History of Art: From the Middles Ages, to Renaissance, Impressionism and Modern Art

by Sarah Goulding (Editor), Andrea Belloli, Ihor Holubizky

From the Renaissance to the Baroque, from the Impressionists to the Surrealists, this gorgeous, visually stunning new book covers the entire range of popular Western art from the early medieval period to the present day. It is a perfect gift for the art lover.

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction

200 pages

First published November 9, 2005

Reviews

[Bernardo Arcos Álvarez]

This book is a compilation of brief artist biographies. Examples are well chosen, and the overall design is beautiful, however, I wonder who decided to include Hobbema and discarded Jacques Louis David and Diego Velázquez.
I'm not an expert, but I see History of Painting as a parabola: with a glorious beginning in the ancient Greece and Rome, with a long epitome that lasted from the Renaissance to the Surrealism and a dramatic, chaotic and catastrophic fall in the last forty years. It can only be the result of an absolute lack of independent reasoning, of homogenization of opinion, of the art becoming a mere business.
A studio called "The Factory", a man painting meaningless unsightly stains on a wall, that all makes me want to catch a bullet with my head.
I'm not saying non-representational art is garbage, for Kandinsky's work is comparable in complexity and beauty with a Chopin's nocturne, I'm saying that the vulgar simplicity, and disgusting emptiness of most of the contemporary art makes me feel like I should have been born two hundred years ago.

[Sybyl]

✨3.4 stars✨

I wish this was more about the titular artworks from the West instead of the artists, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Some of these people's lives were so interesting I had to conduct further research—always a nice brain exercise—and was thus pleased to learn more about their craft and art (some of which is subjectively better than what was included in this tome, ngl).

[LudmilaM]

3.75 stars. Lovely book, just a bit disappointed that the description for each painting was mostly a biography of the author and precious little about the actual painting. I hoped for more description of composition & symbolism for each picture.