THE ART OF LOOKING UP

by Catherine McCormack (White Lion £30)

ANOTHER simple idea, executed with great style and erudition.

McCormack, who teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, looks at 40 spectacular ceilings from around the globe and writes about them in an accessible, entertaining, art-historical style.

Or you can just look at the photographs, which are glorious: Peter Paul Rubens’s extraordinary paintings on the ceilings of the Banqueting House in London, one of the last things Charles I would have seen on the way to his execution; Cy Twombly’s 2010 painting in the Louvre, ‘more blue than is actually comfortable’; and this one, the hypnotic domed ceiling of Imam Mosque in Iran. I bet McCormack’s neck aches.