Art Books for Christmas: Make an exhibition for yourself

The best art books are more than just glossy catalogues, says James Hall. They should also try to say something new

Temporary exhibitions have been the driving force behind art publishing in recent decades, and even the smallest show comes armed with a glossy catalogue. Museums used not to have dedicated spaces for exhibitions, but the National Gallery and British Museum currently have three, while the Tate, with its incessant re-hangs, is nothing but temporary exhibition spaces. Museums now have their own publishing companies producing books, magazines and videos as well as catalogues. Yale University Press, the leading scholarly art-book publisher, is increasingly acting as a distributor of museum publications, while Thames & Hudson and Phaidon are rescuing their dependence on fine art.

The problem with catalogues is that, however thorough they appear, they are reluctant to emphasise things that could not be loaned, so they are often misleading about an artist's total oeuvre. They also rarely comment on the condition of exhibits for fear of suggesting that their fragility should have precluded them being lent in the first place. The Royal Academy's Aztecs is a wonderful exhibition, but in the otherwise excellent catalogue (RA, £27.95) condition is not discussed – hardly surprising, as many of the large and intricate clay sculptures, like the Eagle Man on the front cover, would have surely never left Mexico were it not for pressure from the President, for whom exhibitions abroad can raise his country's profile.

The independent bookseller Ian Shipley of Shipley Art Books in Charing Cross Road thinks there has been a overall decline in the quality of texts, with too many picture books: "People are buying the same quantities of art books but not to read. Basically they're buying magazines. The text could be in Latin." One wonders if the Tate's new series of monographs on contemporary artists is meant to be read, or just flicked through. The inaugural titles, Fiona Bradley's Paula Rego and Matthew Collings' Sarah Lucas (both £12.99), are chaotic montages of text, interviews and brash images. Bradley's text is perfectly alright, but doesn't say anything very new about this painter. Collings has made a minor art form out of equivocation – his indecision is always final. Here, his comments about scatalogical Sarah swirl around momentously, but without making much progress.

One of the most welcome recent developments is the appearance of rivals to Thames & Hudson's venerable World of Art series. The authors of the Oxford History of Art tend to be a bit joyless, adamant that their materialist approach is the best ever, but Lawrence Nees' Early Medieval Art (OUP, £12.99) is a pleasure to read. He combines social background with close analysis, and clearly explains the early development of Christian art, and the ways in which it absorbed and rejected Roman art. There's a lovely section on the Sutton Hoo ship burial that will make readers rush off to the British Museum to see the deluxe grave trinkets. Phaidon's Art & Ideas series is not as nicely produced, but the texts are less likely to be written through gritted teeth. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin's Piero della Francesca (Phaidon, £12.95) is a solid introduction to a great artist about whom so much remains mysterious.

The Complete Paintings of Luca Signorelli (Thames & Hudson, £48) is the first comprehensive study in 50 years of this brusquely original if not altogether likeable painter, much admired by Michelangelo. Even so, the main text by Laurence B Kanter is over-obsessed with working out what he did and when, and there isn't enough discussion of Signorelli's creepy sensibility. Felix Thürlemann's Robert Campin (Prestel, £85) is a major study of one of the greatest Flemish artists, a contemporary of Van Eyck.

Yale have thoroughly updated Deborah Howard's The Architectural History of Venice (Yale, £25), a standard introduction now printed in a handy portable format. Her guide can be supplemented by Richard Goy's large-format Venice: The City and its Architecture (Phaidon, £24.95), recently issued in paperback, which also has an interesting text and more illustrations. The same author's Florence: The City and its Architecture (Phaidon, £45) is out in hardback. Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (Abrams, £27) is a good-value compendium of images with a brisk commentary by Marcia B Hall. Diane Bilbey's British Sculpture 1470 to 2000 (V&A, £60) is the first ever catalogue of the V&A's unrivalled collection, with every item illustrated.

Eleanor Sims' delightful labour of love, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and its Sources (Yale, £60), is the first thematic survey of its subject: 250 images, mostly from illuminated manuscripts, have been given catalogue-style entries, and grouped into recurrent themes that include fighting, feasting, mourning, the natural world and the built environment. Sheila R Canby's The Golden Age of Persian Art (British Museum, £19.99), just published in paperback, is an excellent general introduction, based on the superb collections of the BM. It gives equal coverage to metalwork, ceramics and tiles, which are perhaps even finer than the painting. The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 (Yale, £55) is the substantial catalogue of an exhibition that has just opened at the Met, New York. It includes rarely seen loans from Russia and Mongolia, though Britain is the biggest foreign lender.

Anyone interested in modern art should read Sybil Gordon Kantor's Alfred H Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MIT, £27.50), a blow-by-blow account of the career of the first director of MOMA, New York, and surely the greatest curator of the 20th century. His famous flow-charts plotting the development of modern art have been attacked, but never bettered. Wieland Schmied's stimulating Giorgio de Chirico (Prestel, £5.95) puts the master of enigma in context. John McEwen's The Sculpture of Michael Sandle (Lund Humphries, £54) is a lively and informative introduction to this pungent artist. McEwen convincingly argues that Sandle's watercolour U-Boat in Glass Case Monument (1976) is a forerunner of Damien Hirst's shark piece.

Peter Osborne's Conceptual Art (Phaidon, £45) almost manages to make this incomprehensible movement comprehensible and provides masses of texts and images. Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier's Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (Reaktion, £28) is a fascinating cultural and architectural history, full of period photographs. We learn that Berthold Lubetkin, architect of the penguin pool in London Zoo, preferred animals whose colouration fitted his modernist aesthetic.

James Hall is the author of 'The World as Sculpture' (Pimlico, £15)