Pleasures for the Holidays

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In 1715 a young Italian Jesuit missionary, Giuseppe Castiglione, arrived in Peking and, like other Jesuits of his time, soon went to work for the Emperor, Kang xi. For a half-century, under the name Lang Shining, Castiglione served as a court painter, brilliantly blending Western and Eastern styles. Lang Shining's success is evident in Treasures of the Forbidden City (Viking; 262 pages; $75); his monumental painting of a deer-hunting party is one of only 100 art objects chosen for this book from more than 910,000 items in Peking's Palace Museum. The selection, compiled and annotated by Zhu Jiajin and a team of assistants and photographed by Hu Chui, embraces every notable Chinese art, from ancient bronzes to 19th century silk embroidery.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be, according to antique dealers, and this scholarly and delightful volume proves them right. American Toy Cars and Trucks by Lillian Gottschalk (Abbeville; 328 pages; $75) celebrates wheels past, from 1894 to 1942, and the older these miniatures are, the more charm radiates from their wire wheels and peeling running boards. From the Jones & Bixler touring car complete with uniformed chauffeur, to the double-deck city bus populated by "clown, fireman, porter and gentleman," to the motorcycle steered by Popeye, Bill Holland's photographs offer a bright valedictory to objects that managed to be mass-produced without compromising their jaunty integrity and cast-iron elegance.

Genius is rare; genius blessed with longevity is miraculous. That Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) made the most of these twin gifts is attested to in his sketchbooks, which cover 73 of his 92 years, a span that transformed our way of seeing. Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso (Atlantic Monthly Press; 347 pages; $65) documents that revolution of vision through the artist's eyes. The book reproduces six sketchbooks and includes selections from 36 others, each illustrating the development of images and styles that dominated the painter's major periods. Scholars should find this work indispensable; art lovers will discover renewed appreciation of one of the century's most creative forces.

Art to Wear (Abbeville; 320 pages; $95) by Julie Schafler Dale is a stunning survey of a movement dedicated to clothes for art's sake. The designers of these garments (weavers, needleworkers and painters) sacrifice the practical for the spectacular. These robes of many colors shimmer with feathers, beads, buttons and metallic threads. An ordinary flight jacket, when encrusted with 25,000 brass safety pins, is transformed into glittering armor. Knitted into a wool jacket, along with abstract images of the sun and its rays, are words by Walt Whitman ("Give me the splendid, silent sun/With all his beamsfull--dazzling"). A book for people who dress to thrill.

Sculpture: The Adventure of Modern Sculpture in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Rizzoli; 308 pages; $85) is a wide-ranging study of this art form. In addition to more than 550 photographs (nearly half in color), essays by art historians chart the changes in sculpture from traditional men on horseback to imposing abstractions that are set against desolate landscapes or take up acres and even miles. Examples include Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah and Christo's 24 1/2-mile-long nylon Running Fence in California. These and more familiar pieces by Auguste Rodin, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder are investigated with intellectual rigor and inviting illustrations.

The challenge of illumination has often led to amusing and beautiful solutions, as can be seen in Art Nouveau and Art Deco Lamps and Candlesticks by Wolf Uecker (Abbeville; 280 pages; $75). Illustrations include color and black-and-white photographs of glass lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Daum Freres, brass fantasies wrought by Josef Hoffmann and a lacquered wood-and-parchment floor fixture by Eileen Gray. There are modernist abstractions as well as familiar nymphs in flowing robes. Among the most delightful surprises: a bronze snail, its light contained beneath a shell of oxide-colored glass, and Emile Galle's magnificent lamp, a trio of mushrooms.

Unlike such contemporaries as Renoir, Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas (1834--1917) has inspired few legends and has never come to seem larger than life or as colorful as his art. In Edgar Degas: Life and Work (Rizzoli; 343 pages; $70), British Critic Denys Sutton shows why such comparative obscurity would have suited his subject perfectly. Degas was a reserved, withdrawn soul who poured most of his energies into painting and drawing. There were rumors that the artist, a life-long bachelor, did not care much for women. The evidence, Sutton decides, is inconclusive. But look at the pictures this sumptuous book provides: achingly beautiful renderings of women toweling down after baths, the delicate pastels of ballerinas in various postures of strain and repose. What his life may have lacked was translated into scenes for posterity to cherish.

