Appropriate for one-semester art history surveys or historically-focused art appreciation classes, "A History of Western Art, Fourth Edition", offers an exciting new CD-ROM, additional color plates, and a number of new features. Focusing on the Western canon of art history, the text presents a compelling chronological narrative from prehistory to the present. A new 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.
Whilst this is obviously a textbook, and you have to be a bit of a nerd to read it when not doing the subject, I actually enjoyed it! Basically a multi millennia review of the story of art, from its earliest origins in cave paintings, (though I was disappointed that rock art in the NW of WA did not get a mention) through to the present day. Gave me a very strong sense of its development and how everything fits into the long development of painting, sculpture and architecture, to give sense to what we see today. as such it will have changed and allowed an (I suspect very superficial) analysis of everything I see from now on!
A lucid, comprehensive introduction to Western Art History. The gorgeous large reproductions of the paintings accompanied by the empirical observations of the works trained my eye well.
I wish more text was spent synthesizing rather than describing things. I've seen it being done in other sources much better.
Suck it, H.W. Janson. Schneider Adams is just a little bit more preferable to me even though you are still the standard text for all into Art History courses.