This deliberately concise history is something of a tour de force, intended to stimulate the expert as well as to guide the layman. Throughout, it is motivated by the author's belief in art as a vital activity and, therefore, as something that - in the words that open and close the book - "has not ceased to be produced." Not a bare factual outline, it concentrates on individual works of art, whether a Minoan statuette, a Gothic reliquary, or a Raphael portrait. What is told is, in effect, the story of Western man's creative energy constantly finding new ways to fill the world with non-natural objects. The author imposes no arbitrary pattern or simple explanation but, rather, emphasizes the novel element of surprise in every work of art that has often disconcerted people at first sight - long before nineteenth- and twentieth-century controversies about "modern" art. The result is a book that does justice to major styles and many artists over the whole course of Western art, and also communicates a sense of the authors own enjoyment in looking at works of art of every kind.
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