1.1: Using This Textbook

About this Book

This textbook curates the scholarship of museums and online resources like Smarthistory into a single, cohesive, easily usable, accessible, and infinitely remixable virtual “textbook” that fulfills the requirements of a traditional “Survey of Western Art I” course. At the same time, it strives to embody a more global and less Eurocentric approach to art history, including emphasizing new findings in the field and broader academic and social concerns. This textbook was specifically designed to meet the requirements established by C-ID ARTH 110, “Survey of Western Art from Prehistory Through the Middle Ages,” but it is the editors’ hope that it will be equally useful in any similar Survey courses, as well as Art Appreciation classes.

Structure and layout

Like most survey texts, this one is laid out mostly chronologically, with the majority of the chapters dedicated to single geographical regions/cultures. An exception comes in the Medieval chapters, which have been reconfigured from the traditional structure—one codified in the C-ID descriptor for ARTH 110—that tends to privilege exclusively European objects and themes. Instead, three extensive chapters place the art of Byzantium and the Islamic world side by side with concurrent developments in Western Europe in an attempt at a more balanced, accurate representation of the global Middle Ages.

Each chapter begins with an introduction to draw in the reader and present themes the chapter will address. This is followed by a section called “Historiography (Writing History),” which invites students to look critically at the way these histories have been told and how they have been shaped—whether by accessibility to certain objects and sites; incomplete or limited knowledge of culture, language, and/or science; and/or by individual or national politics, prevailing discourses and ideologies. They also often address information about terminology contained within the chapter. These sections are followed by a brief “Chapter Overview” that serves as the glue binding together the articles, themes, and histories covered in the upcoming chapter, as well as providing relevant historical context and important notes about the time period, regions, and cultures discussed. Within this section, an “Objects Overview” gives a bulleted list of some of the traditional and unexpected works of art and architecture explored in the chapter. The section concludes with a list of targeted learning objectives and a list of optional resources for diving deeper into the material introduced in each chapter. A comprehensive glossary is provided both as a stand-alone section and as an in-text reference tool for those reading online. Finally, throughout the chapters, we wrote original sidebars called “Global Connections” to draw readers’ attention to areas of overlap and exchange within the wider global context, expanding the conversation.

Our story

The first iteration of this textbook was compiled by Cerise Myers,* and a grant from the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges’ Open Educational Resources Initiative (ASCCC OERI) allowed for the assembly of a team to transform it into a more complete, diverse, and cohesive product. Our team of five art historians represents five California campuses, including College of the Desert, Imperial Valley College, West Los Angeles College, Mt. San Antonio College, and Ventura College. Together, we have decades of experience teaching face-to-face and online; we have used all of the major publisher textbooks; and we bring a variety of different specialties in art history, ranging from medieval to contemporary West African. We range from full-time professors to multi-college adjuncts, and through this collaboration—a passion project for each of us—we have devoted our skills and diverse perspectives to provide a resource that eliminates the barriers, monetary and otherwise, that have for too long stood between our students and access to high quality art history textbooks.

We are grateful to the ASCCC-OERI for their support of OERs and California Community College (CCC) students and faculty. We particularly thank Shagun Kaur and Selena Silva at the ASCCC-OERI and Delmar Larsen and Josh Halpern at LibreTexts for their ongoing insight and support. We also thank Smarthistory, Boundless Art History, and Khan Academy for the treasure trove of openly-licensed academic articles. Museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have also provided generous permissions to images and/or content.

*Because of her foundational work on this text, several of her transcripts for student videos and background research help form the basis for our chapter introductions as well.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

With this textbook, we have aimed to provide a resource for students and instructors that is not only of the utmost quality, and entirely free to read online, but that can be customized to instructors’ preferences. We have carefully pursued images and text that are both of the highest scholarly caliber and licensed for sharing. Most of this material is licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and we have indicated where permissions were granted specifically for this project. If you believe an image or text has been used or cited incorrectly, please reach out so that we can remedy the error immediately.

Because this is primarily a curated resource, we recommend that references to individual articles be cited using the particular article’s author, either as is included in our text (i.e., “Glass, Robert. ‘What is Art History and Where is it Going?’ Introduction to Art History I, edited by Myers, et al. LibreTexts Libraries, 2022” or directly to the original source, following the article link at the bottom of each chapter page. To cite the textbook as a whole, we recommend “Myers, Cerise; Caldwell, Ellen C.; Phelps, Margaret; Soccio, Lisa; and Taylor, Alice, editors. Introduction to Art History I (2022). LibreTexts Libraries. (CC BY-NC-SA)"

Using this Book

Navigating LibreTexts

This book has been assembled in LibreTexts, the preferred platform of the ASCCC-OERI, which funded this project. LibreTexts allows for easy remixing of texts, either within a single resource or between multiple sources (learn more about the LibreTexts Remixer). It also allows users, through clicking the blue “Downloads” button on the textbook homepage, to download either the full textbook PDF, an import package for an LMS (e.g. Canvas), or an individual ZIP file. The same menu allows users to easily order a print book or download a ZIP file for publication using the provider of their choice.

The text can be navigated online in several different ways. Blue arrows at the right and left sides of each page allow readers to virtually turn the pages, moving either forward or backward. Clicking “Contents” in the narrow blue menu that runs down the left side of the screen provides the option to jump directly to any chapter. Expanding a chapter by clicking the plus sign (+) beside it allows for navigating directly into a given subsection.

At the top of each chapter page is a box that shows that chapter’s subsections along with the content covered in each. Each subsection page has its own Table of Contents in the upper right corner. This Table of Contents can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the plus (+) or minus (-) signs, respectively. Finally, a trail of digital “breadcrumbs” in the light blue ribbon near the top of the page (which can be expanded using the three dots or collapsed using the up arrow/caret [^]) allows for quick navigation to the parent subsection, chapter, and textbook home page.

Accessing Recommended Articles and Videos

Among the material included in each chapter are optional and recommended resources, including digital videos, interactive online materials, and additional readings. Occasionally, with media sites such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, readers might hit a paywall if they have already exceeded their allotted number of monthly complimentary articles. In this case, we encourage readers to check with their school or local libraries for access. Very occasionally, we recommend books/ebooks or academic journal articles that we think are important, timely, and of interest, but may not be immediately freely available online. Readers may check with their libraries, including interlibrary loan, to access those resources—and we have provided stable URLs to make searching for these resources more efficient.