Art: From canvas to cameras

Sometimes it is more interesting to enter a great museum by its side door. In a manner of speaking, this is what Michael Wilson does in If the Paintings Could Talk (Yale, £12.95), his intriguing guide to some of the National Gallery's treasures. This is a guide like no other. Not organised by painters or paintings, it plucks some matter of interest out of works of art, quite serendipitously, and manages to shine new light on both art and artist. "Off Balance", for example, is all about why everything seems to be at an angle in Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast. You never know where you are going next. Staying in that great institution, one of the art books of the year must be the sumptuously illustrated and intelligently written catalogue to Renaissance Faces (Yale, £24.95), the brilliant exhibition of Renaissance portraiture still running in the Sainsbury Wing.

If paintings could really talk, they would be gossiping about the fact that Marcel Proust was so knowledgeable about art and artists, as revealed in Eric Karpeles's delightful Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, £25). It sets passages from In Search of Lost Time beside reproductions of the paintings to which Proust so scrupulously refers. Karpeles has discovered that there are more than 250 of them, ranging far and wide throughout the Western canon.

Related articles

• General fiction: Wizards of Oz surf into fiction's front rank
• Biography and memoirs: Literary or showbiz, foodie or rude: 10 stories of journeys out of the jungle
• Music: Open ears and minds break down the walls of sound
• Children: Bears, bombers and a very scary fairy
• History: Global tales of deals and steals from Columbus to the credit crunch
• Poetry: Spelling out the magic of the mundane
• Nature: Save the hedgehog – and save the world
• Crime: Mayhem from Sicily to Scotland
• Food & Cookery: Ruined by a cake, rescued by an oyster
• Film & Theatre: Cads, saints and fans in the limelight
• Sport: Revolution with an oval ball - and heaven and hell on wheels
• Search the news archive for more stories

Sarah Thornton has ranged wide for her highly readable and amusing book, Seven Days in the Art World (Granta, £15.99). One day she is sitting on a terrace beside the Grand Canal chin-wagging with champagne-quaffing collectors at the Venice Biennale; the next, she's deep into an earnest conversation with one of the makers of the stuff that will sell for much in one of Takashi Murakami's studios in Japan. It's a hectic journey, occasionally a little too frothy, but an engagingly informative one.

It's been a good year for lovers of the energising, sado-masochistic gloom of Francis Bacon. The catalogue of his Tate Britain show does him proud (Tate Publishing £24.99), and two other books thicken the tortured plot of his life. Incunabula (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) shows us images of the photographs and visual documents which fed into the wild frenzy of his painting. His friend and official biographer Michael Peppiatt has assembled Studies for a Portrait (Yale, £18.99), a marvellously absorbing book of essays and interviews.

The best art biography of the season is Jackie Wullschlager's long but highly readable account of the life of Marc Chagall (Allen Lane, £30). Wullschlager is one of the unusual breed of the scholar-journalist, which means that she not only knows her stuff, but can write about it palatably and readably without engaging in obfuscatory art-speak.

This autumn's major retrospective of the photography of Annie Leibovitz at the National Portrait Gallery spawned another unbudgeable catalogue. Even more interesting is a new book which tells the human story behind the camera. In Annie Leibovitz at Work (Cape, £25), she tells us how she works, the cameras she uses, of the tussle between the photographer and the mighty ego of the sitter. Occasionally we glimpse the mighty ego of the photographer, too.

The season's most informative general book about the art of photography over the past 40 years, which fascinatingly engages with the ongoing battle for pre-eminence between photography and painting, is Michael Fried's long-windedly-titled Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (Yale, £30). It's a lovely, intellectually chewy book with an abundance of well-chosen illustrations.

So to the recommendations aimed at those who have money spilling from their pockets. Those who are happy to pay a lot for a magnificently quirky book should acquire Alessandra Zamperini's Ornament and the Grotesque (Thames & Hudson, £48) to prove to themselves just how gloriously outlandish human taste can be. Tate Publishing's History of British Art is available in three volumes for £25 a piece, or at a knock-down £70 for three, with a handsome slip-case.

How do you tackle such a many-tentacled creature as a survey of the visual culture of Britain? By artist, great works or thematic essays? Tate has opted for a combination. Sometimes it works well; at other times, you are inclined to quarrel. The last volume, which struggles for coherence about a period from 1870 to the present, is weakest. In spite of these criticisms, the very fact that this vast subject has been encompassed, and to this level, is a reason to congratulate the publisher. At £70 for the three, it does represent very good value – provided you've already heated the house to the temperature required to sit and enjoy the books.