Art, culture and nature : from art history to world art studies / John Onians.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Introduction -- I. Art history, Kunstgeschichte and Historia -- II. World art studies and the need for a new natural history of art -- III. Inside the brain : looking for the foundations of art history -- IV. A natural anthropology of art -- II. Art and culture -- V. War, mathematics, and art in ancient Greece -- VI. Idea and product : potter and philosopher in classical Athens -- VII. Tabernacle and temple and the cosmos of the Jews -- VIII. From the double crown to the double pediment -- IX. Brunelleschi : humanist or nationalist? -- X. Alberri and [PHILARETE] -- XI. Leon Battista Alberti : the problem of personal and urban identity -- XII. Abstraction and imagination in late antiquity -- XIII. On how to listen to high Renaissance art -- XIV. The column : the material, the magic and the mind of architecture -- XV. Architecture, metaphor and the mind -- XVI. The last judgement of Renaissance architecture -- XVII. Serlio and the history of architecture -- XVIII. The system of the orders in Renaissance architectural thought -- III. Art and nature -- XIX. The origins of art -- XX. The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders : the case of the earliest European prehistoric art -- XXI. Introduction : art and ritual - the biological connection -- XXII. Greek temple and Greek brain -- XXIII. 'I wonder ...' a short history of amazement -- XXIV. Architecture and painting : the biological connection -- XXV. The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics -- XXVI. Chinese painting in the twentieth century and in the context of world art studies -- XXVII. The nature of art in Lin Fengmian's China.