Treasures of the English Church: A Thousand Years of Sacred Gold and Silver
Edited by Timothy Schroder. 144 pp. With 150 illustrations in colour. Pb. £20.00. Paul Holberton Publishing.

"The thousand years of craftsmanship represented here testifies to the passion so many have felt to put the very best they could do at the service of God." So writes theArchbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in a wise and thoughtful foreword.

Timothy Schroder's introduction is similarly attractive in its scholarly perspective. He points, for example, to the long continuity of faith represented by liturgical vessels; to their physical continuity in so far as much that was new was made from old melted plate; and to the tradition of giving "right down to our own day" that makes such objects "powerful symbols of continuing community."

Such illuminating comments are echoed in different ways by Mr Schroder's galaxy of expert contributors. The emphasis is on the social background including changes in forms of worship stimulated by theological evolution. In other words, you won't be buried under hallmarks, except when important as in one essay devoted to the nationwide "campaign" to develop a standard form of communion cup in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; and in another concerned with the many examples of overseas plate donated down the centuries to England's churches and cathedrals.

In the past, as another contributor explains, scholars put aside items with a domestic origin from their study of church plate; they had failed to appreciate their contemporary importance as objects "freighted with family associations and memories" eminently suitable for use in "an ancient building."

The nigh incredible destruction during the Tudor Reformation of England's medieval heritage of church treasures is deftly emphasized by one contributor with the bald question: how was it possible for such damage to be done by "some of the most brilliant and cultured people of the age?" The answer was money, or more precisely its shortage for Royal military purposes. A hint of what was lost is seen in a beautiful little silver gilt Pax dating from the early 16th century and only one of many superb colour illustrations that are a feature of this book.

Both the flagons and alms dishes that remain such a handsome feature of England's church plate were the result of Protestant practices and beliefs: the sharing of communion wine by the faithful, and the public duty to care for the poor. Similarly the making of sets, many of them magnificent by any standards, was judged proper for a parish church "envisaged as the court of heaven" and so deserving of quality equal to the plate used at local mayoral banquets.

The social, economic and political barriers placed upon public worship by Roman Catholics are well known, yet wealthy families in the 18th century were still able to commission fine silver by the best makers. Ironically this work presaged the renewed splendour of the plate designed and made for the Anglican "High Church" revival in the following century. The complexities of much of the craftsmanship that resulted gave way eventually to the elegant individualities of the Arts and Crafts movement that dominated, though not exclusively, the first half of the 20th century in England.

A revolution followed the Second World War. With astonishing foresight the Goldsmiths' Company, whose patron St Dunstan was himself skilled in metal, set out to encourage a new generation of designer craftsmen by adding significant examples of their work to its "growing [and now uniquely important] collection of contemporary silver." Its policy of commissioning new works, undoubtedly inspired many "outside patrons," and in respect of liturgical plate, this patronage continues, most successfully under the Company's direct guidance.

As if this was not enough, the Goldsmiths' Company also took the lead in setting up cathedral treasuries. Here neglected or little appreciated examples of plate were gathered together from parish churches "in the hope of renewing interest in plate in the clergy and of stimulating public appreciation of fine workmanship."

For a fine book so full of information and valuable commentary, it is odd to find it without an index, equally odd that none of the captions include dimensions, and strange to find no mention of the Goldsmiths' Company's charismatic post war Art Director Graham Hughes. But there is one quiet sensation: the candlesticks recently given to the ancient city church of St Mary-le-Bow, "highly original works of art" made of polished steel.

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings
By Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz. 160 pp. Illustrated in colour and black & white. Hb. £18.99. National Portrait Gallery, London.

In the middle years of the 18th century in England, Handel wrote his Music for the Royal Fireworks celebrating the peace of Aix-La-Chapelle, Hogarth published his series of satirical prints including Gin Lane and Beer Street and Thomas Chippendale his Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Directory. The British Museum was opened, and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce founded.

Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, a rich and cultivated widow, was an early member of the latter: not only was she an active patron of the arts but successful in the management of the collieries she had inherited from her husband. She was also a fashionable London hostess as were her friends Frances Boscawen and Elizabeth Vesey. Bored with "popular amusements and alchohol" they "invented a new kind of informal sociability" that encouraged women to enjoy intellectual pursuits - in congenial company delicately lubricated by the new custom of drinking tea.

Men were welcome: Dr Samuel Johnson was one whose Dictionary of the English Language was new in the booksellers and the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet another; his blue worsted stockings worn instead of the usual white silk gave rise to the sobriquet light-heartedly endorsed by the Blue Stocking hostesses and their guests.

It is odd to think that the Blue Stockings have been more or less forgotten - especially in our age of enthusiastic feminism but this has more to do with the passage of time than gender; few these days know of another informal group that gathered on moonlit nights in the English midlands to discuss scientific and other matters: Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood were among its members.

In an impressive, attractively written and finely illustrated book, Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz have done great service to these "brilliant women" by rescuing them from the back pages of history and lifting them to their rightful positions as persons of cultural significance and political influence. They who claim unorthodox sexual freedom always attract scandalous interest and some of the Blue Stockings were no exception. The most notorious examples were the historian Catharine Macaulay and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. By contrast Hannah More, an unmarried provincial schoolmistress successfully encouraged women to involve themselves with moral, religious and social philanthropy.

Beyond the pantheon of the original blue stockings and those that immediately followed them, the authors widen and extend their history to for example the late 18th century French political writer Madame de Stael, the 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and today's iconic feminist Germaine Greer. Unexpectedly however, the authors end their important chronicle by suggesting, rather sadly, that it was easier perhaps "to be a bluestocking in the eighteenth century than in our own age."

But the last word has to belong to the novelist and educational writer Maria Edgworth. In 1795 she wrote: "Considering that the pen was to women a new instrument, I think they have made at least as good a use of it as learned men did of the needle some centuries ago, when they set themselves to determine how many spirits could stand upon its point..."

Poussin. Paintings. A Catalogue Raisonne.
By Christopher Wright. 320 pp. Illustrated in colour throughout. Hb. £45.00. Chaucer Press.

Mr Christopher Wright is his own man. He says that [nowadays] the intellect has gone out fashion as one of the necessary accomplishments of looking at a picture. Furthermore one of the intentions of his book is to display "the genius of a man who hid his abilities much of the time by trying too hard." These are challenging - and attractive - comments.

But first, let us remind ourselves of his subject's's life and reputation. Nicolas Poussin was born in France in 1594 moving to Rome in 1624 then "one of the largest cities in the world [and] the main cultural centre for foreign artists... to learn their profession." In 1640 he returned to Paris under pressure from King Louis XIII but returned to Rome after two unhappy years. By his death in 1665 Poussin was revered as one of the greatest artists of the age, inspiring classically-trained artists until the rise of the romantic movement in the 19th century. Yet, as Christopher Wright states, he remains "the darling of intellectuals" to the present day "as a consequence inspiring much pedantry."

That this is an important art-historical work almost goes without saying, given the authority and reputation of its author and his comprehensive text: thoroughly cross-referenced, extensively annotated and exhaustively indexed. On the other hand, one warms to a scholar who remarks that "so much of the writing on Poussin consists of undeviating admiration, that is is easy to lose sight of the variability of his work." Here then is a very great artist, warts and all.

Despite Poussin's sometimes near overwhelming "intellectual and moral severity," such is Mr Wright's skill as a writer and intuitive understanding of the needs of many of his readers, there is much in his book to enthral as well as to enlighten the non-specialised but interested and sometimes puzzled enquirer. Of one of Poussin's "happy pictures" his Bacchanal before a term of Pan (in the National Gallery, London) he remarks that the subject verges "on the ludicrous to the modern taste" but points out that its colour scheme "is especially light and delicate."

