Thursday, July 26, 2012




Without being immodest, this work constitute my legacy after forty years of art-history teaching.  The texts were written at various times.  I have done my best to bring them up to date.

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HISTORY OF ART HISTORY

OUTLINE

1. Introduction. Sequentiality in the history of art; art historians as bearers and shapers of art history; patterns of historiography; scope of art historiography; the kingdoms of art history; earlier approaches to the historiography of art; summary and prospect.

FOUNDATIONS

2. Greece and Rome. Magical roots of the art concept; emergence of the idea of personality; the Platonic reaction; Xenocrates; Pliny's synthesis; Vitruvius and architectural history; Pausanias; ecphrastic traditions of later antiquity; conclusion.

3. East Asia. Relation of art and writing; pre-Han crafts and rituals; Buddhism; Chinese concepts of historical development; emergence of the scholar-connoisseur type; Hsieh-ho's Six Principles; ranking of artists; the Northern and Southern schools; mainstream and eccentric traditions; Japan.

4. Europe in the Middle Ages. Byzantine continuation of ecphraseis; development of vocabulary; art works and dynastic achievement; monastic traditions and patrons; reemergence of the idea of the individual; sacred history as a theory of progress.

5. The Renaissance Tradition. Emergence of the modern idea of the Renaissance; Ghiberti's renovation of the Plinian concept; the Vasarian paradigm; its spread, first through Italy and then to other European countries (Bellori; Van Mander; Sandrart; Palomino; Walpole); academies; collecting and museums; conclusion.

6. Winckelmann: Predecessors, Accomplishment, Influence. The key dea that the focus of the discipline is art, not artists; other leading concepts; disparagement of the Baroque and fostering of emergent neo-Classicism; Winckelmann's successors; early stages of classical archaeology.

NEW BEGINNINGS

7. Romanticism and Reorientation. The emergence of aesthetic relativism; changes in the condition of artists; duality of contemporary styles and their analysis by contemporaries; the sublime; the attractions of the exotic.

8. Historicism and the Art Historian. The two historicisms (Hegel vs. Ranke); the particularist trend in art history: Rumohr, Passavant, Waagen; the Hegelian trend: Schnaase and Kugler; reasons for German primacy; Burckhardt.

9. Medievalism. The Gothic revival; the taste for the primitives; archaeology and Viollet-le-Duc; the emergence of iconography as a discipline; opening of new vistas.

10. Egypt and Egyptology. Pre-Champollion speculations; Napoleon's expedition and the Egyptian revival; the founding of Egyptology; affinities: Mesopotamia and prehistory.

11. Rehabilitations: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. The problem of occultation and revival; Baroque, Rococo, and Mannerism; Vermeer, El Greco, Botticelli, and Bosch; feminist rehabilitations; partial and failed rehabilitations.

12. Wölfflin and the Viennese. Visuality and dualism in Wölfflin; special character of Vienna: Riegl, Wickhoff, Schlosser; Strzygowski; the "New Vienna School."
13. Connoisseurship, "Micro Art History," and Formal Analysis. Connoisseurship: forerunners; Giovanni Morelli; the Morellian legacy; Bernard Berenson; aftermath.

14. Meaning. Hamburg and Aby Warburg; the heritage of iconography; Erwin Panofsky; criticisms of Panofsky.  Appendix: art history in the United States and the Transatlantic migration; Ernst Hans Gombrich.

INCORPORATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

15. Modern Art and Its History. Ambivalent attitudes toward the historiography of modern art; premises of the positive evaluation of modernism; rise of a system of perioidization: the "isms"; the modernist historiographer emerges; cubism and its historiography; the role of museum personnel; Alfred H. Barr, Jr.; coeval trends; Clement Greenberg; Russian modernism repressed and revived; modern art and the spiritual; ascent of the reputation of Marcel Duchamp; the historiography of modern architecture; modernism delimited?; conclusion.

16. Social and Political Themes. Foundations of the socioeconomic approach; Marxism and its affinities; social discontinuities; the imagery of state power; culture wars; conclusion.

17. World Perspectives. European lenses for viewing exotic societies; the morphology of culture and multiculturalism; the "Orientalism" question.

18. China, Japan, India, Islamic Lands. China: Origins of Western sinophilia; Chinese exports and Chinoiserie; Western scholarship. Japan: The opening of Japan and japonisme in the West; attempts at an overall interpretation; scholarship. India: Early contacts and misinterpretations; aesthetic reassessment. Islamic Lands: Artistic contacts and perceptions; the turn towards scholarship; Islamic art research today. Conclusion.

19. Pre-Columbian and Ethnic Arts. The primitive conundrum. Pre-Columbian art: Pioneers; Mesoamerican study matures; Andean research; North America. Ethnic Cultures and Their Arts: Early approaches to ethnic arts; intervention of artists and critics; complexity and controversy; conclusion.

20. New Departures. Deconstruction: method or mode?; Michel Foucault; the depth psychological approach to the creativity of artists; feminist art history; gay and lesbian scholarship; semiotics, structuralism and beyond; truce?; conclusion.

21. Epilogue. Successive models of art history; history of art historiography; new perspectives on the art historian; return to the problem of change; the sociology of knowledge; rhetorical analysis and historical semantics; individual words in context (historical semantics); other problems of language, past and present; concluding observations: technology and tomorrow.

THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY: INTRODUCTION




"Doing is by and large more important than theorizing about what is being done. But there are times when even the most spontaneous or instinctive cultural pursuits need to be examined in the light of the purposes they serve and the goals they seek." Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, p. xii.

