Hartt Frederick. Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture: Volume I: Prehistory, Ancient World, Middle Ages

Harry N. Abrams, 1976. — 474 p.The most comprehensive and best-illustrated introduction to Western art, the two volumes of ART: A History of Painting, Sculpture, And Architecture. Its author, Professor Frederick Hartt, is a truly gifted teacher. He evokes the place and time in which each great civilization flourished, and shows how individual works of art express it. Volume I begins with the Old Stone Age and follows mankinds artistic development through the end of the Middle Ages. Its three major parts—Art Before Writing, The Ancient World, and The Middle Ages—examine the painting, sculpture, and architecture of more than twenty civilizations. The arts of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Islamic world are studied in detail, as are those of the Early Christian and Early Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic eras.