Robin Blake's Anthony Van Dyck could also have been featured in our arts section but is a powerful biographical sketch which should not be missed by any interested in biographical history. Van Dyck was a portrait painter who saw his own works passed over in favor of his contemporaries, although they were compared to Titian and Rubens. Blake examines Van Dyck's life and art with an eye to revealing the underlying influences on his works; in the process imparting a fine bit of history. Recommended for any student of portraiture.

Diane C. Donovan Reviewer

This is by far the best bio on van Dyck in print today. I purchased it a year ago, from Amazon UK, and am very glad to see it available in the States. If you have the catalog from either the recent show in London or the Washington DC show from '90, use the images from that to go with Robin's text and you're in for a real treat. Bravo Robin!

Wonderful slick pages. Clear, realistic colors and appropriate collection in black and white. I recommend this book as an intro to Caravaggio's paintings, but in substance I recommend as comparative reading to Peter Robb's The Man Who Became Carravaggio. OUTSTANDING comparisons of this master's life and works can be considered. Together, this was my favorite read of the year.

Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the Baroque period's black sheep. The tenebrism that so succsessfully glamorises his canvases is perhaps the metaphoric shadow stirred by his own haunting emotional tumult. The artist's private pain. The homoerotic quality of his early paintings is not mentioned today in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But, like Ganymede and Narcissus, his adolescents charm a print that evokes an age long gone. While at Rome he continued his superb though idiocyncratic profession. The genius of his work at odds with the ignominy in his life. To this book Alfred Moir lends an scholarly and savvy article. Detailing Caravaggio's brilliant if bizarre progress. Mr Moir evokes the vivid milieu of this, Baroque's rascal artist, immensily gifted, though always his own worst enemy. Or, was he? Obscure for some time, now Caravaggio shines. And as we also celebrate the James Deans and Orson Welles, buddies from the same pantheom. Pictorially, the text is full of riches, my favorite the 'St Matthew" series. My other favorite is when..."he threw a plate of artichokes onto the face of a waiter..." I was moved, I'm happy to own this book.

His "Incredulity of St Thomas," with the focus on Thomas's prodding and Christ's reassuring hands, and his "Madonna of Loreto," with the Virgin and Child approachably compassionate to the muddy-footed pilgrims in rumpled clothing, have been much copied. His "Entombment" has been unanimously acclaimed: with only Christ's and Mary Cleophas's faces fully illuminated; with Nicodemus supporting the dead legs while hunching over to look straight into viewer eyes; and with the Virgin blessing all. But it was his "Lute Player" that CARAVAGGIO called his most beautiful picture: with the tenor score to 16th-century madrigalist Jacques Arcadelt's "Voi sapete ch'io v'amo [You know that I love you]" open for the tenor lute; with the unique horizontal balancing of boy and freshly blooming bouquet of vividly colored flowers; and with the window light source reflected on the carafe. The colorplates in Art History Professor Alfred Moir's book are of such photographic quality that readers clearly see the 17th-century artist's studio window light source reflected in the carafe within his "Boy Bitten by a Lizard." The compellingly thorough text and the author's ANTHONY VAN DYCK prepare readers to go on to the other giants of his time, with Jose Alvarez Lopera's EL GRECO, Kristin Lohse Belkin's RUBENS, Jonathan Brown's VELAZQUEZ, Ludwig Munz's REMBRANDT, and Arthur K. Wheelock's JAN VERMEER.