Something there is that doesn’t love the survey of art history textbook. Just as with Robert Frost’s more pentametric unloved wall, everyone has a different opinion of just what it should keep in, or keep out. It’s a statistical fact that very few of the many aspiring tomes published in this category succeed in being accepted as required reading in big-enrollment introductory courses, thus rewarding underpaid professors with long-term royalty income. Even more discouraging to the hopeful authors, and unlike the never irrelevant and always assignable monograph even when out of print, the survey text once remaindered is no longer read at all. College library stacks are cluttered with such forgotten volumes, abandoned to yellow away in dusty oblivion. Furthermore, rarely do such efforts, even those that have enjoyed sales success, rise to the level of good literature. When I think of all the popular surveys I’ve assigned in my fifty years of teaching art history, from Robb & Garrison, through Gardner, Jansen, and Hartt, only E.H. Gombrich’s Story of Art, originally published in 1950, with over six million copies sold so far and now in its record sixteenth reprinting, is a true literary gem. In spite of its controversial...