The Annotated Mona Lisa

An illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to contemporary world art, from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media in an easy-to-understand format.

This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated from the second edition published in 2007, including a new chapter about recent artists and movements. Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to the Present takes art education out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes the history of art movements accessible to beginning art museum-goers—even at a cursory reading.

From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from African art to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections (prehistoric and medieval, renaissance and baroque, the nineteenth century, modern art, and contemporary art) covering a little more than 230 pages.