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"Leonardo was the greatest artist in the world." So begins Leonardo da Vinci, by A. & M. Provensen (Viking; $14.95). "He was also an astronomer, an architect, and an engineer who made hundreds of inventions." Granted, but how can a child be shown the breadth and scope of a genius five centuries removed? The Provensens have performed the impossible, and they have done it in twelve pages. Their solution is worthy of Leonardo himself: a popup book designed to show a movable church, a flying machine, a winged man, engineering and anatomical studies, a three-dimensional model of the heavens and a mural that actually fades before the eyes. From the base of these structures, the reader learns about the look and feel of the Renaissance and about the restless intelligence of an artist who even noted, in his famous mirror writing, the audacious discovery EVOM TON SEOD NUS EHT. A warning: pop-ups are for the very young. This year juvenile readers with a deeper interest in art should turn to a far more comprehensive volume.
In Great Painters (Putnam; $15.95), Italian Artist Piero Ventura ranges through history from the pottery of ancient Greece to the murals of Picasso. Along the way he stops to consider almost every major artist; he shows how Dürer worked in woodcuts, the techniques of Holbein (seen painting the clothes of a straw model because the King is too busy to pose), the hidden Christian imagery of Goya, the palette of the impressionists, the contained violence of the fauves and cubists. Ventura augments photographs of the paintings with his own sketches of the artists at work, explains such terms as fresco and perspective and concludes with a series of brief biographies. There are yearlong art-appreciation classes that do not contain as much information and delight.
No Old Testament story seems retold as often as the episode of Jonah swallowed whole (there are strong suggestions of it in works as disparate as Pinocchio and Jaws). But somehow Warwick Hutton has found a way of giving the tale a fresh approach in Jonah and the Great Fish (Atheneum; $12.95). The text is simplified but not simpleminded, and if the sins have been scaled down, the sinner has not. As Jonah and his shipmates are buffeted by the tempest, the wind seems to blow from the page, and the great fish that consumes him soon turns from a monster into a seaborne aquarium. One half expects to see a sign on its vaulted rib cage warning OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 1,000 FISH AND 1 PROPHET IS UNLAWFUL AND DANGEROUS. Despite his whimsy, Illustrator-Narrator Hutton violates neither religious nor literary scruples. Happy endings, after all, are not exclusive to fairy tales; even the Bible has them, now and again.