For us it all began with Giotto. Zeuxis and Phidias are too remote and the Romans and Byzantines don't count. A sumptuous and definitive volume on the works of Giotto, accompanied by the penetrating text of Francesca Flores d'Arcais, has recently been published with 350 illustrations, of which 200 are in remarkably faithful color. And it all came to an end for us with Picasso, whose work has been so extensively explored and analyzed that we are astonished to have yet another superb book about his art, this one on his early landscapes, with more than 300 illustrations, two-thirds of them in color, and pertinent texts from various critics. In between these two are a remarkable number of beautiful publications recently produced to delight the aesthetic appetites of both general readers and knowledgeable connoisseurs.

Foremost among these is the "The Paintings of the Prado," that inexhaustible and indispensable treasure house. In addition there are valuable studies of Carpaccio, Parmigianino, Delacroix, Kandinsky and Chagall as well as more general works on art collecting in the 17th Century and Surrealism in exile (where it expired).

The catalogue of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, first published in 1990 and republished this year by Stewart Tabori and Chang, is an astounding collection of 827 paintings reproduced in color, accompanied by incisive and erudite comments by Robert Rosenblum, the distinguished critic of 19th-Century and 20th-Century art. The Musee d' Orsay contains 19th-Century works only, but these include many of the best-known and most beloved paintings ever executed, and the museum itself is, to quote Rosenblum, "the most glorious and comprehensive compilation of French painting in the world." Beginning with Delacroix and concluding with Derain, there are works of genius by the score.

"Art Today" includes a candid but apologetic text by Edward Lucie-Smith. It introduces itself with paintings of the 1960s and leads us through a chaos of "styles" up until the day before yesterday. Needless to say, the differences between the contents, significance, purpose, aesthetic nature and spiritual attainment of the works of art pictured in these two books is so profoundly dissimilar as to confound meditation. However, some glimmer of meaning (albeit perverse and pessimistic) may nevertheless emerge from consideration of the artistic abyss that separates a century of creative glory from the most horrendous 100 years since our ancestors--without education or ambition--painted prehistoric animals in all their majesty upon the walls and ceilings of secluded caverns.