Simon Schama's Power of Art

by Simon Schama

BBC Books £25, pp416

Words do not often fail Simon Schama. He is, by his own admission, loquacious. The passion he has for the masters he profiles in his Power of Art, a lush volume to accompany his new TV series (Fridays, BBC2, 9pm) is fluently and floridly expressed. At best, this enthusiasm is infectious. It transmits the drama in the lives of his favourite artists and their work as colourfully as the book's glossy reproductions.

But Schama's transports of delight can also be an impediment. He describes his face-to-face encounters with Caravaggio canvases and Bernini busts as personal epiphanies, essential to understanding their true essence, which somewhat diminishes the value of reading about them in a book. If you doubt the 'hypnotic effect' of David's 'A Marat', he says, 'why not hop on the Eurostar and see for yourself?' If you really want to appreciate Turner's watercolours, 'what you should do is take a trip to Boston', where they hang in the Museum of Fine Arts.

Schama deals with eight artists in discrete chapters. Each is a well-crafted biography and exposition, but there is no thesis that links them. His goal is to answer the question: 'What is art really for?' But he explains only what it does (with emphasis on what it does to the author) - it moves people, it pleases the senses. Schama is a learned art historian. He touches intriguingly on themes such as Modernism's tricky relationship with communism and fascism, but only briefly. That is a shame. Art can send shivers down spines, but that is only the beginning of its ambition.