Art historians are peculiar people. For a long time they practiced their craft discreetly, almost clandestinely, content to remain in the shadows as the stream of images poured forth from their slide projectors. In the darkened lecture hall the verbal commentary seemed to come not from the art historian, who was almost invisible, but directly from the images themselves. In this "coy science," to purloin the expression coined by Donald Preziosi, method was superfluous and the art historian was unimportant--the main thing was to get on with doing art history.i One almost had the impression that if one paused to reflect on how the task was being done it would no longer be possible to do it.
Admirable as it may have been as a commitment to professional modesty, this "stealth strategy" is no longer viable. Foregrounding of method and personnel is inescapable, for the humanities are in ferment, responding to challenges of all kinds.ii In the field of mainstream history, for example, one scholar has placed the ideal of objectivity under the microscope so as to direct critical attention to the foundations of that discipline, while another has sought to link the achievements of medievalists to personality characteristics and foibles.iii As these two studies show, assumptions that are not always made explicit or examined sufficiently have helped to shape inquiry in the humanities, which is conducted by real people, with their preferences, penchants, and blind spots.
Some observers have detected political biases. Literary scholars have asked whether their discipline might not have been entertaining ideological subtexts without being aware of them, and whether these may have shaped the "canon" of accepted texts studied in universities.iv The now familiar airing of the conflict over "political correctness" has brought the ferment in the humanities to the attention of the general public, albeit in a partial and distorted form.v
Setting aside, if we can, the sensational and transitory aspects of these disputes, we can detect at the core an eminently reasonable aspiration: a desire that each branch of the humanities come to know itself. Art history has arrived a little tardily at the assizes of self-scrutiny, but it has arrived all the same.
But what is art history as we have come to know it? Today the expression art history is the accepted designation for a discipline, practiced mainly in colleges and museums, that seeks to study works of art in a systematic way.vi In its concern with aesthetic objects it parallels musicology and literary studies. Like these disciplines art history employs words, with writing being still the preferred medium of communication. Video recordings, including those on Youtube, have come into some use as an educational tool, but advances in research are still usually conveyed in written form, accompanied by visual images, or "evidence," in the form of reproductions. Nowadays of course many of these papers are available on the Internet.
Words may be directed to art works in various ways. A few kinds of images, such as the emblems of baroque printed books, organically incorporate their own explanation; the image and the words are like Siamese twins, forever inseparable.vii  Some late medieval paintings incorporate explanatory captions.  As a rule, though, words consort with art works less intimately, with the result that we are free to access the verbal complement when we wish, or to disregard it. Although we cannot seem to stop talking and writing about works of art, we do not all say the same things. Experience has shown that there is no single authoritative interpretation, so that a painting by, say, Piero della Francesca or Johannes Vermeer will elicit varied, perhaps even contradictory explanations.
It is useful to distinguish between art history in the broad sense as a discipline, and art history as a chronological narrative--the restricted sense. Many kinds of serious discussion of artworks do not qualify as art history in this latter, narrower sense. A description of the brushwork of a Rubens painting, a report on the radiocarbon dating of a medieval sculpture, a study of the conservation of the Bonampak frescoes are not in themselves art historical, though they may contribute to generating a historical narrative that includes the works they study.viii
The word narrative is important. This book addresses the different types of verbal narratives that have arisen in an effort to explain the fact that works of art have come into being in a meaningful sequence.ix Strolling through any large modern museum we are aware that the objects look different in many ways, not simply because of medium and subject matter, but also because of their chronological positioning, their "period" in short. Some objects, we feel, look as they do because they are "early" examples of some particular trend, others seem to rank as "developed" or "mature" pieces, and still others qualify as "late." We can reach such conclusions in perusing the Egyptian wing or the eighteenth-century painting wing, or in any other part of the museum.
The main task of this book is a dual one. First, the following chapters seek to disclose the many attempts that have been made to understand the sequentiality of art, to construct art history in the strict sense. Second, such constructions do not arise out of thin air, but are devised by real people. It seems almost tautological to assert that art history was developed by art historians. These individuals, with their particulars of background, training, character, nationality, politics--even their sexuality--are an integral part of the story. For example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was a German Protestant turned Catholic, a literary scholar who remolded himself as an archaeologist and art historian, and a member of high society who was also a closeted homosexual. 
To understand this dual theme--art history and art historians--other contexts are needed as well, such as the history of aesthetics and the history of taste--as in the rise of the romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century. But the central theme of the book is the double one of the shaping of art history by art historians.
The word history stems from the Greeks.x To the Greeks we also owe certain basic schemes or templates for understanding the pattern of historical development. There are three elementary forms: ascent (or progress); descent (or decline); and cycle. Combining the first two options yields a fourth, mixed form: the bell curve in which an ascending movement finds its complement in a descending one. The different effects of these schematic models of conceiving cultural developments can be illustrated by their contrasting placements of the Golden Age. For the ascending model the Golden Age can only lie in what is to come, the future. For the descending model it occurs at the start, for everything that comes after must by definition be inferior. In the cyclical model Golden Ages come into existence over and over again. Finally, in the mixed scheme the Golden Age stands at the middle of the development, as the bell curve attains its height. 
These models lend themselves to metaphorical expressions, some quite vivid. The ascending model is easily visualized as an inclined ramp--or perhaps as the side of a mountain, on which humanity is arduously but tenaciously climbing. The descending model may assume the guise of a slide or chute. Etymologically (and metaphorically) the cycle is a circle or a wheel. Finally, the mixed scheme, the bell curve, has lent itself to the most inventive metaphors, such as human life, with its development from infancy and youth to maturity and then descent into old age, or the path of the sun as it rises, reaches its zenith, and then declines to its setting.
All these schemes recognize differences, which are plotted in symbolic space as higher or lower. One may ask what is it that ascends and descends. Varying criteria have been assumed, including technical proficiency, complexity, beauty, and illusion. A way of avoiding such judgments is suggested by another model, that of the statification disclosed by modern archaeological digging. At Troy (Ilion), for example, there are nine levels, the uppermost being the city of the Greco-Roman period. The separations between the strata generally result from some catastrophe or change in populations. Although we may be particularly interested in one layer or another--in this case, probably the layer corresponding to the Troy of Homer's Iliad--there is no reason in principle why one layer should be qualitatively better than another. Another point of interest in this model is the fact that logistically we encounter the latest layer first, because it is the one that is uppermost; in the process of digging down, the layer that is earliest chronologically comes last. This reversal of sequence is a useful reminder that in considering the historical developments we often start with the most recent past and work back gradually.
In art history, development can be tracked at a number of different scales, from what might be called microdevelopment--as seen in the conception, elaboration, and completion of a single work--to the grand sweep of whole styles and civilizations. Thus we can establish the history of the erection of the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut (ruled 1403-1382 B.C.) at Deir el Bahri near Luxor in Upper Egypt or we can survey the entire course of ancient Egyptian art over three thousand years from the beginning of dynastic times to the Late Period. These tracings of varying duration may employ similar or different patterns, according to what seems appropriate.
An old idea holds that there are but three canonical branches of the fine arts: architecture, painting, and sculpture. In this view other modes of expression belong at best to the minor arts. At various points in time this restrictive definition of media has been challenged, and ceramics, glass, furniture, and many other crafts have been incorporated into the sphere of the fine arts. Some aesthetic levelers have even maintained that the study of art should embrace the entire range of human artifacts, including even embossed cocktail napkins and bus transfers. For most of us, this hyperinclusivity would go too far. The matter of drawing such boundaries is not easily resolved, but the debate lends itself to historical examination. There is a history of concepts of art genres and this forms part of the history of art history in as much as the parameters of "what is fine art" have shaped the repertoire of objects that form the substance of the historiography of art.

