Purposes of art : an introduction to the history and appreciation of art / [by] Albert E. Elsen.

Introduction: the artist's past training and status
Art as a matter of life and death
Images of Gods
Religious architecture
The sacred book
The synthesis of heaven and earth fifteenth-century Flemish art
The synthesis of heaven and earth fifteenth-century Italian art
Michelangelo
The synthesis of heaven and earth in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art
The table in Baroque secular art
Rembrandt
Images of authority
The architecture of authority
To be of one's time: the synthesis of past and present in nineteenth-century art
Themes from nature
Painting and objects
The portrait in painting and sculpture
The figure in sculpture
Picasso
Imaginative art
Death of the window and life of the square: abstraction.