An up-to-date and comprehensive guide to 150 of the most significant styles and movements that have shaped art history through time. All art is of its time, and this book is the first survey that explicitly embeds styles, schools and movements within the politics and culture in which they arose, by means of timelines, textual references and the unique present-to-past arrangement of the book. An essential guide to art styles and movements and a history of world art from the present day to Greek antiquity, this book places the reader in the art historian's seat, offering an opportunity to work backwards from our own time and reconnect the dots, or even find new dots to connect. It revives art history, for both the specialist and the general reader coming to the subject with limited knowledge - it shows graphically that art history is a living thing, not dead.

Over twenty specialist contributors include Noit Banai, Lecturer of Visual and Critical Studies at Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Professor and Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario Lee Beard, British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London Lucy Bowditch, Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York Olga Goriunova, Assistant Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, Coventry Katie Hill, Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art and consultant lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Associate Professor of Art History at Emporia State University, Kansas Lloyd Laing, Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Archaeology, University of Nottingham Caroline Levitt, Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London Matthew McKelway, Associate Professor of Japanese Art History at Columbia University, New York Jeffrey Moser, Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History at McGill University, Montreal Stella Paul, formerly Educator-in-Charge of Exhibitions and Communication, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Alistair Rider, Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland Robert Shane, Assistant Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York Sarah Symmons, Reader Emeritus in Art History and Theory, University of Essex/p> Elsje van Kessel, Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland Alicia Volk, Associate Professor of Japanese Art History at the University of Maryland