This course opens in prehistoric Europe and traces the development of art and architecture from the dawn of western civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt through the emergence of classicism in ancient Greece and Rome.  The course studies the influence of Judeo-Christian and Islamic belief systems on the development of art and architecture in the first millennium and the history of the Renaissance and the institutionalization of the Fine Arts in the second millennium.  The course concludes with an examination of modernism and the avant-garde, introducing important 20^th-century movements such as expressionism, abstraction, surrealism, and absurdity. This course can be used to satisfy University Studies requirements.