AS Mr. Wickham says in his preface, this volume of photographs of Renaissance artistic monuments may well be used as a handy supplement illustrating, as it were, works like those of J. A. Symonds and Jakob Burckhardt on the Italian achievement during the XVth and XVIth centuries. It is the first book in a series entitled "Life and Art in Photographs," and if all the succeeding volumes are as good as this, one hopes that the series will cease only at the crack o' doom. Such praise is excessive, to be sure, but it is with genuine ardor that one turns these pages in search of reproductions of his favorites. It will serve no purpose to quarrel with Mr. Wickham over his omissions, which were necessary if the book was not to become fat like the volumes of van Marle. You will find Titian's "Charles V," and you will rejoice if you like that portrait; you will also find Botticelli's "Venus," Raphael's "Julius II," and Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," but not Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," which is of course so popular a selection that it is both proper and fair for its place to be taken by a nude like Titian's "Danae," which is often omitted out of deference to "the non-Conformist conscience," as Max Beerbohm calls it "which does make cowards of us all."

All the arts are represented, and by specimens which tend to be a persuasive, even if mute, testimony in an age of rampant modernism. In his well-written, though necessarily hurried, and even breathless, survey, Mr. Wickham pauses to inveigh against those modernist critics, who deprecate the masters of yore in order to extol "now a van Gogh, now a Picasso, now a Klee, now a Braque, now a Wadsworth, or now the art of the primitive Negroes or the Seljuka." That kind of criticism is indeed indefensible; one hopes, however, that Mr. Wickham, in his ardor to defend classicism against the enemy, is not leaning over backwards, for all the modernist idols--except the obvious frauds--possess a perfection of their own, which the best modernist critics, at any rate, are gravely anxious to explain and to applaud. So one must really be cautious in his demolition; Picasso, for example, would not be Picasso if he were not privy to certain secrets unknown by Giotto. The attention paid to him is only superficially due to a "justifiable reaction from the ideas of the XIXth century, and above all a reaction from the camera." Understanding of Picasso is like understanding of the Renaissance. Neither must be separated from the nexus of relations which is its age, and neither is to be condemned for not being other than itself. Mr. Wickham's anthology performs the service of helping us towards a sympathetic knowledge, even if at one remove, of the artistic expression of an age.