Masterworks from the Musee Des Beaux-Arts, Lille

Paintings by Goya, Courbet, Raphael and Gericault are featured in this tony catalog of a loan exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a sampling of treasures from the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille, one of France's major museums. Highlights include van Gogh's moody oil, Study of Cows, completed just prior to his suicide; Peter Paul Rubens's dramatic paintings created for the churches and convents of Lille; Donatello's stylized marble relief, The Feast of Herod ; David d'Angers's four bas-reliefs depicting the invention of printing in the four corners of the world; and 15th-century Dutch painter Dieric Bouts' allegory The Fall of the Damned , which recalls Hieronymus Bosch's visions of Hell. There are also superb drawings by Delacroix, Raphael, Poussin, David and Durer. Essays by Liedtke and Groswold, Met curators and other scholars accompany more than 130 color and black-and-white plates. (Jan.)