Many painters familiar with the work of Velasquez admire him because he is a brilliant, and brilliantly unders-stated, technician, something that becomes evident if you look at the surface of his pictures in detail. That is exactly what historian Jonathan Brown and conservation scientist Carmen Garrido do in their remarkable Velazquez: The Tech- nique of Genius (Yale, £29.95 in UK). Their book is a treat, offering analyses of some thirty works spanning the artist's career, and copiously illustrated with huge closeups of significant details.
Mark Rothko is one of the great artists of the century, and Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas, A Catalogue Raisonne, by David Anfam (£95 in UK, £75 until January 31st), is a welcome addition to the literature on him, featuring generous colour reproductions of all his work on canvas, from early oil sketches of street life to the last, haunted monochromes. There's also Mark Rothko (Yale £40 in UK), the catalogue of the major retrospective which will travel to Paris in January.
This year saw the centenary of the birth of British sculptor Henry Moore. Among the publications marking the event, John Hedgecoe's A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore (Collins & Brown, £35 in UK) is a visually sumptuous celebration of his achievement - by someone he regarded as the best photographer of his work - and includes an illustrated chronological inventory of every sculpture he made. Moore is out of fashion, but that will change.
Just as the landscape of Ireland's west coast assumed a particular importance in terms of national identity, so the northern wilderness became a defining characteristic for artists of the Scandinavian countries in the 19th century. Torsten Gunnarsson's Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nine- teenth Century (Yale, £40 in UK) is the first comprehensive account of the subject. Hugely informative and lavishly illustrated, it makes an invaluable work of reference.
The Peacock Room was designed and painted by James McNeill Whistler in London in 1876 for ship-owner Frederick Leyland. It was meant as a showcase for Leyland's collection of Chinese porcelain, but became the subject of a bitter dispute when the artist revised his creation without checking with his patron first. The whole room ended up in the Smithsonian Institution in the US. Linda Merrill's exhaustive, lavish The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biog- raphy (Yale, £40 in UK) is the definitive account of the history and meaning of what could be described as a remarkable work of installation art.
The celebrated Russian installation artist Ilya Kabakov is a recent addition to Phaidon's ground-breaking Contemporary Artists series. Ilya Kabakov (Phaidon £19.95) incorporates writings on and by the artist, a detailed chronology of his work and is profusely illustrated.
In an elegant paperback edition of Renaissance (Phoenix, £16.99 in UK), historian George Holmes provides a remarkably concise, lucid account of the blossoming of visual culture in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. His thesis uncontentiously posits the city as a force for cultural change. Recent additions to the revisionist Oxford History of Art series, incorporating the techniques of the "new" art history, include Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, Archaic and Classical Greek Art, and Native North American Art. Extremely well illustrated and produced, they are exceptionally good value at £9.99 in UK.
Film director and painter Peter Greenaway, a world-class obsessive-compulsive, has produced 100 Allegories to Represent the World (Merrell Holberton, £25 in UK), a picture book initiated during a residency in the city of Strasbourg in 1995. Photographs of more than a hundred nude Strasbourgers were digitally combined with a huge range of imagery to produce a dazzling catalogue of contemporary allegorical figures. Greenaway's chilly touch, his autodidactory mania and his visual flair are much in evidence. It is at heart a decorative indulgence, but fans of his films will love it.
This year the National Library published its complete collection of Gabriel Beranger's topographical watercolour drawings of the antique buildings of Ireland, dating from the late 18th century, in a single volume. Beranger's Antique Buildings of Ireland (Four Courts Press/National Library of Ireland, £35/£14.95 and a limited edition with a slipcase at £100) is a beautiful book and each of its hundred colour plates is accompanied by an informative commentary by Peter Harbison.
Patrick Marnham's Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (Bloomsbury, £20 in UK) is an exemplary biography of the larger-than-life Mexican artist, brilliantly placing him in the context of his times. Not an easy task since Rivera, like Picasso and Dali, mythologised his own life. Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Quartet Books, £12 in UK), is not only a well-informed, sympathetic account of the brief, brilliant career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, it also provides a telling portrait of the movers and shakers of the Eighties art boom. Closer to home, Bruce Arnold this year produced a weighty new biography of Jack B. Yeats (Yale, £29.95).
Highlights of this year's Irish Arts Review Yearbook (£35/ £22.50) include Catherine Marshall on the making of Gordon Lambert's collection of modern art, Dorothy Walker on Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray, and a critical view of some recent Irish architecture by novelist Colm Toib in. The six additions to Gandon's Profile series of monographs on Irish artists published this year included volumes on Alice Maher and Maud Cotter, plus one architectural profile, McGarry NiEanaigh (all £7.50 each). Gandon also produced Volume One of Irish Architectural and Dec- orative Studies, the Journal of the Irish Georgian Society, an anthology of illustrated essays edited by Sean O'Reilly and including pieces on Oswald Reeves, artist and craftsman, and the Irish Exhibition at Olympia in 1888.