What makes one person revere High Renaissance art but dislike the work of the impressionists? How can the work of Picasso be compared to that of Boticelli? The appreciation of art is so highly personal and subjective that it defies analysis and is as much a mystery as what actually inspires someone to become an artist in the first place.

To give an impression of the way that the styles have changed, The World of Art is ordered chronologically. Displaying paintings by date provides the reader with an impression of when the great artists were working as well as the way that art has changed over the years, in both subject matter and style. Over four hundred and fifty pages of magnificent full colour images allow this journey through the movements of the great names of Western painting - from the religious works of Cimabue and Giotto to such oddities of twentieth century art as Fauvism, Vorticism, or Action painting.

Great art is not merely a matter of brilliant technique, wonderful composition or ground-breaking theory - plenty of these artists have had one or more of these attributes but not been judged "great". What makes great art is something that moves the inner spirit and fires the imagination of the observer, something that manages to transcend the simple application of paint to canvas - that is what many of the Artists shown in these pages achieve.