On the other hand, writing of The Annunciation in London's National Gallery and another painting in the Louvre in Paris St Francesca Romana Announcing the end of the Plague in Rome, Christopher Wright's admiration is clear. Poussin's figures "are reduced almost to the status of thoughts... as if the artist wants the spectator to turn away and only to think and not to look any more."

Of the former painting Mr Wright explains the austerity and grimness of the composition as "fitting" for its likely purpose as an epitaph done for the tomb of the great Roman connoisseur (and Poussin's vital early patron) Cassiano dal Pozzo. The pictures were painted at about the same time in 1657 and are illustrated on facing pages so allowing the reader to appreciate the pertinence of Christopher Wright's comment that the latter picture is "both delicate and monumental" as well as "far more subtle and fluid" than the London painting.

Anyone intent on a serious understanding of Western art cannot ignore Nicolas Poussin, nor now overlook Christopher Wright's handsomely produced and profusely illustrated masterpiece.

A Century of Olympic Posters
By Margaret Timmers. 144 pp. With 150 illustrations in colour. Pb. £24.99. V&A Publishing.

The official poster for the 2008 Beijing Olympics features a Chinese seal in the form of a welcoming figure dancing atop the five interlinked rings universally recognized as the symbol of the games.

Like so much else about the modern Olympic games these rings were the idea of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, their founder, who conceived them as representing the five continents of the world, their colours - blue, yellow, black, green, red - being found on all national flags.

Formerly a Senior Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the gorgeous array of illustrations in Margaret Timmers's book confirms her contention that "for over a century, posters have been powerful agents in creating awareness, building expectation and providing a visual celebration of the Olympic games." It has another value, for it is as much concerned with the background history of the different games as with the many artists and designers involved.

The first games of modern times, were held in Athens in 1896 when the marathon "was introduced as a deliberate link" with antiquity. The 1908 Olympiad was originally intended for Rome "but domestic problems and the eruption of Vesuvius" led to London instead and, incidentally, to the now standard length of the Marathon: 26 miles 385 yards, being the distance from Windsor Castle to the White City stadium.

Ms Timmers shows an anonymous 1908 poster promoting rail travel to London via Ostend and Dover which in its way heralds the many more down the years that promoted travel and transport. One designed four decades later for British European Airways shows an athlete hurtling across the nose of an aircraft - marked out as a race track. Various representation of the male body dominated Olympic posters until more recent times when symbols, such as those used for Barcelona in 1992 or Sydney in 2000 began to attract designers and, not least, the various national committees. Nonetheless as early as 1912 a woman gymnast gracefully adorns a poster for the Stockholm games which were the first as it happens to give life to another of Baron de Coubertin's ideas, "that art competitions should be an integral part of each Olympiad."

Bearing in mind the essentially competitive nature of the Olympic Games - athlete with athlete, nation with nation, an Olympiad without politics is as unlikely it seems as rain without water. Margaret Timmers's account includes Nazi ambitions and Cold War boycotts. Controversy of another kind, in fact, "passionate debate" public and professional, followed the unveiling of the official emblem "simple and distinct, bold and buzzing with energy" for the 2012 games in London. A very successful launch indeed.

Greek Architecture and Its Sculptures.
By Ian Jenkins. 272 pp. With 250 illustrations in colour and black & white. Hb. £25.00. The British Museum Press.

With the best will in the world, whether as a bemused wanderer through the galleries in the British Museum, or jostled among crowds of visitors to the Athenian Acropolis, it is easy to marvel at Greek antiquities but hard to understand - what one is looking at.

Help is at last to hand - in the pages of this deceptively academic-looking book by Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum with responsibility for its ancient Greek collections from both sides of the Aegean sea. Of the unknown sculptors of two beautiful but broken figures rescued long ago from the Parthenon, Ian Jenkins remarks on their "Pygmalion-like power... to turn stone into life." Such an aside suggests, indeed proves, that the author has spent a long time looking at, and as long thinking about, the antiquities in his care.

