Art across Time seeks to inspire students in their study of art through a combination of large-scale reproductions, extensive use of color photographs, and effective incorporation of contextual material.

Large format illustrations, 80% in color, allow students to appreciate delicacies of technique and detail that are lost in smaller or black and white representations. Similarly, the writing emphasizes the motivations and environment of the artists to give students a sense of the intent or purpose of the work.

The arts of cultures beyond the West are presented thematically and at points of cross-cultural contact?Japan and the Impressionists and Africa and the European Avant-Garde?in Windows on the World sections.

In all, Art across Time, presents the history of art as a dynamic narrative grounded in scholarship, a narrative that is a dialogue between modern viewers and the past.

Introduction Why Do We Study the History of Art?

Part I

Chapter 1 The Art of Prehistory

Window on the World: Rock Paintings

Chapter 2 The Ancient Near East

Chapter 3 Ancient Egypt

Chapter 4 The Aegean

Part II

Chapter 5 The Art of Ancient Greece

Chapter 6 The Art of the Etruscans

Window on the World: China: Neolithic to First Empire

Chapter 7 Ancient Rome

Window on the World: Developments in South Asia

Chapter 8 Early Christian and Byzantine Art

Window on the World: Developments in Buddhist Art

Part III

Chapter 9 The Early Middle Ages

Window on the World: Mesoamerica (1500 B.C. -A.D. 1500)

Chapter 10 Romanesque Art

Chapter 11 Gothic Art

Window on the World: Buddhist and Hindu Developments in East Asia (6th-13th Century)

Chapter 12 Precursors of the Renaissance

Part IV

Chapter 13 The Early Renaissance

Window on the World: Perspective in Asian Painting

Chapter 14 The High Renaissance in Italy

Chapter 15 Mannerism and the Later Sixteenth Century in Italy

(and more...)