Conventionally, art history surveys are aimed at students, a vast, ever-renewing market that has made these books a gold mine for their publishers. Their authors—the most notable names are Helen Gardner, Horst Janson and Marilyn Stokstad—use clear, jargon-free language to present the art of the ages chronologically. The Early Renaissance led to the High Renaissance, which led to Mannerism and so on. This organizational framework is so clear and so sensible that any publisher who wants to win a share of the market has followed it.

Phaidon Press and Thames & Hudson, both British firms, are boldly trying something else. Phaidon’s offering, 30,000 Years of Art, is huge, even for a survey. With authorial credit going simply to the house’s editors, the book runs to 1,072 pages and is much too heavy to hold comfortably on your lap for long. What makes 30,000 Years unique is that it presents one artwork per page, starting with the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, an astonishingly accomplished carving on a mammoth tusk, circa 28,000 b.c., and ending with James Turrell’s still unfinished Arizona earthwork Roden Crater.

In between are 998 masterpieces of world art, ranging from the familiar stars of the Western tradition to such varied fare as an Australian aboriginal sash painting, circa 17,000 b.c, and a golden Calima mask from Colombia, 500 b.c, as well as a gorgeous painting on silk from Korea from 1447. Every work is presented in an excellent color photograph accompanied by a crisply written caption plus a listing of its place of origin, title, date of creation and present location. (The last allows you to use this book as a guide to 1,000 works of art you should see before you die.) It’s a very handsome, if unwieldy, package.

By using the traditional chronological order, Phaidon also emphasizes the synchronous creation of treasures in different cultures. The temporally related works appear on facing pages. You will learn, for instance, that around 1250 a Yoruba sculptor in Nigeria made a beautiful head of a woman in terra-cotta while in Germany an artist known as the Master of Naumburg was turning a block of limestone into no less striking full-length likenesses of a noble couple for the exterior of the Naumburg Cathedral.

So what? It’s nice to know that so much great art was being made simultaneously, but it’s not going to help art history majors pass their exams. So Phaidon is aiming 30,000 Years mainly at people who want a big, sumptuous art book for their coffee tables. What is more, the publisher is confident it can sell out its initial run of more than 200,000 copies. It has, after all, sold millions of its Art Book, a similarly oversized dictionary of worldwide art. And the price is right: A bargain at $50, 30,000 Years makes a terrific gift.

The latest survey from Thames & Hudson, Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, reverts to the familiar form, describing successive art movements in various parts of the world. But where most surveys, including 30,000 Years, are written by teams of experts, Mirror is written by just one. Julian Bell, himself an English painter, turns out to be a wonderful guide. He has a passion for art, a good eye and a writing style full of grace and energy. He sees art history, he writes, “as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continuously reflected back at us—rather than as a window which opens onto an independent aesthetic realm.” For example, he senses in the huge, mysterious stone Olmec heads in Mexico—“at once so compact and so fleshly”—an “archaic totalitarianism clenched up in the basalt’s mass.”

Most art surveys begin with prehistoric cave paintings. Bell starts much earlier, with a chipped rock ax that illustrates the instinct to go beyond functionalism to create something beautiful. As he cruises lucidly through the millennia, he does what Janson et al. avoid: He tells stories, draws conclusions and remembers that his audience—people who want to know something about art—hunger for substantiated opinion. Bell can even help students get through their courses.