"Perikles never accepted invitations to dinner" he writes, of the great soldier-citizen who feared compromising in public his studied reserve; and who with his "impresario" Pheidias, a giant among sculptors, was responsible for the rebuilding of the Acropolis, sanctuary and castle, following its destruction by Persian armies in the early 5th century BC.

Ian Jenkins makes it abundantly clear that when we view architectural sculptures that once were integral to temples and tombs, we have to consider, so far as we can, the ancient peoples for whom these places were sacred sites and places of doubtless often uproarious festival.

Nor should we forget those who built them: craftsmen of many disciplines including experienced stonemasons so attuned to ancient traditions of design that architects as such were unnecessary, and so skilled that hardly two blocks of stone in the Parthenon are alike. Each was cut on site with matching joints "finer than human hair."

Expensive marble was used because "of the sharp and durable edge it took in its carving." Moreover "there is good reason to believe" that the columns and walls of temples were washed with a kind of varnish "to protect the surface against the weather and to take off the glare that comes with freshly cut stone. Witness: "the patchwork of new marble" marking recent restorations on the Acropolis.

"Lycia in south-west Turkey is a beautiful land of dramatic mountains, pine forests and green valleys, fed by rivers flowing into a lapis blue sea." At Xanthos stood the great temple-like tomb of its 4th century BC ruler Erbinna. Destroyed in Byzantine times by "Christian communities quarrying their pagan legacy of fine buildings" it was discovered in ruins in the early 1840s.

Partially reconstructed in the British Museum its serene and elegant presence belies its turbulent history, as does its current name: "The Nereid Monument" so-called because of the sea nymphs standing between its columns. For Ian Jenkins, "the Lycian tombs represent a rich and fascinating fusion of styles in architecture and sculpture. Of them all, "this was probably the grandest ever built," he suggests.

Huge still in the British Museum's Great Court, a colossal lion weighing some 7 tons and carved from a single block of marble dominated, from the 4th century BC, the final high headland of a promontory stretching from the ancient city of Knidos into the eastern Aegean. It marked the spectacular culmination of the Knidian necropolis or cemetery.

Long-toppled from its pedestal, the lion was found lying on its face by Richard Pullan in 1858 and carefully removed by Lieutenant Robert Murdoch Smith of the Royal Engineers for transport to England by sea. Despite its weathering and the damage suffered from its original fall, Ian Jenkins asks us to notice the surface of its pelt and mane "multi-faceted and made mobile through a play of light over its sensitive modelling."

This is a genuinely enlightening volume that lacks only some kind of chronology, amidst so much else of value. Whatever the endless-seeming and self-indulgent controversies surrounding the display in modern day museums of ancient sculptures removed from their original situations, those who found them, saved them, study and interpret them in wider cultural contexts, all deserve recognition and honour.

Jake & Dinos Chapman
By David Barrett. 48 pp. With 32 illustrations in colour. Pb. £4.99. Royal Jelly Factory.

If ever there were two artists who should be described as "enfants terribles" the brothers Chapman are they. Famous or even notorious for their seemingly deliberately shocking works, they have carved a place of their own in the infinitely varied world of contemporary art.

Born in the 1960s, the brothers worked as studio assistants for Gilbert & George; entering the Royal College of Art in 1988, they began to discuss the idea of working together, exhibiting their first joint piece in 1992. This was a kind of manifesto (across a brown paint-smeared wall): "We have manufactured our products according to the market demands of a deconstructive imperitive [sic]... we phantasise emancipation... into... a scatological aesthetics for the tired of seeing."

All of that constitutes, when translated and, as David Barrett remarks "a declaration of intent that informs all of their later work."

A short factual introduction is followed by a closely edited and genuinely illuminating interview with the brothers. "Shock is a theatrical response. If people see something that doesn't sit easily with their moral position, they feign shock. Whereas laughter is a convulsive reaction... where the rational or linguistic response is woefully inadequate. And we try to make that happen in the work."

