Holiday Buying Guide

$49.95

That's a lot of art. But this boulder-sized (1064 pages) picture book from Phaidon is endlessly entertaining. It's a chronological run through the art of the entire world, from The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, circa 28,000 B.C., to James Turell's still unfinished earth-and-sky work Roden Crater. By devoting each page to a single large picture it allows side by side comparisons of, say, Michelangelo's Dying Slave, circa 1514, and a Persian watercolor portrait from around the same year, or a carved African mask produced not long after Constable put the finishing touches on his View of Salisbury Cathedral, just across the page.

— Richard Lacayo