DANCESCAPE.

* New York City museums are outdoing themselves this season in exhibiting rare and exotic objects, many in some way connected with dance. The elaborately attired figure at left is a nineteenth-century female acrobat, on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its exhibition Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 (through January 24). Life-size figure painting was a rarity in the Islamic world, but as the show demonstrates, it flowered in Persia.

Victorian Fairy Painting, at the Frick Collection through January 17, highlights a nineteenth-century craze. Inspired by forces as varied as Shakespeare and spiritualism, artists in Britain turned out wildly popular elfin studies, such as Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849), shown here. The scanty dress of the sprites also had some appeal. The Frick won't admit children under ten years old.

Harris Green

* Sandra Lee and Thomas Hunt's book, At the Ballet: Onstage, Backstage (Universe Publishing), a collection of their striking photographs taken in the past five years, could as easily have been entitled "The Making of a Company," in this case, the San Francisco Ballet. The book, which Lee and Hunt designed, opens with a picture of young girls, watching older students in class, and ends with an acton shot of former principal Yuri Zhukov.

In between, there are some 150 intimate studies of America's oldest ballet company, many as bold and endearing as this one for Muriel Maffre and Cyril Pierre, in rehearsal of Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Captions are often quotes from the dancers. The text includes profiles of SFB company members and interviews with Mark Morris, David Bintley, and artistic director Helgi Tomasson.

Rita Felciano

* Harlequin, Columbine, Pulcinella, and other members of the commedia dell'arte stock company have inspired artists over the centuries. Among twentieth-century choreographers, Balanchine, Massine, and Fokine found them worthy subjects.

Now Abrams has turned its pages over to one of the most obstreperous of the lot and published Lynne Lawner's Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia Dell'Arte and the Visual Arts--208 pages and 180 illustrations, covering everything from oil painting to films.

And we do mean everything. Joseph Cornell (1903-72), whose creations were small boxes filled with objects, was represented with A Dressing Room for Gille, a character in many of Watteau's clown studies.

H.G.

* Dancers are required to be in superb shape, but to pose for one of photographer Howard Schatz's famous underwater studies, they must be really fit. Schatz insists that his subjects be able to swim 44 feet submerged--in one breath. Fortunately, many dancers and models qualify, as you can see in Pool Light, the hefty coffee-table spectacular Graphis Press just issued. Among its 132 photographs is this effervescent one of Mary Arnett.

H.G.