Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas first met in a gallery at the Louvre. Degas was standing, etching plate in hand, copying a picture. How audacious, Manet exclaimed, to work without a preliminary drawing. ‘I would not dare to do the same.’ And thus he revealed the essential difference between the two.

Degas was a supreme exponent of drawing, while Manet was a magician of the brushstroke. In many ways they moved on parallel tracks, each interested in subjects from contemporary life, both at odds with academic convention. But their talents were at a tangent. Famously, they fell out after Degas painted a double portrait of his friend and his wife. Enraged, Manet cut off a slice containing Mme Manet’s face. Making women look glamorous wasn’t something Degas did.

Almost five centuries before Lucian Freud, Dürer drew an unflinchingly truthful naked self-portrait

The joint exhibition, currently at the Metropolitan Museum, New York until 7 January 2024 and previously in Paris, is an enthralling exercise in comparison and contrast. For those who haven’t seen it, the catalogue, Manet/Degas, edited by Stephan Wolohojian et al (Metropolitan Museum of Art, £50) offers a handsome substitute. 

Art history, like all other histories, is in a process of constant revision. These days the Renaissance, for long regarded as the summit of human achievement, is widely seen, in academia at least, as hopelessly uncool (pale, male, Eurocentric, etc). In Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance (Thames & Hudson, £30), Jonathan Jones sets out to rebut the view that the very idea of the Renaissance is ‘a wheezing old steam train, a 19th-century construct’. Instead, he argues, it constituted a revolutionary new focus on the earthy realities of the world, human flesh among them. He makes the case vigorously, persuasively and entertainingly.

Painting in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Diane Cole Ahl (Yale, £55) offers a different adjustment to the received ideas about the Renaissance. Namely, that they are too Tuscany-centric. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, the primary source, was written by a Tuscan (and elective Florentine). He was often unaware of, if not prejudiced against, what had gone on elsewhere in Italy. This book leads one to wonder what we would think if Vasari had hailed from Venice or Palermo.

One Renaissance innovation that survives undiminished is the star artist. Most of these predecessors of Picasso and Damien Hirst were Italian, but one exception – quite as self-obsessed as any modern successor – was Albrecht Dürer of Nuremburg. This is the case David Ekserdjian makes in Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography (Reaktion Books, £17.95). None of his contemporaries, Ekserdjian writes, showed ‘the almost obsessive interest he displays in himself, his own biography, even including his dreams and his surroundings’. Almost five centuries before Lucian Freud, Dürer drew an unflinchingly truthful naked self-portrait. In another mood, verging on blasphemous, he came close to depicting himself as Christ. Ekserdjian recounts it all with fastidious scholarship and dry wit.

Even Dürer did not go as far as Marina Abramovic has in Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places (Prestel, £40), an anthology of her sketches, doodles and notes on headed writing paper from hotels around the world. It’s an eccentric publication, but one that conjures up her wandering life and also hints – unexpectedly – that her performance art might be based, deep down, on drawing.

Pauline Boty (1938-66) was another artist who performed during her poignantly brief life, pursuing twin careers as painter and actor. A member of the generation of students at the Royal College of Art that also included David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Frank Bowling, she was largely forgotten for decades after her early death. A complicating factor, as Marc Kristal muses in Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister (Frances Lincoln, £25), was that she was startlingly beautiful – nicknamed ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’. Boty’s glamour was a theme in her art, but perhaps also a reason for her neglect. According to her friend and fellow student Derek Boshier, ‘the art world couldn’t decide whether she was an artist or an actor’, while the newspapers treated her as a pin-up. Kristal’s book is a study of the fascinating, now distant ambiance of 1960s London, as well as of a unique figure from that time.

I once interviewed Leonora Carrington over a faint, crackly telephone line from Mexico City. It seems I was lucky. According to Joanna Moorhead’s affectionate and intimate Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (Thames & Hudson, £30), she seldom gave interviews. Indeed, she only engaged with Moorhead as a family member (the author’s father’s cousin) and a friend. Carrington lived a long life entirely on her own terms. Early on she decided to become a painter and escaped from a wealthy and conventional British background to Surrealist Paris and had an affair with Max Ernst. In the early 1940s, she moved to Mexico where she spent most of the rest of her life. Only recently has she attained artistic star status; her work was prominent at the last Venice Biennale which took its title, The Milk of Dreams, from a book she wrote for her children.

Lee Miller was also a sometime Surrealist – model, muse to Man Ray, among others, and brilliant photographer in her own right. Lee Miller: Photographs (Thames & Hudson, £30), by Antony Penrose, collates the best of her works, including a portrait of Carrington in 1939 and the celebrated shot of Miller herself soaking in Hitler’s bathtub.

These days genres and idioms are ripe for reassessment as well as artists. The images in 18th- and 19th-century tomes on natural history were once considered mere illustrations, but nowadays are increasingly being reclassified as ‘art’ (and perhaps more interesting than much of that hung at the Royal Academy). Elizabeth Gould (1804-41) is given this treatment in Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould (Prestel/ Natural History Museum, £55) by Andrea Hart and Ann Datta. Gould was the wife of an unartistic taxidermist who insisted she should help him by contributing the plates to a series of spectacular books, culminating in The Birds of Australia. This appeared after her death in 1841 following the birth of her eighth child.

Gould’s works combined delicate naturalism with a touch of the surreal (she took lessons from Edward Lear). The second adjective also applies to the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, the subject of a monumental publication by Peter Walther (Taschen, £100). Atkins (1799-1871) used this system of contact printing, devised by her friend Sir John Herschel, to produce three volumes of British Algae between 1843 and 1853 – the world’s first photographically illustrated books. These images of wispy white filaments, tendrils and leaves on a serene blue background, reminded me of Carrington’s phrase ‘the milk of dreams’.