Books: Christmas: From Snowy Peaks to Sizzling Serves

$32.50 AND UP HIMALAYAS by Yoshikazu Shirakawa.

Unpaged. Abrams. $75. As practically every climber knows, photographs tend to increase the distance between man and mountain. Even the most spectacular peak can be reduced by the camera to an unimpressive white triangle.

The pictures of Japanese photographer Yoshikazu Shirakawa are a dramatic exception to this rule. Shirakawa actually climbed only a few of the pinnacles he photographed. (For others he pressed a helicopter into high-altitude service.) But his massive, magnificently reproduced study of the world's largest and highest mountains represents a photographic summit: Himalayas is simply the most beautiful book on mountains ever published.

DONATELLO text by Frederick Ham, photographs by David Finn. 482 pages.

Abrams. $75. This vast volume, which swings erratically between the largely splendiferous and the merely showy, illustrates all of the great Renaissance artist's known work. It is organized in sections devoted to each work, or group of figures. Photographs showing freestanding sculptures from different angles and various details of reliefs are often orchestrated to produce an almost cinematic sequence. The method works best on Donatello's highly dramatic, mature statuary: the famous Gattamelata equestrian figure, the chilling Judith and Holofernes and two works—St. John the Baptist in Venice and Mary Magdalen —which are Donatello's outcry against the diminishments of old age. In the case of more serene and introspective work, the Florentine St. Louis of Toulouse, like the overlit color photographs with their burnished gold and blue highlights look perilously like inspirational holy pictures handed out in Sunday school.

LANDSCAPE DRAWINGS edited by Curtis O. Baer. 360 pages. Abrams. $35.

There are not many good books on landscape, but this is one of them. Art Historian Baer begins with an essay that covers a great deal of historic and pictorial ground but also manages to be what art history and criticism rarely are:

wise, informative, graceful and affectionate. His captions are wide-roving and perceptive. The 160 expected and unexpected landscapes presented (most in black and white, but a few in color) offer an informal history of the genre that is hard to match, from Da Vinci to Van Gogh and beyond, from Pieter Bruegel and Jan van Goyen to Bonington and Ingres. Landscape, popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries, is now sadly out of fashion. Some people still love it—for drawing or looking —and this is their year.