30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity Across Time & Space

Following on from Phaidon's bestselling The Art Book, published in 1994, 30,000 Years of Art was conceived and edited by Phaidon editors as a follow-up volume. First published in 2007, the book offered an original and accessible way of looking at art, presenting the story of human creativity. Great works of art from all periods and regions in the world are arranged in chronological order in a book designed for a general readership. The book breaks through the usual geographical and cultural boundaries of art history to celebrate the vast range of human artistry across time and space. Revised and updated, this new medium-format edition will feature over 600 works of art from the original edition, but will also boast newly added twentieth- and twenty-first century examples.

Each work is accompanied by key caption information (date, title, place of origin, style or culture, medium, dimensions etc.), and a text that provides critical review of the work, placing it in its art historical context and thus explaining its contribution to the development of the history of art. The book presents art in a way different from other art history compendia, revealing the huge diversity, or in many cases similarity, of man's artistic achievements through time and around the globe. Ordered chronologically, the resulting timeline of works leads to compelling browsing: surprising juxtapositions offer intellectual pleasure and a sense of wonder and discovery. The selection of works from across the world, arranged in the sequence in which they were made, will take the reader on a global and historical journey, as a Chinese Shang urn stands next to a Mycenaean vase, and Michelangelo's Slave is followed by a contemporaneous male sculpture from Nigeria. The chronological arrangement responds to such questions as where does the earliest art appear? What were artists creating in China or Africa while Rembrandt was painting portraits in Leyden? How were similar subjects - equestrian themes, landscapes, religious scenes - manipulated by artists in Aztec Mexico and Medieval Europe?

Although the sequence of works in the book is strictly chronological, the selection of entries for an individual culture will comprise an abbreviated history of the art of that people. Thus, while artworks from ancient Greece or the European Renaissance or pre-Columbian Americas will be interspersed with contemporaneous works created in Africa, India or Japan, an extraction of the Greek or Renaissance or American works could stand alone as an essential abridgement of the finest art of that period or culture.