The carefully chosen illustrations have lengthy explanatory captions - short only on art-speak. This little book is the third in the series of 'New Art Up-Close' and is highly recommended.

The Making of Sculpture. The materials and techniques of European Sculpture
Edited by Marjorie Trusted. 192 pp. With 330 colour illustrations. Pb. £24.99. V&A Publications.

In these hard-bitten times everyone knows, or thinks they know, what an investment is. For sculptors however an investment is a heat-resistant mould made to contain molten metal for casting. This is one of many nuggets of information contained in the glossary of this wholly fascinating book: the result of fruitful collaboration between curators and conservators at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, custodian of the National Collection of sculpture, from the middle ages to the present day.

It was only in 2004 that the V&A opened a new sculpture gallery (Room 111) which, at a stroke, revolutionised the public's appreciation of the medium. Herein are displayed myriads of objects of many dates made in a wide variety of materials. Illustrated text panels, models and short films all serve to explain how and why the sculptures were made.

The success of that gallery, named after the sculptor Gilbert Baynes whose charitable foundation made it (and this book) possible, has encouraged its curators to greatly expand the information in such a way that it can be read and reflected upon at one's own pace.

"Understanding the physical properties of the works and the methods employed in their manufacture can only increase the pleasure taken in viewing them." So writes Paul Williamson, the V&A's Keeper of Sculpture, in advance of a series of twelve chapters each devoted to a thorough examination and explanation of the advantages and problems of using, for example, wax, bronze, marble, ivory, and wood. The scene is set in an introductory chapter devoted to "working practices" including sculptors' uses of drawings and models and their seemingly natural involvement with the decorative arts especially ceramics.

To suggest that these chapters are informative is an understatement. Here are some examples. Small carved gemstones have been desirable collectors' pieces since antiquity; they are hard to date if only because they have been made in the same way down the centuries. One of the greatest collectors of gems was the antiquary Richard Payne Knight; in 1812 he paid "an unscrupulous dealer" more than 500 pounds for a very beautiful piece, a fragment, convinced it was an ancient Greek gem. Eventually the renowned contemporary gem-engraver Benedetto Pistrucci recognized the piece as his own work: yet Payne Knight refused to believe this despite the artist pointing to a hidden mark in the carving.

English alabaster carvings were cheap and easy to produce and were exported all over Europe; many of the finest were painted and gilded as individual devotional figures or as altarpieces. The Reformation put paid to this and the workshops shipped their remaining stocks abroad - so saving from destruction examples of what in retrospect is now recognized as an important part of England's medieval artistic heritage.

The V&A's sculpture gallery overlooks one of the museum's glories its collection of reproductive plaster casts - their importance growing for historians as time inevitably besmirches the originals; an interest increasingly shared for different reasons by artists and students. In fact plaster, because of its lightness, was used by Bernini at St Peter's in Rome in association with marble and bronze to stunning effect; and more recently by Rachel Whiteread for her enigmatic inside-out cast of the BBC's Room 101 - fleeting on view at the V&A a few years ago.

Pop Art Portraits.
By Paul Moorhouse. 192 pp. With 125 illustrations principally in colour. Hb. £35.00. National Portrait Gallery, London.

For art journalists of a certain age, the Sixties in retrospect were exciting and full of sunshine, with galleries of controversial art, many young and enthusiastic critics, and lots of pretty girls in mini-skirts.

A glance at the chronologies in this utterly fascinating volume soon puts these rose-coloured memories of a decade and a half of post war life into proper perspective. The USA tested the first hydogen bomb; the USSR put the first man in space; the Berlin wall was built; and the Vietnam war begun. In the UK the government abolished wartime identity cards, food rationing was ended, the Beatles were honoured at Buckingham Palace, and the nation went decimal.

