Michael Glover picks the best art books of the autumn

The painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp regarded the idea of any work of art willingly incarcerated in a museum with horror and contempt. His admirers will take pleasure in Marcel Duchamp, a facsimile of a wonderful monograph, first published in 1959, that this wackiest of rebels co-wrote with the art historian Robert Lebel. Newly reissued in a luxurious slip-cased edition (Hauser & Wirth, £100), it includes a useful piece of advice from his lifelong admirer André Breton, who writes of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even with all the usefulness that we might expect the founding father of surrealism to muster: “One should keep it luminously erect, to guide future ships across a civilisation which is ending ...”

Those with deep pockets and lovers (or admirers) to impress should consider investing in Munich-based art historian Norbert Wolf’s latest magisterial survey The Renaissance Cities: Art in Florence, Rome and Venice (Prestel, £99; Tablet price £89.10). The pressing questions to be answered are these: what exactly did this “renaissance” amount to? And where and when did it flourish most magnificently? Answer: glance back at the book’s title. Also slip-cased, it is copiously illustrated with ­masterworks by the likes of Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Leonardo.