Whatever were the failings of the Papacy, the Popes have traditionally supported the arts and the Vatican is, in itself, a museum of Italian painting going back to the Middle Ages. Many mural cycles have been effaced or painted over due to changes of taste, and what has survived is not always the best - for instance, there is far too much of the mediocre Pinto ricchio. But Raphael's great Stanze survive intact (in spite of restorers) and most of the great Renaissance figures have a place too, from Botticelli to Caravaggio. Paintings in the Vatican, by Carlo Pietrangeli (Little, Brown, £85 in UK) reproduces some 500 paintings, mostly murals but with a good selection of easel works, ranging from the medieval Roman School through Lorenzetti and Simone Martini (both Siennese) down to the degenerate age of Mengs and Batoni. Alas, the reproductions of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling show how hideous and one-dimensional the recent restoration has left it. The book is too massive and inclusive for ingestion at a single sitting; it is best taken in sections, or consulted as a kind of outsize reference guide.
The `Divine' Guido, by Richard E. Spear (Yale, £40 in UK): Italian Baroque art is now ultra-fashionable and so it was only a matter of time before Guido Reni was given his turn. He was one of the "classical" school, in opposition to Caravaggio, yet was not above borrowing from him when it suited - Reni was an astute careerist, and highly money-conscious. He was, in fact, a resolute eclectic though it is now rather fashionable to pretend otherwise; his core of genuine masterworks has to be set against a good many insipid or mannered pictures, though he continued to be influential in the 18th century and even beyond. Reni, in fact, is one of the direct ancestors of 19th-century academicism, a very mixed distinction. This study makes a good case for him and also reproduces numerous unfamiliar works.
The Sculpture of Andrea del Verrocchio, by Andrew Butterfield (Yale, £45 in UK): as a painter Verrocchio, though he was the master of Leonardo, was secondrate, but he was probably the leading Florentine sculptor at a time when Florence led the world in sculpture, and possibly the finest anywhere since Donatello. He was particularly fine as a portraitist, but the work he is best known for is the equestrian Colleoni statue in Venice, a magnificent life-size bronze in which he was aided by the goldsmith Alessandro Leopardi. (He did not live to see it cast, incidentally.) A handsome and useful book to own. Greatest Works of Art of West- ern Civilisation, by Thomas Hoving (Artisan, £35 in UK): Hoving, formerly director of the New York Met, chooses over 100 works of art in a kind of one-man pantheon. Some of them are almost automatic choices, such as the Van Eycks' Mystic Lamb Altarpiece in Ghent, or Piero della Francesca frescoes, but others are unexpected, even outre - medieval manuscripts, tapestries, musical instruments, or the extra ordinary feathered headdress of Montezuma, last king of the Aztecs. He argues the case for his preferences forcibly, and the reproductions are good.
Seurat and the Avant-garde, by Paul Smith (Yale, £45 in UK): for decades Seurat was considered a great but over-cerebral painter, obsessed by theory, by mathematical conceptions of form, and by intellectual calculation at the expense of spontaneity. It is a view of him which had become patently inadequate, in view of the mystery and enigmatic poetry inherent in his extraordinary pictures. Paul Smith attempts to set him among the aesthetics of Symbolism and of Wagnerian synaesthesia, sometimes perhaps overstating his case but surely on the right track. He is also sceptical about Seurat's alleged political anarchism, which he thinks was for the most part mere opportunism. Good reproductions.
Stanley Spencer: An English Vi- sionary, by Fiona MacCarthy (Yale, £25 in UK): The Spencer revival marches on, and since he is a wildly uneven painter who aimed consciously to reach the Common Man, it now looks in danger of becoming as uncritical in turn as Spencer's apologists (for instance, Eric Newton) were in his lifetime. This is a biography as well as a study, setting out the now-familiar story of Spencer's marriage to Hilda Carline, his entrapment by the ruthless Patricia Preece, and his desperate efforts to find money for both. It is a difficult task, almost an impossibility, to sort out the genuine masterpieces in his large output from all the populist vulgarity and the pseudo-visionary hokum. I have a suspicion myself that the rather despised landscapes and "realist" pieces, which apparently he turned out as potboilers, may last better than most of his efforts to become a religious prophet. Very good value, at the price.
Thomas Moran, by Nancy K. Anderson, with contributions by Thomas Bruhn, Joni Kinsey and Anne Morand (Yale, £40 in UK): This is a real surprise, though in view of Robert Hughes's recent blockbuster, a renewed interest in American art of the 19th century seemed to be on the cards. Moran, the son of poor immigrants fleeing from the Industrial Revolution in Britain, became one of the first painters to exploit the overpowering scenery of the American Far West, combining factual accuracy with the cult of the Sublime. We hardly know his work on this side of the Atlantic, but it might not be too great a put-down to call him the Cecil B. de Mille of painting. Moran lived to be a Grand Old Man and died in 1926, having gone safely through the great Californian earthquake of the previous year.
German Expressionism: Art and Society 1909-1925, by Stephanie Barron and Wolf Dieter Dube (Thames & Hudson, £55 in UK): Dube has already written about the German Expressionists and is fully at home in the milieu. The two principal schools of painting, the Brucke in Dresden and the Blaue Reiter in Munich, are dealt with ably, and of course the great "independents" such as Beckmann are given their due. The first World War dealt the movement its death blow, not only killing off some of the finest talents but crushing the hopes and ideals of others, whose work never recovered its old verve or inner conviction. Very sensibly, the book continues into the Twenties and the New Objectivity, dominated by Otto Dix and Beckmann (who denied belonging to it, however). Paintings and graphic work apart, Expressionist sculpture, cinema and even architecture are also considered, making the entire book a valuable one for students in particular. Some of the paintings reproduced, however, are in danger of becoming over-familiar.
The Architecture of Ricardo Legorreta, by John V. Mutlow (Thames & Hudson, £40 in UK): I am not familiar with the work of this Mexican artist, but apparently his standing is high not only in his homeland, but the United States. Texas and California have been prodigal with commissions, and if one can judge by the photographs (admittedly, difficult in the case of buildings) his talents and invention are impressive. In particular, he seems to have achieved a successful synthesis of the "native" adobe style of architecture with a confident Modernist idiom.
Patrick Procktor, by John McEwen (Scolar Press, £25 in UK): Procktor, recently turned 60, is very much a Swingin' Sixties painter, of the generation of Hockney, Blake, Caulfield, etc. He is no heavyweight nor would he claim to be, but he has found his true medium in watercolour and has created many works in it which are charming and insouciant and witty, in the best Sixties vein. Unlike most of his contemporaries, too, he appears to have got better with age. Since Procktor was born in Dublin (though not of Irish blood) I suggest that one of our galleries, public or private, might think of inviting him to show here. Any bites?
(This is the first part of a two-part review) Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times