For courses in Art History, World Art, Art Appreciation. Art: A Brief History provides students with the most student-friendly, contextual, and inclusive art history survey text on the market. The most popular choice for the one-semester survey market, Art: A Brief History is a condensation of the best-seller, Art History. This new edition of Art: A Brief History is the result of a happy and productive collaboration between two scholar-teachers (Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren) who share a common vision that survey courses on the history of art should be filled with as much enjoyment as erudition, and that they should foster an enthusiastic, as well as an educated, public for the visual arts. Like its predecessors, this new edition seeks to balance formal and iconographic analysis with contextual art history in order to craft interpretations that will engage a diverse student population. A such, throughout the text, the visual arts are treated as part of a larger world, in which geography, politics, religion, economics, philosophy, social life, and the other fine arts are related components of a vibrant and cultural landscape.