Art Through the Ages: Ancient, Medieval & Non-European Art

by Helen Gardner, Fred S. Kleiner

This classic art history survey text has sold more than two million copies since it was first published in 1926. The ideal text for the full-year history course, it surveys the entire span of Western art from prehistory to the present and offers overviews of significant areas of non-Western art. * New to this * Increased number of illustrations, more in colour. * Heightened visual appeal and superior accuracy of colour resulting from printing at 175-line screen resolution. * Addition of new maps, timelines, and improved photographic views. * Reorganized, expanded, and revised chapters in Part One reflect significant changes in the field of ancient art over the last decade. (Author Fred S. Kleiner, Classical scholar, is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology, the official journal of the Archaeological Institute of America). * Inclusion of more art from North American museums facilitates students' viewing of actual works. * Inclusion of many new views of previously illustrated monuments. * Increased attention to social and political context of works of art in the ancient world. * Presentation of more classical works of art created for non-elite patrons. * Reorganized by Early Christian, Islamic, and Byzantine material. * Addition of twenty-eight new line art figures. * Expanded coverage of Chinese art and introduction of Korean art. * Expanded coverage of Mayan ceramics ans stelae, new coverage of Peruvian textiles and Colombian goldwork. * Revision of African art, updated in a separate chapter with twice as many images as the previous edition. * Reorganized chapters covering Northern and Italian Renaissance. * Reorganized coverage of eighteenth-century material. * Increased coverage of women and minority artists. * Totally reorganized nineteenth- and twentieth-century material, many new images from nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists.

Genres: Art, Art History, Architecture, History

688 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

About the author

Helen Gardner (1878–1946) was an American art historian and educator. Her Art Through the Ages remains a standard text for American art history classes.

Gardner was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and attended school in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. In 1901 she graduated with a degree in classics from the University of Chicago. After an interval as a teacher, she returned to the same university to study art history, and received a master's degree in 1918. In 1920 she began lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she would spend the rest of her career, with the exception of short appointments at UCLA and the University of Chicago.

Her major work, Art Through the Ages, was the first single-volume textbook to cover the entire range of art history from a global perspective. Frequently revised, it remains a standard textbook at American schools and universities. In 1932 she also published Understanding the Arts, an art appreciation text directed toward educators.

Reviews

[Jennifer Callahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written with medium quality illustrations.

[Andrew Volpe]

Art Survey I course textbook, Westfield State College, 1996.