Vastness and Limits of the Kingdoms of Art History.
The beginning of this Introduction alluded to a recent shift in art history in which the reticent phase that prevailed in the United States since the establishment of the discipline here in the early twentieth century (the "coy science") yielded to the contemporary self-examining one, sometimes termed the New Art History.xi Interesting as it is to compare these two phases, such an analysis would be inadequate, for art history has gone through many more historical permutations than most observers imagine.
In fact this book challenges the widely held assumption that art history is a recent arrival among the humanities. To be sure, American universities have fostered systematic pursuit of art history only since the second decade of the present century, when departments were authorized at Harvard and Princeton universities. Yet the body of this book shows that the discipline enjoys a continuous pedigree that reaches back to the early Renaissance, so that it is older than, say, musicology or the study of English literature which do not start until the eighteenth century.
Discarding the recent-origin hypothesis, one might be tempted to go to the other extreme, maintaining that some kind of organized writing about art has occurred since the beginning of literate society.  Yet this assumption of pervasiveness is also mistaken, for careful examination of the record contradicts the notion that art writing figures as the natural and constant handmaiden of art production itself.  The disjunction is shown by the fact that several important literate cultures, such as those of the pre-Columbian Maya and of the medieval Hindus, distinguished as they were by superlative achievements in the visual arts, did not give rise to significant traditions of their own of writing about the visual arts.  This absence is not necessarily a defect. Some cultural pessimists have held that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, as the "Alexandrian" phase of scholarship succeeds the classical age of creativity. In this view happy cultures are those that do not need to justify their art with elaborate written apologias. The problem with this conclusion is that it seems to idealize a "state of nature" in which the absence of certain types of consciousness equates with bliss.
At the other extreme, some Western observers, particularly those of earlier generations, have held that such cultures as the Maya and the Hindu not only lack art history but art itself. The languages of these peoples do not seem to contain terms corresponding to our word art; moreover, the objects they produced that resemble our art objects were created for religious, political, or practical purposes. In this now problematic Western view, these products do not belong to the history of art, which is restricted to the achievements of peoples who have knowingly created art in the Occidental understanding of the term--preeminently the ancient Greeks and Europeans since the Renaissance.
These last objections evoke two responses. The first consideration, which argues that the absence of a term proves the absence of a concept reflects a theory called Social Construction, which holds that we have only the capacities that our social situation allows. But this view seems false, for many human capacities have been enjoyed from time immemorial, long before their existence was recognized through the appropriate verbal analysis. For example, absolute pitch, the capacity of gifted musicians to identify any note without reference to musical scores, was discovered in the nineteenth century. Yet this does not mean that before the discovery no one had the gene for absolute pitch. The capacity was a reality, even though it was not conceptualized as such.xii In their everyday existence some individuals in all human groups seem impelled to create art of some sort or another regardless of their ability to conceptualize what they are doing in ways that we would recognize. Second, the fact that an object functions in one way does not prevent it from also functioning in another. Modern automobiles are means of transportation, but they may also be (as manufacturers cannily recognize) things of beauty. Scholars and the public have long recognized the outstanding aesthetic qualities of the altarpieces of the Italian Renaissance. The ritual function, which they had to fulfill in order to be accepted by the patrons who commissioned them, does not preclude them from also being aesthetic objects worthy to be included in our histories of art.
Why then does art history arise? In an important study, Joseph Alsop has pointed to a nexus between collecting and art history.xiii The collector acquires objects essentially for their "pastness," their capacity to transmit something of the sensibility of a bygone era. The accumulation of collections in turn calls for a body of writing to explain the objects acquired. In the course of this book we shall have occasion to see that collecting and art history do often run in parallel tracks.
At all events, the West has inherited a vast, disparate array of such writings, from multivolume histori­es to mundane contracts, from highly subjective biographies to matter-of-fact guidebooks and technical treatises.  This richness notwithstanding, the resulting amalgam of writings must always be viewed as a special creation--coming into being and justifying itself over and over again on different grounds. If the impulse to create art is a cultural universal, perhaps even a necessity for human survival, writing about art seems to be something supplemental, belonging to a second order.xiv Yet once the "art-writing machine" gets started it seems unstoppable.
As a scholarly and intellectual enterprise, art history arose from the confluence of a number of tributary streams, including personal accounts by artists themselves, biographies, lists of great masters drawn up by collectors and amateurs, technical treatises, legal records (including contracts), and narratives enshrining local patriotism (sometimes termed "boosterism").  Art history emerged tentatively as an autonomous discipline with the ancient Greek Xenocrates of Sicyon and with the Chinese literati, and then definitively with Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) and Giorgio Vasari (1511-1568). With this definitive birth (or rebirth) in the Renaissance art history stabilized a sense of its own purpose, without completely blending the external and partial motives that had character­ized the tributary streams.  These last, together with the overall ideological currents of each era, must be analyzed, while preserving a sense of the cumulative evolution of the discipline. 
A major task lies ahead, which will be the work of many scholars, to record the lives and achievements of individual art historians. To attempt such a harvest at this stage of research would be premature. Instead, this book groups the material under the headings of significant historical phases and themes, corresponding in large measure to the emergence of successive paradigms of the discipline, without attempting to present every detail in the intervening stages. The aim is to present a clear narrative so that crucial issues and contrasts will stand forth. To this end, many significant art historians of the past must be omitted or scarcely mentioned. Living persons appear but rarely, and when all is said and done some of those excluded may prove to be more important than those mentioned. The reason for this selectivity is that ideas rather than persons shape the guiding lines of the book. To be sure, ideas inhabit persons, and biographical episodes in the lives of the art historians who have the ideas oftentimes rank as deciding factors in their intellectual formation. Art history is ongoing and many new "growing points" of research are appearing. For obvious reasons only a selection of these can be reviewed in the last chapters of the book.

