During my recent trip to New York I decided I would visit all the major bookstores and buy myself lots of books about Renaissance drawing. Surely, I thought, sophisticated New York bookstores would have such books in abundance. Here are the results of my arduous researches:

1) There are VERY few books about Renaissance drawing.

2) This book is by far the best of the lot.

Probably Carracci is nobody's favorite artist, and I'm sure I would never have bought this book if I hadn't had the chance to leaf through it first. Photos of preparatory sketches by a not-so-famous painter for $90? Yeah right.

But this book is great. Carracci's paintings may be stiff, but the drawings are definitely not. He was a master of the kind of drawing that just doesn't exist anymore -- elegant, accurate, offhand but truly observed. I don't suppose he was a better draftsman than Titian, say, or Raphael, but this book shows him to be among the real masters.

And the book is a model for what art books should be. It is big but not painful, with pages that are almost square so that the drawings can be shown to their advantage and not run into the gutter. Each drawing is shown compete, but it is the details that make the book. Many are reproduced full-page and in true color, so that the real feel of the paper and touch of the line come across.

Though all the works in this book are by Carracci, it still comes across as a kind of survey course in drawing because this one artist drew in so many ways. Every kind of drawing is here, from the quickest preparatory scribbles to Holbein-like portrait drawings, clearly intended as finished works. The text is of the "This drawing was formerly attributed to Mr. X but now is attributed to Mr. Y" variety, but the text is not why you buy a book like this.

In the end I came home from New York without any books, ordered this one from Amazon, and felt that I had accomplished my mission.