Rating: 4 stars
Cover synopsis: With a full-color plate representing each artist, this book is an alphabetical reference to 500 of the world's greatest painters and sculptors, from antiquity to the present.
I've always wanted to learn more about art and art history, and this was a good sampling. It takes 500 different artists and shows one work from each of them. It was a nice introduction to some artists I hadn't heard of before, and it gave a brief synopsis of the work and the artist.
An in-depth exploration this isn't. It often left me wanting more. But it gave me a good taste of art from the 1200s to 1990s. And I flagged dozens of pages that I'm interested in researching further -- for instance, Riopelle, Turner, Marc, Grimshaw and Copely, to name a few. I should note that, being an art book, there is a bit of nudity in here. Some of it is artful and appropriate, but there were some that I felt the artist used only for shock value, and that I wouldn't want my children to stumble across. But that's an entirely different debate...
Overall, though, this was a nice coffee-table book. (Note: there are two versions of this book: A large coffee-table sized one published in 1994, and a smaller pocket-sized one published in 2005.)
