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The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry. Preface by Mil lard Meiss. 139 pages. Brazil ler. $35. Lovingly reproduced facsimile of the world's most famous medieval Book of Hours. The illustrations of the Psalms, the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary, as well as the seasonal work and play inside and outside the French chateaux of the Duke of Berry, are mainly by that trio of 15th century Netherlandish geniuses Jean, Pol and Herman de Limbourg. In their colors and contours, the Limbourg miniatures combine the jeweled precision of a goldsmith's work with a sense of men and landscape rarely matched in art.
Rembrandt: His Life, His Work, His Time by Bob Haak. 348 pages. Abrams. $35. For anyone who can stand another good book about the world's most overexploited painter, this tercentenary volume is massive (612 illustrations), meticulous and readable.
Dado & Surrealist Art by Williams S. Rubin. 525 pages. Abrams. $35. Marcel Du-champ logically extended Dada's absurdist principles when he stopped painting and devoted his life to chess. Surrealism, with its dreamlike images rising obliquely from the ruminations of psychoanalysis, also self-destructed in an orgy of cliches. As this lucidly written, generously illustrated book makes clear, though, the influence of both movements on Pop art, black humor and the commercial graphics of today is still strong. Comprehensive without being condescending, it is one of the best popular surveys on the subject.
The Eighteenth Century: Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. Edited by Alfred Cobban. 360 pages. McGraw-Hill. $30. An outstanding specimen of the coffee-table book: sumptuous illustrations informatively captioned for the browser, and authoritative essays on government, art, technology, etc., for the peruser. A book that can be either pleasurably read or just left around to give off emanations of cultivation and wellbeing.
The Gothic Cathedral by Wim Swoon. 328 pages. Doubleday. $30. If architecture is a language, no monuments anywhere evolved a more elaborate grammar or richer vocabulary than the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The book provides a fine armchair pilgrimage, with photographs that convey both the massive drama of the great facades and the glory of the glass. Well calculated to make any cocktail table thoroughly ashamed of its tubular steel legs.
Europe of the Invasions by Jean Hubert Jean Porcher, W. F. Volbach. Vol. XII in The Arts of Mankind series, edited by André Malraux and Andre Parrot. 387 pages. Braziller. $30. One of the year's finest examples of the bookmaking art surveys the artistic output of the thorniest epoch in Western history: from the 3rd century, when barbarian invasions signaled the end of classical antiquity, to the 9th century when the new cultural unity of Christian Europe emerged. Superb color and black-and-white illustrations present everything from Ostrogothic jewelry to illuminated Irish manuscripts, as well as some magnificent frescoes recently discovered in Castelseprio, north of Milan. The learned authors make their way through this dark and fragmented period with intimidating and often opinionated aplomb. Fortunately, Editors André Malraux and André Parrot have relieved the strain with a long, rich supplement of maps, architectural plans, chronological chart, and glossary of persons and places.