For us all, Pop Art, iconolastic, colourful, and idiosyncratically figurative represented our era until then overwhelmed more or less by the energetic and dashing mysteries of American Abstract Expressionism. Materially, times were good and getting better; the shops were full and enticing, wages were rising and there was money to be spent on bettering homes, domestic gadgets and cars. This was the beginning of the consumer age.

Somehow too, Pop Art in reflecting these economically successful times came to be identified as an art primarily about "things," a form of still life art in fact.

With the benefits both of wisdom and distance, Paul Moorhouse challenges this view, which he sees as unbalanced. "My central argument," he asserts, "is that people and objects are two inseperable halves of the brave new world addressed by Pop Art. If Pop can be said to have a subject, then it is mankind's changing condition in a consumer society."

His book is devoted to illustrating and discussing the point that "Pop... was pre-eminently a figure-based art." Furthermore, in respect of portraiture (Paul Moorhouse is a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London) he contends that not the least importance of Pop Art "is the way it developed the concept of portraiture way beyond the conventional representation of living people."

Musing on the illustrations and their accompanying texts, one soon realises that Mr Moorhouse is right. Here (for example) are works by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton and by the late Eduardo Paolozzi - whose idiosyncratic visual ideas derived from mass-media sources began it all; and from the USA, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.

Most certainly pop artists were in thrall to the glittering and brief life of Marilyn Monroe: the subject of an especially touching image by Pauline Boty - whose own years were ironically cut short, by leukemia. Paul Moorhouse points to many threads of portraiture in Pop: the processes of fame and its consequences; hidden portraits derived from real people or anonymous figures; and finally fantasy or imaginary portraits.

This fine book also contains an enviably concise yet broad-ranging social and historical introduction by Dominic Sandbrook to "The Age of Boom" in Britain and the United States. This is essential reading. But the last word must belong to Paul Moorhouse and his breathtaking claim that Pop Art transformed the portrait, "supplanting the religious icons of the past... creating new gods... as secular idols for a material world."

The British Library
By Colin St John Wilson. 64 pp. 75 colour illustrations. Pb. £4.95. Scala Publishers Art Spaces.

"This beautiful, warm, friendly and welcoming building manages to be at once a private place for each of us, and a great public and social institution - a place of silent study, and of meetings and greetings and assignations." So wrote the novelist Margaret Drabble in terms that will be echoed by the many that have used the British Library's Reading Rooms since it opened in 1998.

Thirty-six years in the making - from conception to completion - its architect the late Colin St John Wilson introduces and discusses his masterpiece with a mixture of disarming modesty, wry good humour and steely professional pride. This latter quality proving especially necessary over the length of the project which attracted more than its share of cruel controversy.

The new library arose out of the simple fact that its original home: the famous Round Reading Room at the British Museum and its associated storage areas were no longer capable of serving the needs of readers. Colin St John Wilson and his colleagues prepared three designs for two sites - the final one hard by Sir George Gilbert Scott's great St Pancras Chambers, built in 1867, and now the magnificent herald for the UK's Channel Tunnel rail link to Continental Europe.

"The art of architecture lies in raising functional order to the level of celebration, necessity to the level of enjoyment - in that order." Writes Professor Wilson, adding, "We touch, hear and smell a building as much as we see it." Bearing in mind the colossal size of the new British Library its innate humanity is no accident but the result of very careful thought. Individual areas of use not only have their own identity, but are generally percolated by natural light and warmed by the widespread use of natural materials such as leather, wood panelling - and carved marble.

The building is deliberately designed to be built in phases. This is made possible in part by the architects' decision to follow the traditions of the 19th century "English Free School promoted by William Morris and John Ruskin" which freed them to adopt "organic forms that are responsive to growth and change." This idea is represented in St Pancras Chambers itself which is rightly (and humbly) reflected in the exterior of the new library also faced in brick, "the one material," as Professor Wilson states, "that in this climate improves rather than degenerates in appearance over time."

