Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One object per chapter, twenty of them, spread over 14,000 years — the painted bulls at Altamira, the mosaics at Ravenna, a Seljuk incense burner out of twelfth-century Iran, a Byzantine funeral chapel, then Botticelli, Caravaggio, Monet, Sargent. Her questions aren’t the ones you got in school. Who owned this thing and how did they look at it? Where was it actually sitting? How did it end up behind glass in a museum halfway around the world? How did it get famous in the first place? It’s a book about slowing down in front of one object instead of marching through a survey course, and it’s written for people like me (and maybe you) who just want to know more.