This book, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, owes its unique popularity to its direct and simple writing, aiming to help the beginner "put in understandable order the wealth of meanings, periods, and styles accumulated in the pages of the most ambitious works" and, using their intuition in the psychology of visual arts, to see the history of art as "a continuous interplay and alternation of traditions, where each work refers to the past and points to the future," "a living chain that connects our era to the era of the Pyramids."