Customer Reviews

Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition

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Gerard David comes late in the list of Northern Renaissance masters. Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, and Memling are more famous and probably more original, but there are a lot of us who dearly love David's small, jewel-like paintings, especially the two versions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, one in New York and the other in Washington.

Until recently it has been hard to find books with good reproductions of these two pictures, and the many other less-well-known but similarly charming pictures by David which are scattered throughout the museums of Europe. The works on paper, especially, have been nearly impossible for the average museum-goer to see, since they are almost always tucked away, accessible to only the lucky few.

It is a pleasure, then, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has decided to publish a book to document the work of this painter who has seemed until now much too elusive. And the Met has gone about the job with its usual skill and thoroughness. There are many paintings here that have probably never been reproduced before in a widely-available publication. They include some wonderful drawings and pencil studies, that give the lie to the idea that painters of David's era were tight or finicky -- some of the drawings of girls rival Watteau's for their lightness and casual perfection.

There are also dozens of x-ray-type photographs to analyze the underdrawings beneath the paintings, and even a chapter on the "dendrochronology" of the panels, in which the experts count the tree rings on the edge of the painted panel to analyze a picture's date and origin.

In fact, there is quite a bit in this book that will be of interest ONLY to those experts who go in for such thoroughness. People who love David's work and want to get every bit that they can should get this book. Others, who would be happy with well-reproduced highlights and feel they can skip the x-ray analysis, would be better off getting the Metropolitan Museum's recent book "From Van Eyck to Bruegel", which has a very good chapter on David, and much else besides.