Leonardo's Nephew: Essays in the History of Art and Artists

A poet and Oxford don, Fenton claims to have made ""no attempt... to impose any overall thesis"" onto the 15 ingenious pieces gathered here on such topics as canon formation, patronage and the peculiarities of collecting (all but two written for the New York Review of Books). Intentionally or not, the essays overlap in subtle, mercurial ways, doubling back time and again onto the same conceptual territory. Fenton is our cicerone--the grand tour guide he invokes in his essay on Verrocchio--for an idiosyncratic roundup of artworks from ancient Egypt through the late 20th century. Intrigued by emerging and unstable reputations, he introduces us to Leonardo da Vinci's half-brother's son Pierino, a precocious sculptor celebrated by Vasari but virtually forgotten since; to the impoverished Welsh painter Thomas Jones, whose striking oil sketches from the late 1700s are only now making a splash; to Maillol's patron Count Harry Graf Kessler, whose diaries, rich with information about the European avant-garde and political rear guard, are currently being transcribed onto CD-ROM; and to other figures and phenomena on the periphery of art history. It is up to the reader to discover the essays' less conspicuous parallels: ""Everything is on the same plane of interest"" in Pisanello's naturalistic drawings and frescoes, while half a millennium later Rauschenberg paints and assembles ""as if everything he sees appears equally important."" Fenton's own eye is sometimes tweedily connoisseurial, yet he leavens his enormous erudition with a dash of colloquial, even ribald, irony. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)