Disciplinary Boundaries.
For some time the scholarly world has resounded with paeans to interdisciplinary study. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries has long since ceased to be taboo, and has become a positive virtue. Indeed should boundary lines be honored at all? Now may be the time, as some urge, to "explode the categories," declining to acknowledge interdisciplinary barriers of any sort. However desirable such an outcome may be, the posited effacement of lines of separation has not been achieved, and is not likely soon to be so, in part because knowledge itself is constantly increasing in volume so that it becomes ever harder to keep up with one's own field, let alone to accept a friendly invitation to poach on someone else's turf. Moreover, the position we start from is one of inherited disciplinary distinctions. In order to orient ourselves, we need to form some sense of how the disciplines have grown up in their proud states of autonomy and self-assertion, and also, from these bases, how they have negotiated interaction and sharing of responsibilities.
Mention was made above of the parallel between art history and its objects of study, on the one hand, and musicology and literary study and their objects of study, on the other. Some have felt that the "sister arts" (as the group has been collectively termed) have evolved in harmony--that their histories are essentially similar.xv In fact, cultural historians seek to study them in connection with the history of thought and intellectual endeavor, and this approach will require attention from time to time in the chapters of this book.xvi
Apart from these alliances with neighboring disciplines, art history must share its own house, so to speak, with several related overlapping disciplines. Art history has evolved in close contact with, but also in distinction from two particular fields: art criticism and archaeology.  The term criticism (which is also well entrenched in literary study) implies a developed sense of intuitive understanding--especially with respect to new, or relatively new works.xvii When the practice emerged in the eighteenth century the public expected the art critic to advise the audience which objects to choose (critic deriving from ancient Greek krino, "to choose."), singling out those works which are intrinsically, so the critic believes, worthy of attention, due to their outstanding aesthetic qualities.  It would seem that one who would make such choices must necessarily rely upon subjective criteria, asserting a claim to enjoy a keener sense of quality than other mortals so as to judge which objects are worthy and which are to be ignored. In practice critics guard against arbitrariness by frequently conferring with artists and fellow critics. Moreover, while the objects that engage the critic's attention are new and ever changing, the field of criticism has its own distinctive history, providing a sense of balance.
Contrasting with the emphasis on innovation that marks art criticism, archaeology originally meant the study of things that are old (the first element of the word stems from the Greek adjective archaios, "old").xviii Traditionally the field has embraced preliterate cultures as well as such civilizations as those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome.  Recently, though, with the appearance of "industrial archaeology" remains from the nineteenth and the early twentieth century have come into the purview of the field. Most archaeologists would agree that their concern is with the total culture, of which art as such is only a small part.  The discipline considers itself an objective science, relying heavily on technology (such as radiocarbon dating), whereas art history sees itself and is seen as situated within the academic grouping termed the humanities. And whereas archaeology ideally attempts to recover and describe the totality of a past culture, art history seeks only a partial recovery, in a particular area.
Archaeology reconstructs a culture from the objects it leaves behind, and hence is linked to physical anthropology.  In a sense, archaeology is more ambitious than art history.  It attempts to be non-discriminatory, whereas art history is selective. In practical terms, archaeology is a field discipline, involving on-site digging and visual inspection of the context in which an object is found, while art history is developed in the comfort of the museum, the library, the archive, and the study. 
Looking at all three disciplines, we may situate art history as the intermediary between archaeology and art criticism.  In its middle position art history is more concerned with striving for objectivity than criticism but it is not as objective as archaeology.  Nonetheless, close bonds link the trio. All three direct their attention to material objects, in contrast to musicology or literary study which address creations that are not material.
Mention of music and literature calls to mind an approach that aims to embrace the whole field of human creativity: aesthetics.xix  That is perhaps best regarded as a subdiscipline of philosophy.  Perhaps because of its very ambitiousness aesthetics tends to suffer from a lack of concreteness.  In any event, as will be seen, art history is older and has been able to function largely without the assistance of aesthetics, though some art historians have also contributed to that field.

