Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art, from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media.

"Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge."--Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern

This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art education out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes the history of art movements accessible to beginning art museum-goers - even at a cursory reading. From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from African art to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections (prehistoric and medieval, renaissance and baroque, the nineteenth century, modern art, and contemporary art) covering a little more than 200 pages.