Under the cover of this edition you will find not only the creations of Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh. We include among the masterpieces simple at first glance paintings by realists who had the courage to declare that simple peasants and hard physical work are quite worthy of the artist's brush; and individual works of representatives of pop art, which in the twentieth century provoked another round of controversy on the topic of "what is art"; and canvases by abstractionists who created new theories about the effects of color and form on the viewer; and in some ways naive and primitive works of the ancient archaic, without which, nevertheless, both the masterpieces of the Renaissance and the creative searches of our contemporaries would be impossible. From the origins of civilization and ancient frescoes to the Renaissance and Baroque, from classicism and romanticism to modernism and abstraction, this book has collected 1000 masterpieces of world art created by mankind in more than 5,000 years.