What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes, or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors, and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political, and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind. He has always started with reality, but has selected and reshaped that reality to create a parallel world; a world of the imagination.