Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featuring the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly, The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself. This excellent new Taschen edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist's ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio's career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases. Colour. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 512 pages.

Observer Best Art Book 2021, it is an illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague-ridden Apocalypse, the first works mass produced by any artist, to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, Dürer's art was a revelation. It not only showed us who we are, but also foresaw our future, a vision that remains startingly powerful and seductive today. Philip Hoare encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare and traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan and the artist pursued. 'In another scene, from Eden, other animals slipped out of the forest, the humans as naked and content as them, until then. The scene receded, three-dimensionally, in layers. In the distance, a goat teetered on a cliff. Maybe this is where the world began... Then in another picture I saw an angel... Another sleepy dog dozed at the hem of their robes, a comet burst over the distant sea.' We can appreciate the many famous artworks through the eyes of a dreamer and wonderfully descriptive writer. 'Dürer gave you more ink per square inch. Peter Ursem, a Dutch artist, tells me that woodcuts differed from wood engravings... They're fossils, or contour maps of the seabed. In their gullies and crevices, agony collects. Dürer turned these blocks in his inky fingers, before the next run. Adam and Eve are chased from Eden; an archangel wields a sword; Christ dies, over and over again.' In 1515 Dürer created his Man of Sorrows, the first metal etching known to western history. If his woodcuts are astounding, his engravings are almost uncanny. Very well illustrated and with a series of colour plates at the end of this fine 4th Estate publication with its witty accounts and delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world. 304pp.

Original illustrations from Audubon's masterwork Birds of America. Favourites include the Blue Jay, Golden Eagle, colourful flycatchers, warblers, waterbirds, the Barred Owl, Passenger Pigeon, Belted Kingfisher, Red-shouldered Hawk, Carolina Wren, Baltimore Oriole, American Flamingo, Yellow-billed Magpie, all with vibrant plumage and ideal subjects for colouring in. John James Audubon (1785-1851) was born in Haiti and raised in France, emigrating to North America when he was 18 to avoid conscription into the Napoleonic Wars. His true passion was ornithology and he spent many years identifying and recording bird species. Peter Gray, a long established illustrator of books, provides the outline on each right hand page, some portrait some landscape orientation, and we can follow the colours of Audubon's originals in situ on branches and sometimes with berries and flowers on the opposite page. 96 pages, 22.5 x 28cm, softback.

Large, glamorous art publication by Philip Wilson Publishers of Bloomsbury, the topic is William Powell Frith (1819-1909), one of the most successful painters of the Victorian age, celebrated for his highly original depictions of modern life subjects in the 1850s and 1860s. He was virtually a household name due to the widespread dissemination of reproductive engravings which made his images familiar throughout the world. His three great panoramas of the contemporary world, Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), The Derby Day and The Railway Station depicted Victorians at leisure and are scrutinised in depth. Similarly covered is Frith's later and more exclusive panorama reconstructing the Private View of 1881 at the Royal Academy, where Oscar Wilde has centre stage. Essays explore important and hitherto neglected areas of his personal life and professional activity, of significant biographical interest are studies of his connections with Yorkshire, the county of his birth and also his first wife Isabelle's, and his friendships with the contemporary writers notably the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and his historical genre pictures focussing on the early success of 'An English Merry-Making, A Hundred Years Ago.' An intriguing angle is the recreation of certain of his famous compositions as Tableaux on the London Stage, yet another fresh topic in this presentation of 'The People's Painter'. So lifelike are the eyes and skin in page after page of gorgeous colour images on these heavy glossy white pages - Poor Maria, The Beautiful Grisette, Vanessa who was a longtime lover and correspondent of Jonathan Swift. It was well known that Frith was a friend as well as a devotee of Charles Dickens and his paintings are brimming with life and incident such as Alexander Pope's vain declaration of love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The courtyard of Millbank Prison provides a unique view of life in disgrace wearing shaming uniform dotted with arrow motifs. Another favourite of ours is Frith being buttonholed by a flower seller as they stand against a backdrop of the Bay of Naples. 192 glamorous pages, 22.9 x 27.6cm.
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