This is the survey doorstop, the one that gets assigned. Marilyn Stokstad wrote the first edition in the nineties at Kansas, and she did something the old standbys hadn’t: She quit treating art history as a straight line from Greece to Paris and pulled in Asia, Africa, the Islamic world, and the Americas as their own stories, plus a lot more women. Michael Cothren, a medievalist at Swarthmore, came on for the fourth edition and has carried it since; Stokstad died in 2016, right around when this one landed. Volume 1 is the first half, cave paintings through the fourteenth century — Lascaux, Egypt, Greece, Rome, early Buddhist and Hindu India, Tang and Song China, West African bronzes, Maya and Moche, Islamic Spain, and the whole Romanesque and Gothic run. It’s the sixth edition, 2017, and the tone is the selling point. It’s warm. It explains things instead of assuming you already know. Used copies go cheap because the seventh is out.