Art. This sly little English word is often used to refer to one of the most enduring and mysterious of human activities. 30,000 YEARS OF ART (Phaidon, £29.95) is subtitled “The story of human creativity across time and space”. “From the time when human beings can first be called human,” says its brief preface, “they have felt compelled to depict themselves and their world — as gods, mortals, animals or abstractions”.

This splendid compilation brings together high-quality reproductions of a thousand masterworks from different countries, cultures and civilizations in simple chronological order. The writing is lucid, informative and gently interpretative, though not entirely free of printing errors. There are fascinating time-lines and a glossary at the end, the former allowing us to find, and lose, our own ways through “the story of art” — to use the title of E.H. Gombrich’s classic, which this book brings to mind. The time-lines, with their useful thumbnail prints, create surprising and illuminating pairings in time — Velázquez’s Las Meniñas and a jade wine-cup for Shah Jahan by an unnamed artist, a Japanese Noh mask and David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Friedrich’s Monk on the Seashore and a Maori carved centre-post, or an Indonesian Hanuman puppet and Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold.

Bottom left are the hand stencils in the Cave of the Hands in Argentina’s Rio de las Pinturas. They were created by hunter-gatherers sometime between 11,000 and 7,500 BC. They placed their hands on the rock surface and blew paint, usually through a hollow tube, in a diffuse cloud around them. Extreme left is Masaccio’s fresco, painted between 1425-28, of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise — “flung into history by God,” says the Phaidon text. The fresco is in the Brancacci chapel in Florence. Masaccio’s Adam and Eve are too overwhelmed by shame to see that “the world was all before them”, as Milton would make them feel a couple of centuries later.

Some of the most exquisitely sophisticated works in this collection are from China and Japan. Their profound refinement and minimalism make the splendours of, say, the Spanish Baroque look disconcertingly over the top. Here is a Chinese scroll, kept in the Shanghai Museum of Art, called Studio of True Appreciation (1549). It is done with ink and light colour on paper by the calligrapher, poet, painter and “the very embodiment of Ming dynasty culture”, Wen Zhengming. The artist’s friend sits with another friend in the central studio of this picture, discussing the scroll unrolled between them. Dusk falls as tea is being made in the room on the right, and the friend’s collection of books can be seen in the smaller room to the left. Another visitor stands by the riverbank outside.

Bottom left is The Human Condition (1933), an oil on canvas about an oil on canvas, by the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte.