In an article on “their favorite books of 2007,” New York Times art and architecture critics write “there is more to art books than gorgeous illustrations.”

As an example of a book that is more than just “gorgeous illustrations, they name Yale’s The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, edited by Gary M. Radke. Art critic Roberta Smith calls the book “a handsome and unusually handy (because narrow) catalog that may be the first book in English devoted exclusively to this masterpiece.” She praises The Gates of Paradise, saying that it “brims with research gleaned from a newly completed 25-year conservation process and has essays by a dozen American and Italian scholars, leading off with an especially inspired one by Andrew Butterfield, a writer and Renaissance sculpture expert.” Read more about this favorite and others here.

In an article for the Holiday issue of the New York Times Style Magazine, Carol Kino praises another art book recently released by Yale Press, Calder Jewelry, edited by Alexander S. C. Rower and Holton Rower. Kino says that “leafing through the book feels like taking a trip through art history.” You can read more from this beautifully illustrated article, or see more images from the book.

Featuring around 300 bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and rings––along with inventory drawings and historic photographs––this stunning book examines Alexander Calder’s captivating jewelry.

Benjamin Genocchio of the New York Times reviewed Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds as a “fine exhibition,” for which Yale Press released the catalogue by Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez Ruiz. Genocchio went on to call it “undoubtedly the largest exhibition at the [Yale Center for British Art] in some time” and noted that “the displays and research yield fascinating stories, not only about art’s relation to history but also about the appalling cruelty that humans inflict upon one another.” Read the entire review here.

And Edward Rothstein wrote an article on the opening of the Museum at Eldridge Street, after 20 years of reconstruction. He talked to the “knowledgeable” Annie Polland about what used to be the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Polland’s YUP-released book, Landmark of the Spirit, is forthcoming.