While Galileo suffered under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War ruined Europe, and the Pilgrims struggled to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for cen…
Since its first publication this book has been hailed as the most up-to-date and wide-ranging history of art ever published in a single volume. This quote from Andrew Graham Dixon describes the book: 'Spanning continents and millennia, ranging from man's earliest cave paintings to the works of Picasso and beyond, this is a hugely ambitious book. But thanks to the breadth of their scholarship, t…