why Friedrich was one of the most significant draughtsmen of his era

Books: The National Gallery’s latest Technical Bulletin makes some great discoveries

The volume is a compendium of papers presented at the Gallery in September 2009

Booksarchive

Impressive publication on the anonymous 'RA' collection of Chinese porcelain

Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos' three-volume catalogue is painstakingly researched and beautifully presented

Booksarchive

Illuminating scholarship

Illuminating scholarship

The mysteries of Leonardo: A review of the National Gallery's new exhibition on the master

An exhibition catalogue that is erudite, sound and elegant—but for scholars, not the general reader

Booksarchive

A first-rate history of photography, the V&A museum and its pioneering collecting

Collecting oneself—and a few others besides in the Victoria & Albert Museum Photographic Department

Booksarchive

Books: Art not made by artists and trends in art production

When artists subcontract technicians to make the works they design, who’s the artist?

Books: The end of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The complete correspondence of the pre-Raphaelite painter and poet has reached the last of its nine volumes

Art theftarchive

Sandy Nairne and his life as an undercover negotiator: The ethics of retrieving Tate's Turners

The National Portrait Gallery director had a sensitive, secret role in recovering the stolen paintings