An essential sourcebook for students and the only reader to cover such an extensive time period, this unprecedented collection of primary texts is organized in three parts, mirroring the three Art & Visual Culture textbooks. Included are extracts from Vasari, Panofsky, Ruskin, and more, on topics from sacred art to landscape design and the birth of modernity.

The essays in this volume engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalization, cultural difference, and curating, as well as explorations of key artists and movements and some less well-documented work by contemporary artists.

Influential Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901-1991) was, throughout her long career, best known for her large-scale abstract paintings. Marrying influences from Islamic, Byzantine, and Eastern art with the bold color of the Fauvists, the geometrical dissonance of the Cubists, and the precise lines of Mondrian, Zeid developed an abstract vocabulary that was a synthesis of East and West and uniquely her own.

Zeid's career began in the 1920s in Paris and took her back to her native Istanbul, then to Berlin and Budapest before a return to Paris in 1946. In the mid-1970s Zeid moved to...