FIFTY prize specimens of towering buildings in their natural habitat, the city, appear in Skyscrapers (Prestel, £22.99/$35), edited by Andres Lepik. Stunning images, like the one of Chicago’s Lake Point Tower (below), are reason enough to buy this book. What’s more, each building comes with a summary of its history, context and influence. The problems of skyscrapers are not assessed – their shadows move like anti-spotlights across their neighbourhoods. This is a celebratory book, one for futurist dreamers.
Go to the past for another present: half-drowned in the ground mist that smears away the modern signage, Rome’s classical landscape haunts the cover of Nigel Spivey and Michael Squire’s Panorama of the Classical World (Thames & Hudson, £29.95). This rich collection of hundreds of photographs reconstructs the visual imagery of the classical period in Greece, Etruria and Rome, and so illuminates the ideas and attitudes that shaped it.
Innumerable chronological studies of architecture, artefacts and iconography already exist, but Spivey and Squire choose to explore the connective tissue binding that 1000-year period. Faced with a sea of evidence, they create order by sorting it into themes, such as the context of art, the centrality of the body, and representation of the divine and the mortal. This book takes a modern theoretical approach, examining how we have constructed the classical world in contemporary terms. It shows why this time-slice of the ancient world remains intriguing: it continues to inspire interesting new ideas about ideas.
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We tend to privilege the villa and the temple, the grand scale of imperial works. But the land also gripped the Roman imagination, its ownership a precondition of high status. Yet the raw countryside was not quite what was wanted. Living in the country for emperors and aristocrats was to live in a manipulated landscape, replanted with a perfect olive grove. Even in crowded cities a bit of improved country was desirable. The ingenious ways that the Romans achieved their ideals are laid bare in Patrick Bowe’s Gardens of the Roman World (Frances Lincoln, £35), including the garden walls of Pompeii, painted to give an illusion of space. Inspiration for gardeners, perhaps?
“Stunning photos blur into abstract art. False colouring turns a grain of tulip pollen into a seething red planet”
An extraordinary book illustrates the idea that a skull lies behind a smile. Alexander Tsiaras and Barry Werth’s The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman (Doubleday, $50) shows the slide and slip of muscles moving bones, the looping intestines and nets of nerves set in shadowy pictures of people. It reminded me of Lawrence Durrell’s character in The Alexandrian Quartet who, as he embraces his beloved, imagines all the processes that keep her alive. She is a digestive process in a column of flesh. Gripping stuff, if slightly horrific.
Turning from the flesh to the plant world, Herbarium by Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay (Cambridge University Press, £40) shows off an Australian botanical collection. Beautiful images of ancient collected specimens. Twists of seaweed and flowers are followed by pages showing, for example, a landscape framed by pictures of the species in the scene, a trophy of knowledge combined with taste.
For lovers of botanical painting, Margaret Mee has long been a favourite. Her beautiful pictures are world famous for magically combining the look of Amazonian plants with how they fit into their surroundings. She even sketched night-flowering plants by torchlight deep in the forest. Margaret Mee’s Amazon (Antique Collectors’ Club/RBG Kew, £29.50) is her own account of the people, as well as plants, that she met, spliced with paintings and photographs. Fascinating.
Often hailed as the original ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes searched the Amazon for plants used for everything from psychedelic trips to string. He found 30,000 specimens, of which 300 were new to science. Wade Davis has annotated original photographs of Schultes’s plant-hunting in The Lost Amazon (Thames & Hudson, £18.95). Some things haven’t yet made it out of Amazonia: a cup of yoco, for example, is equivalent to 20 coffees. Sounds like the ideal wake-up drug for city-dwellers.
Extreme close-ups fill Pollen by artist Rob Kesseler and scientist Madeline Harley (Papadakis, £35), which shows off exactly what they promise in their title. Tough “skins” protect pollens for thousands of years, so they play a star role in the reconstruction of ancient landscapes, lost food habits and so on. There is a good summary of the science, plus stunning photographs that blur into abstract art. The false colouring of scanning electron microscope images, for example, turns a grain of tulip pollen into a seething red planet.
Ecologist Sara Oldfield conducts us through the drylands in Deserts (MIT Press/New Holland, £24.99/$29.95), a serious look at these fragile ecosystems full of weirdness: living pebbles, snappy gum and elf owls roosting in cacti. Each beautiful scene faces threats: too many people settling in arid zones, tourists and wars being the greatest.
Ray Troll also deals in weirdness. Rapture of the Deep (University of California Press, £18.95/$29.95) showcases his art – a rich and extraordinary mixture of accurate depictions of marine life interleaved with wild fantasies. His paintings can be as crowded as a Where’s Wally? picture, but are startling and provocative. How about a lantern-jawed fish from the deepest ocean with a mermaid and a diver? “Not in Kansas anymore” swarms with species now known only as fossils, snapping and swimming in a lost sea.
A more recent past is celebrated in Treasures of the National Maritime Museum (NMM, £25). Edited by Gloria Clifton and Nigel Rigby, it is beautifully illustrated, and knowledgeable as the London museum itself. I was glad to see that, among glorious paintings, ship’s figureheads, swords and uniforms, Nelson’s bloodstained breeches and stockings are still on display. They fascinated me as a child, along with the story that his body had been brought to London in a barrel of rum, and that Londoners took to calling the drink “Nelson’s blood”. The book is fabulous, the collection well represented and broad. Here you will find not only the great sea battles, but also pictures of migrants forced overseas by poverty, the sailor’s story as well as the admiral’s.