For nearly 2,000 years, the rich and fertile area of western Asia known as Armenia proved hospitable to man and beast, as well as to a remarkable civilization. Then in 1915 the Turks massacred more than a million Armenians, leaving their historic lands desolate and sending the survivors fleeing abroad. The splendidly illustrated The Armenians (Rizzoli; 288 pages; $75) aims to restore to view some of the beauty of this brutally wounded culture. Various Armenian and Italian scholars have contributed chapters on the arts, history, religion and literature.

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A small golden jackal, nipping at the rump of a hyena twice its size, chases the intruder from its territory. Two young lions tear into a still struggling buffalo calf. Such violent scenes are everyday rhythms Among Predators and Prey (Sierra Club Books; 224 pages; $35), the reflections of Wildlife Photographer Hugo van Lawick. The author has a long acquaintance with rough nature: he has lived with East Africa's wild animals for a quarter-century part of the time among chimpanzees with his former wife Jane Goodall. Van Lawick's knowledgeable narrative recalls a life that included a stint covering th digs of Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge. Buts his prose pales against his vivid photographs.

The beauty of some things prevails even in an age of overexposure. Chateaux of the Loire (Vendome; 152 pages; $45) is a splendid case in point. Photographer Daniel Philippe has looked again at 19 of these fairyland fortresses, both from the sky and the ground, in snow and in bloom. There is formidable Chambord, which may have been planned by Leonardo da Vinci, and delicate Azay-le-Rideau, the creation of a banker who went too far when he mixed state money with his own. The aerial exposures suggest that some of the chateaux were designed for the eyes of god: the intricate geometry of the Renaissance gardens at Villandry can be fully appreciated only from aloft.

Michelangelo did not, as legend has it, paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel lying down. He stood up, neck craned back, for the entire enterprise. That scholarly judgment is just one of many in The Sistine Chapel (Harmony Books; 271 pages; $60), an intensive look at the Vatican's most famous treasure. The book's seven essays give due credit to other artists who embellished the Renaissance chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, including Botticelli and Raphael. But the focus is on Michelangelo, whose preference for bright colors is coming to light as restorers clean centuries of candle soot, grime and varnish from his frescoes. Only the lunettes above the chapel windows are finished so far, but their dazzling colors, photographed by Takashi Okamura, suggest the hue of things to come.

If there will always be an England, let us hope it will always contain people like those in Britons (Aperture; $45), the second collection of group portraits by Photographer Neal Slavin. Posing doggedly for Slavin's immense Polaroid, they make truly royal subjects: club members, drinking buddies, co-workers and choirs, all decked in the regalia of their proudest pastimes and fixed in the postures of their social roles. We see them keeping up appearances in every, sense of the phrase, whether they are the Distressed Gentlefolks Aid Association or the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, with their staff of almost 150, dwarfed by the mansion that will endure long after they are gone.

For a half-century, LIFE has been the closest thing to the nation's photo album. It could go to a war zone or a slumber party and see them both with feeling and acuity. Life: The First 50 Years 1936--1986 (Little, Brown; 319 pages; $50) is a year-by-year account of the magazine's history, which is also the history of the world as LIFE saw it. With thousands of pictures and every cover ever published, the book is a brimming repository of work by those lucky photographers whose franchise was to keep a sharply focused eye on just about everything. Where else can you find in one volume the Marines at Okinawa, the first moon landing, the development of the human fetus, and Picasso in shorts and a fedora?

The corporate initials ILM may not be as famous as GM, but the products of that little-known company are almost as familiar as the Chevy and Buick. Since its founding by Director George Lucas in 1975, the aptly named Industrial Light & Magic has created the special effects for five of the ten most successful movies of all time, including the Star Wars trilogy, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Thomas G. Smith's amply illustrated Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects (Ballantine; 280 pages; $50) is more than a history. It is a filmgoer's delight and an answer to that eternal question, How in the galaxy did they do that?