Art-Historical Language.
Encountering the art world today, laypeople and newcomers typically complain of the inaccessibility of the writings that come their way. Articles in the glossy art magazines, which address mainly modern and contemporary art, seem enveloped in dense clouds of arcane jargon. One senses that important things are being said, but the way in which they are expressed seems almost to constitute a private language designed to strengthen the bonds of elite circles of initiates while repelling outsiders. Sometimes the obscurity is linked to current ideological fashions. An article may urge that adoption of progressive political views is essential; however, the appeal is all too often couched in such obscure polysyllables that even sympathetic readers find it hard to assimilate. In this way the article effectively endorses the elitism that its writer claims to oppose.
Professional journals such as the Art Bulletin and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte are off-putting in a different way. These prestigious organs of the art-historical community seem austerely technical, dourly forbidding any effusions of enthusiasm or advocacy of the objects they discuss. Here too, just as in the otherwise livelier magazines of contemporary art, appeals to old-fashioned virtues like grace and beauty are taboo.
To some extent, these obstacles may be inevitable and even justified. Art-world magazines contain pieces in which critics are struggling to formulate, for the first time, a vocabulary to describe new work.xx Thirty years hence the descriptive strategies will be enriched and clarified, but the work will no longer be new. In its iconoclastic search for innovation contemporary art always seems to outrun efforts to capture it in words.
A different problem arises with the art of the past. As the body of this book shows, systematic study of art did not begin yesteryear. Art scholarship is a complex and specialized field and requires terms and usages of its own. The vocabulary and explanatory strategies deployed to analyze art in words reflect a considerable sophistication that has grown over time. The product--today's art history language--is a complex amalgam of the deposit of many cultures and centuries of development within cultures. To start from scratch and invent a new, simpler language would probably produce a more "user friendly" result, but it would go against the grain of art's interpretive community, which is constituted in large measure by the efforts it has made to master the traditions of narrative and explanation that have been bequeathed to it. In any event there would remain the adjustments and obscurities that inevitably accrue from the effort to translate experiences in a visual realm to a verbal one.
A few episodes in the development of art-historical vocabulary will illustrate the stock of inheritance that is an essential part of our story. The Greeks, who invented the western tradition of art history, began to inscribe their art vocabulary on a tabula rasa; they declined to borrow art terms from their predecessors in the ancient Near East. Indeed when the Greeks sought to describe two major aspects of Egyptian art they used their own words: obelisk ("little spit") and hieroglyph ( "sacred sign"}. Greek vocabulary came from two sources: workshop usage and the discourse of the learned. Contrast skiagraphia (shadow painting) and ropos (mixture of colors) with mimesis (imitation) and prepon (appropriateness).xxi The Greeks also invented some specific genres of writing about art, including periegesis (the guide book literature) and ecphrasis (vivid descriptions of works of art, whether real or imaginary).
The Romans found themselves in a more complex position, having to enrich the rather primitive Latin vocabulary so that it could convey all the nuances of the Greek. They used two procedures: forming new terms from native materials on the foreign model (what linguists term "calque" or loan translation) and direct borrowing. Thus qualitas was formed on the basis of Greek poiotes, while philosophia was simply purloined. As the text of Vitruvius (the creator of the standard Roman architectural treatise) shows, too much borrowing could lead to obscurity and misunderstanding. The meaning of some Latin terms changed over time. Amusingly, the word fornicatio ("vaulting"), which has a purely architectural meaning in Vitruvius, took on a totally different significance in Christian Latin.
Medieval ecclesiastical Latin supplied terms for liturgical objects such as aquamanilium (vessel for water) and ostensorium (monstrance).xxii There were also more general expressions, referring to techniques and styles, such as opus Saracenorum (Saracen work, Islamic art) and opus interrasile (a metalwork technique). Medieval masons developed an elaborate vernacular vocabulary comprising such terms as liernes and voussoirs.
The shop talk used by Renaissance artisans continued that of the medieval botteghe (workshops). But the new professional class of humanists, largely supplanting the medieval scholastics, created a new rhetoric for the description and praise of works of art.xxiii
State support in France, coupled with the complementary adversary tradition that made that country for long the cynosure of the avant-garde, helped to generate terms that were then exported to other tongues.xxiv However, just as the Romans had plundered the Greek vocabulary, the French took from the Italian, often by simple modification, as fresque from affresco and torse from torso. In borrowing from abroad, sometimes the two donor languages offer a choice: in English contrast Italian-derived studio with French-derived atelier. In our language such terms as impressionism and fauvism, vernissage and cloisonné are of course of purely French derivation.
If the French contributed many terms which were adopted into other languages, Germans pioneered a new mode of art historical narrative. This nineteenth-century achievement was governed above all by historical consciousness, the sense that each phase of art occupied a place of its own in a continuous march of progress. Passionate judgmentalism was out, detached explanation was in. The German writers were also influenced by the tone of work in the natural sciences, a status to which they wished art history to aspire.
In addition to borrowing terms from one language to another, the art vocabulary grows by comparison of effects received in one sense with another, as when we speak of colors as "loud" (hearing to sight) or "soft" (touch to sight).xxv These comparisons are sometimes said to be grounded in synesthesia, an ability (which seems to be relatively rare) to experience sensations normally received in one sense through another. These "synaesthetic" comparisons probably occur more frequently in some periods of art discourse than in others. One would expect them to be more common in the seventeenth century (the baroque) than in the fifteenth (the early Renaissance); this matter deserves further investigation. Synaesthetic comparisons also help to foster the idea of the "sister arts," that painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music are all kin. Else why would they borrow terms from each other with such ease?
As long as they are new, labels of styles such as cubism and futurism can serve as rallying points. This capacity for attracting converts has a more general application, as when in contemporary America the spread of the labels hippy, yuppy and guppy served as a multiplier effect, vastly increasing the numbers of people who could be classified by them. In the course of the eighteenth century the diffuse term romantic was gaining more and more acceptance.xxvi When Friedrich Schlegel defined it in 1798 and others followed, the prescription served as an incentive to the creation of contemporary "romantic" poetry (and not long thereafter of "romantic" painting). An antonym is often implied, as in the classic-romantic contrast. Even as many are attracted by the new slogan, others are repelled, as was Goethe who condemned romanticism as sickness. Connotations can sometimes be imposed on words. In the course of World War I some xenophobic French critics tried to make cubism a word of opprobrium, even spelling it Kubisme, so as to suggest that the style had come from the hated other side of the Rhine.xxvii
Terms launched by means of manifestos, as symbolism (1886) and futurism (1909), function as talismans, attracting followers. In keeping with the idea that art is a religion, sometimes the aim seems to be to create a conversion experience.
Almost as if they were themselves alive, terms in vogue can engender other terms. Realism gave rise to surrealism (a term coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire, but with a different meaning from the one it assumed a little later). In 1911 impressionism generated postimpressionism and expressionism. In turn, postimpressionism (with some help from postindustrialism) generated postmodernism.
By the early twentieth century a chasm had become evident separating popular writing for the middle classes (who sought a palatable version of the culture formerly restricted to the elite) from the increasingly technical writing for art professionals. The latter trend has fostered the multifootnoted display of erudition and the Olympian, impersonal tone that became the common currency of today's art history cadres.
Recently this tone has been called into question, by those who claim that it does not assure detachment and exemption from political parti pris, but has been coopted into the legions of the many forces affirming the status quo. Scholars in the field of communications have examined the content and rhetorical strategies of many fields of current discourse, from politics to medicine and literary study. As yet, however, no in-depth studies of this kind have been published for art historical writing.xxviii Until this kind of examination is done, we will not have the empirical data needed to arbitrate the linguistic aspects of the dispute between the defenders of traditional, ostensibly value-free art-historical presentations and advocates of the new confrontational modes, who include feminists, Marxists, and semioticians.

