Parsing the picture frame. (Books about Antiques).

The author of this cerebral consideration of picture frames, W H. Bailey, appropriately teaches display design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. His seven chapter headings accurately foretell his approach: the frame as altarpiece, as window, as decoration, as content; frames found, designed, or made by artists.

Introducing the "Frame as Window," Bailey writes: "The frame allows us to step from one world into the other and helps us maintain our focus as we relax and enter the world of the painting. Once we are safely within that realm, the frame's role shifts to one of a security agent ensuring that we can spend all the time we want actively engaged with the work of art." This seems a very serviceable definition of most frames. However, the deeper you delve, the more complex things become. Consider, for example, the frame to Florine Stettheimer's Portrait of Duchamp (1923; Philadelphia Museum of Art) which is made up entirely of the alternating letters "MD" in bold relief. The author concludes: "By virtue of its assembly-line, staccato movement, the frame adds a mechanistic dynamism to the outer edge of the portrait and reiterates the expanding circle of the interior clock. To trap this activated, free-fall universe Stettheimer has made a frame fit for a king."

If this analysis is too rich for your blood, there is much that is more immediately accessible in this consideration of some sixty pictures, from an eleventh-century Byzantine gospel cover (Tesoro, San Marco, Venice) to Lynne Golob Gelfman's Bloodlet (private collection) of 1997. The wide, intricately carved frame to Michelangelo Buonarroti's Doni Madonna (c. 1505-1507; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) designed by the artist, contains the three-dimensional heads of five prophets, each popping out of a medallion. The author suggests that the downward looking prophet at the top asks us to follow his gaze as he considers the Holy Family that is the subject of the painting. The gap between the two prophets near the bottom invites "us to enter the picture at ground level before our gaze is drawn upward in a sweeping S-curve that culminates in the loving looks being exchanged by ...