Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

Great reference, small variety
Unless you happen to still paste up keyline boards and need clip art to literally "clip out", the Dover Ready-to-Use books offer less images for the price. They're printed on slick, hard paper with nothing on the back of the page. I discovered that half of the same images were available in my other Dover reference books of similar themes. The picture variety spans a broad spectrum of the Middle Ages and Renaissance with lots of etchings and the occasional celtic knot. It's a good reference, just limited.

Clip Art
Of the Dover Books, this is one of the most interesting. The only caveat is they don't offer it with a CD like so many of their books. Highly recommend for hilighting projects. It adds alot of detail to manuscripts, music, etcetera.

beautiful but disappointing
The pictures are wonderful examples of patterns. I was looking for something with more depth explaining the structure and construction of the art.

Great clips!
This Dover book/CD-ROM and the one on books, reading & writing are my two favorites (well, I like the food one too...and the Egyptian....) All the animals are from 19th C. illustrations. The volume is a terrific addition to the expanding Dover CD-ROM library.

Not a 'ready-to-use' book, but beautiful ideas...
I purchased this book along with one by M. P. Verneuil, and, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give THIS one a firm "5". The idea starters are here, in some lovely period (although somewhat mono to duochromatic) colors, but most are small and will need much manipulation and skilled handwork to transfer to a project. Because of their small printed size, a scan into digital format can only help so far: I was able to scan a chosen 1.5" X 3" image in at 300dpi, re-interpolating the image at 200% size. THEN I was able to "re-draw" the image by tracing it using Adobe Illustrator, producing my own vector (infinitely scaleable) digital image. It took me (a professional graphic artist) about 3 hours total to produce ONE of the 7 borders I need for several urns I am working on.

When every minute counts, I cannot afford to do this every time I need an image to "accent" a project I've already spent hours on, so, for me, it would be far easier to dream up a design (or use one of the illo's in this book as a 'starter') on my own without going through all of the scanning, re-drawing, image manipulations, tweaking, re-sizing, etc.

For those who KNOW there's no such thing as a "free lunch" (or thick volume of totally usable art for tracing or stencilling), this is still a nice book for referencing, especially if you're having a creative block and need some sparks to get the artistic fire going. But do expect to work at turning out a scaleable, tileable piece.

My only other disappointment was that this was a relatively THIN book (let?), and might've been a little nicer (and heftier!) if they'd NOT tried to squeeze so many illo's onto each page (hence, making most almost too small to work with)...


On the other hand, the "other" book I purchased, "Art Nouveau Floral Patterns and Stencil Designs" by M. P. Verneuil, was WONDERFUL (read my review of it there): the illo sizes are comfortable, the colors are bewitching (true color, not mono or duo tints!), and I am eager to use 4 out of every 5 designs (159 total crisp, detailed color plates)in the book!

-- Shea

poor colour
Being a lover of Art Nouveau style, I liked the designs which will be very useful in my artistic endeavours. However, I was quite disappointed with the presentation of colours and sometimes print quality

Passable but not great
These images could be quite wonderful, but by the time the bookplates are of usable size they are grainy and out-of-focus. They are useable, but not of the same quality you would find in a bookstore.