Civilisation

Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: A Personal View grew out of his BBC television series and follows how Western Europe, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, produced the thinking, literature, architecture, art and remarkable people that together form its civilisation. It travels from ninth-century Iona to twelfth-century France, and on through Florence, Urbino, Germany, Rome, England, Holland and America. Clark sketches the men and women who gave civilisation new energy and the works they produced in architecture, sculpture, painting, philosophy, poetry, music, science and engineering, from Brunel's bridges back to Raphael's School of Athens. The 1969 book has never been out of print.

Paul Graham wrote in his essay Some Heroes that for anyone reading just one book on art history, this is the one he would recommend.