Price: $49.95
Publisher: Phaidon
A spectacular feat of cross-cultural history, visual presentation, and mathematics. (I invoke the last term because the 13-pound book costs only $50.)It begins in 28,000 B.C. and ends with an earthwork under construction in the Arizona desert, and every page is devoted to a single piece of art, with a few informative paragraphs. An Italian Renaissance portrait, for example, faces an Iranian carpet created the same year. This book is staggering, in at least two senses of the word.