Problems of Language Interpretation.
Understanding various strains of language, especially those in use in earlier centuries, also poses a special problem for the material treated in this book. Not only did Vasari, for example, write in Italian, but his use of the language reflected a state of the tongue radically different in many ways from the one found now. Care must be taken to avoid "false friends"--that is words that appear similar to their English cognates but in fact have different meanings (e.g. Italian cornice, which means frame rather than cornice, and French roman, meaning romanesque rather than Roman, which is romain) but also to avoid anachronism in English words themselves. Thus when Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) remarked: "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God." (Religio Medici, 16), he was using the word artificial in a different sense from the one now usual. To capture Browne's meaning we might rather say "artifactual."
From what has been said one might conclude that we encounter an unending profusion of states of languages and an unending profusion of languages. Or do we? In art history not all languages are equal. From the founding of our own art historical tradition in the fifteenth-century Renaissance to about 1800 the Italian tradition was dominant. The exceptions prove the rule, for even when historians like Carel van Mander and Joachim von Sandrart wrote in Dutch and German respectively, their ideas reflected the Italian tradition that culminated in Giorgio Vasari. After 1800 the power, as it were, crossed the Alps, and German-speaking art historians assumed dominance. On reflection, the first, Italian-dominated phase seems understandable, for Italy was the homeland of Renaissance art itself. It seems fitting that the proud creators of this art should take first place in explaining it. But German art, for all its merits, has not--since at least the Ottonian period--been in the lead. The explanation for Kunstgeschichte's flowering lies in part in the excellence of the German university system, but there are other reasons for German preeminence, and these must be explored in due course.
Some anthropologists, notably Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, have held that language shapes thought decisively--to the point that we cannot even think thoughts that the structure of our language excludes. Most would reject this extreme linguistic determinism today, but there seems little doubt that language conventions help to guide research.