Many works of art are to be seen at the new British Library, some specially commissioned, others long in its possession. These are sensitively, often spectacularly positioned, all the result of the architects' intention not to "add them later as decoration, but to incorporate them into the architecture." One stunning as well as uniquely appropriate example is a six-storey-high bronze and glass tower - free-standing and housing the 65,000 leather bound volumes of the King's Library. If you doubt that Colin St John Wilson's is a modern masterpiece, go and see it for yourself.

Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft
Edited by Laurie Britton Newell. With essays by Glenn Adamson and Tanya Harrod. 144 pp. with 70 illustrations in colour. Hb. £24.99. V&A Publications.

This important book accompanies an exhibition currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (until 17 February 2008). But it has to be judged on its own account - many of its readers will be unable to see the exhibition, and the book itself will outlast it.

The book, like the exhibition, is a collaborative project by the V&A and the Crafts Council. Its editor and the exhibition's curator, is Laurie Britton Newell, who looks after the museum's Contemporary Programmes and was responsible, for example, for another provoking exhibition, Export: Global Influences in Contemporary Design, held in 2005.

Ms Newell immediately nails her colours to the mast. Her subjects are "international artists who use craft to transform everyday subjects and materials into works that are extraordinary." This is a very good start with ideas of "art" and "craft" already fused.

Who then are these artists and what do they do? Olu Amoda uses scrap metal to make doors and grills that are both decorative and functional. Annie Cattrell uses transparent materials to arrest transient natural phenomena such as clouds. Susan Collis makes everyday objects look stained and worn through careful processes of collage, inlay and embroidery. Naomi Filmer is concerned with the physical experience and sensation of wearing jewellery - sometimes made in ice or chocolate. Lu Shengzhong creates installations from countless fragile and exact hand-produced paper cuts. Yoshihiro Suda carves and paints hyper-real plants from magnolia wood for specific locations. Anne Wilson works with fabrics, using human hair in particular, to disturb the viewer's perception.

At this point it is important and relevant to mention the plates. Philip Sayer has lovingly photographed the artist's sudios and workspaces; and Lizzie Finn has created delicate line works illustrating each artist's ways of working. Additional insights come from a series of interviews.

The two essays are fresh and important and it is only possible in a brief review to attempt to provide a slight flavour of their content.

Glenn Adamson, for example, states that "craft is not a field of practice with fixed qualities, as twentieth-century reformists tirelessly argued [he instances Ruskin, Morris, Bernard Leach and David Pye] but it can equally inspire unthinking delight." His claim that "craft is submerged fully in the system of exchange," is echoed in Tanya Harrod's historically based view that nowadays "we are invited to concern ourselves with the process of making and this in turn, leads to reflections on the nature of work, time consumption... technology and virtuosity."

Both this book, and the exhibition doubtless, must surely up-end any lingering and romantic views of what craft is nowadays about.

Private Treasures. Four Centuries of European Master Drawings
By Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Andrew Robison, Rhoda Eitel-Porter and Jennifer Tonkovich. 256 pp. With 110 colour and 20 black & white illustrations. Hb. £40.00. Lund Humphries.

"Artists' drawings hold a very special place in both private and public collections." So announce the four authors of this very fine volume which contains a selection of master drawings "spanning four centuries and six [European] national schools." They have been chosen from an anonymous private collection "one of America's most significant" formed, extraordinarily over eleven years only, "with enormous taste and great passion."

The authors are specialist scholars from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, both of which have collected master drawings since their foundations. This involvement confirms both the quality of the drawings as well as the commitment of their owner.

Drawings are certainly special: not only do they range from the briefest note to a finished work, they have intrinsic interest because inseparably linked with the artist's mind via the swing of his hand. Indeed, the learned authors note that the collector has made no attempt to achieve "historical completeness" instead making her choices "based on her personal response." This explains why the illustrations show overall a strong individual taste.

