Fundamentals. (Books About Antiques).(Bibliography)

A fifteenth-century observer described artist's brushes made of miniver fur mounted in quill handles. Painting on canvas thrived in Venice, which was so damp that frescoes aged badly. The word "cartoon," in its meaning as a humorous drawing, originated in 1843 when the cartoons for murals in the British Houses of Parliament were satirized in the magazine Punch. Beginning in the fourteenth century a convenient way of carrying or shipping vegetal pigments was to drench a piece of cloth in the required color and let it dry. The so-called cloth-let could then be soaked by the recipient, releasing the pigment.

If you already knew all these things, or even some of them, read no further either on this page or in the series of basic hooks under consideration. Five in the series are entitled Looking at...Paintings; Photographs; European Sculpture; European Ceramics; and Prints, Drawings, and Watercolours. The remaining two books are preceded by the word Understanding...Greek Vases; and Illuminated Manuscripts.

The aim of the series is to demystify museum visitors and students faced with a perplexing wall label or critical essay, and in this they succeed admirably. No one should be ashamed to have these little paperbacks on their library shelf, since it is only human that the devotee of Ansel Adams and Eugene Atget will be less sure of the differences between body color, gounche, watercolor, tempera, and/or distemper.

These little dictionaries have been issued by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, most of them in conjunction with the British Museum, British Library, or Victoria and Albert Museum in London. All but two are written by curators and conservators at the Getty. Looking at Prints, Drawings and Watercolours is by a curator at the British Museum; Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts is by a curator at the British Library.

All seven books are alphabetically arranged introductions to the technical terms so as to decipher the art under consideration. There are ample cross-references to other entries, identified by the keywords in small capitals. In most cases an illustration of the term in question is shown next to the definition. Thus "drypoint" is matched to Rembrandt's Clump of Trees with a Vista, shown with a detail illustrating the characteristic burred line scratched into the plate with the metal point. And the term "added red" is placed next to an amorous pair about to go into a clinch. "Added red" is a term for details painted on Greek pots over the glossy black but before firing.

Sometimes the terms chosen for definition sometimes seem a trifle obvious. "Base," "bier," and "brass" are all defined on the same page of European Sculpture. On the other hand, an apparently innocent word such as "bat" turns out to mean four quite separate things in ceramics: a flat disk that can be ...