To the amazed eye of a new beholder, the American West often gets extravagantly romantic responses. German Photographer Gerd Kittel has resisted that temptation in Southwest USA (Thames & Hudson; $40). A few visual cliches are here, but intentionally underplayed: golden Bryce Canyon appears only in shadow and mist. Kittel is better at seeing the country from motels and poolrooms and truck stops, on blue highways and unpaved roads. In Monument Valley a derelict automobile rusts to the color of the earth beneath it. On a Sunday morning in Globe, Ariz., the empty main street looks more like a movie set than movie sets Kittel has photographed. At Isleta pueblo a basketball backboard dominates a dusty plaza by a weathered adobe store. Kittel's visual wit is as dry as the land he surveys.

Emile Zola said that a "work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament." He could have been talking about the work of Eliot Porter, who during the 1940s pioneered the use of subtle color in serious photography. In Maine (New York Graphic Society; $39.95), Porter's palette is often keyed to the New England bedrock that everywhere peeks through the thin soil. On this meager staging ground, nature wears the color wheel as the badge of its own tenacity: disks of citron-banded fungus, lichen in shades of ash green and teal, glyphic stripes of brown and mustard kelp. Whether shooting a tidal pool or a lobsterman's shed, he works with a reporter's eye br significant facts and a musician's instinct for tonal vibration.

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"Now to get up heat enough to melt that gold, those flower tones," Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. "It needs the whole and entire force and concentration of a single individual." The flora he described was sunflowers, and Van Gogh is the one artist who did those blossoms justice. In Sunflowers for Van Gogh (Rizzoli; 149 pages; $25), Photographer David Douglas Duncan captures the luminous, strangely feminine character of his subjects. This glowing tribute to painter and plant offers what seem to be studies of leafy blonds singing in the daylight, mourning in the shadows and brightening the earth when there is scarcely any light source, in Van Gogh's words, "with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize."

In 1966 a southeast gale and an undersea earthquake sent the sea flooding through Venice. Four feet of water overflowed the Piazza San Marco. Yet according to Peter Lauritzen in Venice Preserved (Adler & Adler; 176 pages; $29.95), the deluge bore good fortune. It helped to jolt the world into rescuing Venice from nearly two centuries of decay and depredation. Photographers Jorge Lewinski and Mayotte Magnus record the resurrection of the city. Lauritzen combines a sure hand for history with a light satirical touch for the bureaucracy of restoration.

Two generations ago, George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, gave Rochester a movie house. Better than that, he commissioned a brilliant young painter to create posters of the films on view. Alas, many of those celluloid epics have long since been turned into banjo picks, but the artwork survives in Movie Posters: The Paintings of Batiste Madalena (Abrams; 64 pages; $14.95). Here the famous and the forgotten are captured in the forceful style of art deco. Once upon a screen, these vamps, clowns and pirates romanced in a world of black and white. But outside the theater, Madalena made them leap from the walls in vibrant hues. This is one kind of movie colorizing that deserves sustained applause.

I is for imaginative, ingenious and inventive. All are adjectives that apply to the 26 paintings Mike Wilks has devised in celebration of the alphabet. Each picture in The Ultimate Alphabet (Holt; $19.95) contains a multitude of objects illustrating a single letter. Among the 259 items in G, the reader is invited to identify a Gypsy guitarist garbed in gaudy garments in a graveyard full of graven images. The T painting teems with 427 items, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee and enough trees to traumatize a topiarist. For the reader who spots the most words, the publishers offer a $15,000 prize.

He's the top, he's Mickey Mouse, and he's the subject of his own biography. Mickey Mouse: His Life and Times (Harper & Row; 96 pages; $14.95) documents the career of Walt Disney's cartoon creation, the cheerful rodent who lifted America's spirits during the Great Depression and went on to become a beloved international star. Mickeymania inspired books, toys, watches and countless other items, many of which are pictured in Mickey Mouse Memorabilia: The Vintage Years 1928-1938 (Abrams; 180 pages; $27.50). Whether happily dozing in an armchair that is the base of a lamp or merrily dancing with his Minnie atop a toy piano, Mickey is the sturdy little guy we recognize in all of us: the mouse as Everyman.