The History of Western Art

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes, or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves?

The History of Western Art shows how painters, sculptors, and architects of the Western world have expressed the religious, political, and aesthetic belief systems of their age. From the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind. He or she has always started with reality and then selected and reshaped that reality to create a parallel world of the imagination.