This catalogue (which accompanied an exhibition seen last year at the two sponsoring institutions) is arranged unusually helpfully for potential yet wary new collectors. Traditionally, scholars prefer to organize such important collections into national schools - which begs many question; instead the drawings are marshalled into centuries which is very interesting, as well as easier to come to terms with. Here for example, Constable and Ingres rub shoulders with Degas and Burne Jones.

The drawings are very finely reproduced, often near actual size, and are accompanied by lengthy commentaries, based not only on the latest scholarship, but with more than a hint sometimes of enticing personal admiration. Of a Self-Portrait at Sixty done by Kathe Kollwitz in 1927, the author notes that the artist "fashioned her profile as if in sculptural relief, modeling the surface of her face with fluid strokes... Such spare use of the [lithographic] crayon - a restrictive strategy that lends prominence to every mark - takes exacting skills."

More conventionally, but no less fascinating, a "magnificently confident, solemn drawing" of The Dead Christ by Agnolo Bronzino, done it is suggested between 1529 and 1535, is accompanied by a discussion of its likely origin as a study for one of two known commissions for Florentine patrons. (Bronzino was prominent at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, painting many celebrated family portraits.)

While scholars and experienced collectors will find much to dwell on in this very handsome volume, new collectors too will find in its pages much to encourage them - in their own lengthy, never to be completed journey.

Towards An Art History of Medieval Rings: A Private Collection
By Sandra Hindman with Ilaria Fatone and Angelique Laurent-Di Mantova. Introduction by Diana Scarisbrick. 260 pp. with 125 illustrations in colour. Pb. £25.00. Paul Holberton publishing.

This utterly fascinating book is a jewellery milestone. Indeed its title suggests this. At its heart is a small yet highly select private collection of only 35 rings gathered by Sandra Hindman over some two decades - and ranging in date from the 4th to the 16th centuries; or to put it another way, from the period of the late Roman Empire to the height of the Renaissance.

In her serenely objective introductory essay, the doyenne of ring historians Diana Scarisbrick, considers the history of the collecting of these beautiful little objects. Although engraved gems were prized both in antiquity and the Renaissance, she points out that rings was not recognized "as monuments of art and history" until the 17th century; the pace of interest thereafter quickening in the 18th and 19th centuries when a number of important collections were formed.

In the 20th century by contrast, serious collectors of rings were very few in number. Diana Scarisbrick suggests that aspirants may have been scared off perhaps "by the number of forgeries, as well as by the very restricted supply of genuine examples."

Hence the need for a serious basic study of the subject which this book and its authors aim to provide. Each ring has been photographed in careful detail, generally from more than one angle. Each is then described meticulously, mentioning for example, any gems that may have been replaced, the method of construction, the meaning of any inscription, and signs of wear. All the rings are put into their historical context with, where appropriate, contemporary illustrations of paintings or manuscripts showing similar examples.

Finally, every ring is catalogued to the fullest possible extent including details of its provenance and, not least, a census of similar rings in other collections. Notes and bibliographies complete the work.

Such detail is breathtaking not only in its extent but in its making. One example must suffice - a Renaissance intaglio ring, unequivocally described as showing "the refinement of the jeweler's art," was made in gold using the lost wax technique in the middle of the 16th century; it bears traces of enamel; and its engraved gem, or intaglio, with a portrait of an unknown man, dates from the 18th century, probably replacing a lost earlier example.

This ring has a wonderful provenance being formerly owned by two important collectors: Ernst Guilhou in the 19th century and Ralph Harari in the 20th. Its interest is extended by similar enamelled rings seen in 16th century portraits, that by Frans Pourbus shows one with monochrome enamel, and another by Veronese, a multicoloured example. Perhaps indeed these suggest differences of fashion in northern and southern Europe?

This is a truely entrancing book. It is also surely a major scholarly contribution to the study of rings, which, asserts Diana Scarisbrick, "more than any other relics... can shed new light upon the religion, the art, the sentiments, and the business practices" of a vanished world.