The Sociology of Knowledge
It has been suggested that the development of art history can be clarified by examining it in the light of the sociology of knowledge.  This approach arose in Germany with Max Scheler and especially Karl Mannheim, who helped to spread it in English-speaking countries.  The ultimate germ stems from Marx's idea of socioeconomic determinants of ideological super­structure.
Setting aside art history for the moment, an example may help to clarify the approach.  As Robert K. Merton and others have shown, seventeenth-century England saw a remarkable flowering of natural science.xxix Gilbert's work on magnetism (1600), Bacon's attempt to reorganize all of knowledge (1605), and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (1628) are but three major landmarks.  This energetic activity led to the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1660.  These advances are all the more remar­kable because England had been scientifically undistinguished in previous centuries.  Why this explosion of knowledge?  Protestantism is the answer that springs to mind.  But Protestant Germany and Sweden registered no such advances at this time.  Hence the search has narrowed to a particular form of Protestantism endemic to England, Puritanism.  This step was taken by Merton in his germinal study of 1938. Yet some have wondered whether this parallel is more than a coincidence.  In rebuttal it is said that Puritanism promotes the goals of antiauthoritar­ianism, optimism about social transformation, methodological empiricism, and experience.  Recent research has suggested that this link is real, though other factors contributed also.
Among the other factors are fascination with trade and its respectability among Englishmen, in contrast to other countries. As a rule professional historians tend to be wary of monocausal explanations, in which phenomenon A is derived simply from cause X.  Instead they prefer polythematic explanations. Thus, the French Revolution came about as a result of agitation by intellectuals (the philosophes), growing secularism and anticlericalism, the incompetence of the royal government, and so forth--not by any one of these alone.
To return to Robert K. Merton, he introduced the important distinction between internal and external approaches. Before his work students of science had generally viewed the subject as one of progress from (relative) darkness to (relative) light, with individual scientists being graded on the "correctness" or "incorrectness" of their views, based on later knowledge. There are obvious difficulties with this view, for scientific progress does not necessarily proceed in a straight line; some approaches, judged marginal at their inception, prove fruitful, while others, which seem mainstream, turn out to be sterile. Nonetheless, there is a place for such internalist studies for they reflect important realities: scientific knowledge is cumulative, and each person who wishes to make an advance must inform him- or herself fully of the state of the question before setting out. However, Merton showed that this method needs to be supplemented by its complement. Only the externalist approach, roughly equatable with the sociology of knowledge, could explain delays of discoveries or their rapid succession and could explain why the propensity for discoveries tends to "bunch" among particular groups and nations.
Can this approach of the sociology of knowledge be applied to art writing?  In Vasari the predominant role of fame seems to be grounded in the competing world of the Renaissance states and in the this-worldly emphases of humanism. During the nineteenth century the enormous prestige of natural science led to the formulation of the ideal of a "scientific art history."  The identification of such factors can sometimes be reductive, as when Martin Bernal claimed that Winckelmann's emphasis on Greek art was a simple product of growing European chauvinism and imperialism.xxx  To anticipate, we shall expect that elements such as these play important roles, but art history has its own inner dynamic, which means that it is not simply a reflection of such external factors. Today art history is well established. Yet one should ask what it takes to get a discipline started, for the circumstances of origin must inevitably have left their stamp. For a discipline to emerge a generally favorable climate is required.  Yet there seems to be a more specific condition: networking.  Recently this phenomenon has been investigated under the old seventeenth-century rubric of the "invisible college," an informal collective of closely interacting researchers, who agree to keep each other abreast of continuing progress along particular lines of investigation.xxxi  Typically, members of an invisible college are geographically dispersed, and communicate through letter, telephone, and (nowadays) modem and fax, gathering for face-to-face encounters only rarely. In this way a new field of study can be "jump-started" with little initial academic recognition in the form of departments and grants; these are added later.
The Question of Interested Parties.
The last two decades have seen a sustained critique of the earlier confidence in the disinterestedness of knowledge. One approach to this problem is the sociology of knowledge discussed above. However, the new critiques claim to be more radical. Some Marxists assert that all theories are simply ideological in the sense that they advance the interests of dominant economic groups, both by affirming contingent developments as natural and inevitable and by defining problems in such a way that oppressed minorities are denied a voice. Some art history has been, one must grant, affected by such considerations. An example is the Tuscan bias of Vasari, designed to favor a particular region. Moreover, when Vasari's tradition was "de-Tuscanized," this broadening served to make it the instrument of the European aristocracy as a whole during the Age of Absolutism. Such assertions are valid--but do not take us very far. For scholars often affirm, though sometimes in a guarded way, truths opposed to dominant interests. Thus Winckelmann, writing from the very heart of the Age of Absolutism (and in the Papal capital, no less), concluded that Greek art had flourished under democracy, and had withered under tyranny (i.e. absolutism). The possibility of an oppositional stance itself refutes the claim that ideologies are all-enveloping. Still they often exercise pressures of which the writers are themselves unaware.
A more radical solution has been proffered by poststructuralism or deconstruction.xxxii The deconstructors propose to abolish the old idea that truth involves a progressive improvement of "fit" between what is explained and the language we use to explain it. This is commonly termed the Correspondence Theory of truth. But Derrida has proclaimed that "Il n'y a pas de dehors," that is that there is nothing outside of our linguistic webs. His followers have hastened to assert that Derrida was only asserting that the relationship between language and reality is always problematic. Relativism is not a new current in Western thought, but here it must be asserted that in its strong form it is an obstacle to understanding the history of a discipline--in this case the history of art.
Then there is the matter of more particular interests. Until recently there have been relatively few biographies of historians of art. In part this dearth reflects modesty: most art historians have accepted that the biographies of artists were of infinitely greater interest than those of their interpreters. But the reticence has perhaps served to promote the myth of a totally objective "scientific" history exempt from the personalities of its creators.
Each personality is different, but there are also commonalities. Some, like Xenocrates and Vasari, who excel in art history have also been artists; others never practiced art. Both conditions have been a source of some embarrassment, for the artists who have taken up art history have either abandoned the practice of it, or have had to sustain criticism that they are artists of the second rank. "Those who can do, those who can't teach." The suggestion of creative impotence holds even more strongly for those who have never practiced art. Yet recent reconsiderations have broken down the dichotomy between creation and criticism. Writing and speaking are also arts.
Perhaps the best counsel is to reject premature conclusions about the interests of art historians. The discipline of art history has its own dynamic (as the "internalist perspective" suggests) and this has presented a series of problems that individual art historians, whatever their background and prejudices, have found irresistible.

