A History of Western Art Author:Laurie Adams Appropriate for one-semester art history surveys or historically-focused art appreciation classes, "A History of Western Art, Fifth Edition", combines sound scholarship, lavish visuals, and a lively narrative to provide students with an accessible and engaging introduction to art history. Focusing on the Western canon, the text present... more »s a compelling chronological narrative from prehistory to the present. A non-Western supplement, "World Views: Topics in Non-Western Art", addresses specific areas of non-Western art and augments the Western chronology by illustrating moments of thematic relationships and cross-cultural contact.
Why do we study the history of art?
The language of art
Prehistoric Western Europe
The ancient near East
Ancient Egypt
The Aegean
The art of ancient Greece
The art of the Etruscans
Ancient Rome
Early Christian and Byzantine art
Romanesque art
Gothic art
Precursors of the Renaissance
The early Renaissance
The high Renaissance in Italy
Mannerism and the later sixteenth century in Italy
Sixteenth-century painting and printmaking in northern Europe
The Baroque style in western Europe
Rococo, the eighteenth century, and revival styles
Neoclassicism: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Romanticism: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Nineteenth-century realism
Nineteenth-century impressionism
Post-impressionism and the late nineteenth century
The early twentieth century: Picasso, Fauvism, expressionism, and Matisse
Cubism, futurism, and related twentieth-century styles
Dada, Surrealism, social realism, regionalism, and abstraction