Earlier Attempts at Writing the Historiography of Art History.
The founder of the modern historiography of art history was a patient and resourceful Viennese scholar, Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938). As a young man Schlosser had made contributions to the "hunt for sources" that formed the basis for the series started by Rudolf von Eitelberg, the Quellenschriften, or primary texts in art history. Accordingly, he compiled gatherings of excerpts from original sources devoted to the Carolingian era (1892) and to the Western Middle Ages as a whole (1896). A different sort of contribution was Schlosser's exemplary critical edition of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Commentarii (1912) in which, with great acumen, he reconstructed the formative elements of the writing of that artist turned historian. He did this so thoroughly that the reader feels privileged to enter Ghiberti's study, peering over his shoulder so as to witness the actual process of creation. Such endeavors are rarely conducted in a vacuum. Schlosser was in contact with his contemporary Wolfgang Kallab whose posthumously published Vasaristudien (1908) explored the sources of Vasari's Lives with great critical acumen. The confluence of these interests led to a work of extraordinary erudition, Die Kunstliteratur (1924).xxxiii This book, best known in the enlarged Italian edition, is both more and less than a history of art history: more, because it includes writings on art theory and aesthetics, as well as histories of art, and less because it stops at 1800. Towards the end of his life, Schlosser published an essay that constituted one building block towards the construction of the subsequent historiography: an account of a hundred years of the Vienna school of art historians, which is, as one would expect, partly personal.xxxiv In these inquiries the Viennese scholar was sustained by the optimistic belief, derived from the Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce, that we can make meaningful contact across the centuries with earlier minds, recreating their mental universe in our own thoughts.
A parallel study appeared in Germany. A student of the intellectual historian Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Waetzoldt (1880-1945) sought to delineate the achievement of German art history in a series of vivid capsule biographies published in two volumes.xxxv He began with some early forerunners, culminating in Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688). However, his main account started with Winckelmann and concluded with Carl Justi, who died in 1912. The Austrians and Viennese were not included.
The first history of art history to survey its entire sweep from the Greeks and Romans to the present emanated from Lionello Venturi (1885-1961). The son of the great historian of Italian art Adolfo Venturi, Lionello set himself apart from his father by his studies of modern art. In 1926 he published the first synthetic study of the "taste for the primitives," the interest in pre-Renaissance Italian and Flemish painting that constituted a subversive element within the Western exaltation of classical aesthetic norms from the time of Vasari onwards. In 1931 Venturi, then a professor at the University of Turin, refused to take the required oath of loyalty to the fascist regime, and went into exile, first in France and then in the United States. It was in this country that his History of Art Criticism first appeared in 1936.xxxvi Like that of Schlosser, this work too was sustained by the idealistic philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Although it includes aesthetics and criticism, the main emphasis--the title notwithstanding--is on the historiography of art. Although his book may seem overschematic and is now dated, Venturi carries the story up to the early twentieth century. It is thus the first organic history of art (though it does leave out, not surprisingly for its time, non-European art).
World War II halted art-historical research. Publications, generally of texts prepared before the war, were reduced to a trickle. After the end of the war and after essential steps had been taken to rebuild European cities and relocate stolen works of art, primary research got started again. Much of this new research was accomplished by, or under the inspiration of, scholars of the "transatlantic migration," distinguished European exiles who had settled mainly in the United States, with a few going to Britain. Although many of these scholars had been formed during the 1920s, a phase of intensive theory building, they preferred to put this speculation past them, concentrating on their own primary researches which had been delayed by the disruptions of immigration and the war.
In 1947 Elizabeth Holt, who had been trained in Germany, brought out a selection of sources, generally short excerpts culled from a variety of sources.xxxvii The ultimate inspiration for this useful publication was the much bigger collection of material gathered by the Austrian Quellenschriften; unlike these publications, the sources appeared only in English translation. She later supplemented the collection to cover much of the nineteenth century.xxxviii Then H. W. Janson organized a multivolume series, the Sources and Documents in the History of Art, edited by various scholars and made widely available in paperback by Prentice-Hall. The series included volumes by such leading scholars as J. J. Pollitt (Greek and Roman art), Cyril Mango (Byzantine Art), Wolfgang Stechow (northern Renaissance art), and Linda Nochlin (nineteenth-century art). These volumes were not casebooks, comprising examples of modern scholarship, but gatherings of primary sources contemporaneous with the art works they described. Initially these publications elicited unrealistic hopes: it was thought that they could supplant undergraduate textbooks. Some even idealized the sources in almost mystical fashion, attributing to them the singular virtue of affording direct access to the mentality that had produced the art. In retrospect this assumption, implying the unity of source and art work, seems a naive manifestation of Hegelian cultural history, with its conviction of the invincible "spirit of the age." In fact, the sources supplied were quite diverse and, in the absence of a proper commentary. These excerpts did not bond together to form a history of art, and their presentation in isolation occluded the vital contributions that had been produced by art historians over several generations. Thus these source collections, despite their considerable intrinsic value,  unintentionally served to delay recognition of the desirability of a critical examination of the historiography of art.
Only somewhat later did the need become evident to resume contact with the earlier traditions of art historiography, so as to restore links that had been essentially severed in 1933. In 1958 the Hungarian-born art historian Arnold Hauser, who was teaching at Brandeis University, published a book containing his personal views on art-historical methodology with extensive treatment of Wölfflin and the Viennese art historians.xxxix He did not attempt a systematic account of the evolution of the discipline. That task was undertaken by Udo Kultermann in his handbook of 1966; this genial, but largely anecdotal work was premature, in as much as the author did not probe deeply into the theoretical concerns that guided the individual figures.xl Luigi Grassi's three-volume survey, produced during the 1970s, offered some treatment of art history but mainly focused on critical and aesthetic theories; since coverage did not extend beyond the eighteenth century, his study was essentially an up-dating and summary (not always accurate) of Schlosser's magnum opus.xli Most recently, Germaine Bazin, a curator at the Louvre and professor at several universities, produced a sprawling, personal volume.xlii
New efforts, limited in scope, but more deeply probing, occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when deconstruction and other new intellectual trends fostered efforts to reassess the foundations of disciplines. Radicals assumed that the foundations of all disciplines would be found wanting; others thought that they could be defended, but only by examining their own principles. Some art historians began to speak of a "crisis" in their discipline, without specifying exactly what this meant or how it could be overcome.xliii At the same time, others were quietly working to generate new information. Joan Hart and Michael Ann Holly, to cite but two names, have made impressive studies of two notable art historians: Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky.
During the 1980s the Art Bulletin, the "official" organ of American art history, published a series of state-of-the-question articles on various fields, such as medieval art, seventeenth-century Italian art, nineteenth-century art, and so forth. Since the task was an imposing one, the authors generally concentrated on the scholarly production of the last two decades or so, unintentionally conveying an impression of the special value of that which is recent, and neglecting the long history of interpretation of these subjects.
The G. K. Hall firm of Boston has brought out a score of comprehensive bibliographies, mainly on medieval themes. The French Romanesque volume, which lists virtually all publications in the field up until the time of publication, is a representative example.xliv Since the arrangement of this book is partly chronological, patient study reveals the main outlines of the history of the subject.
The problem of integrating the older and newer scholarship was recognized in the case studies of David Carrier.xlv After considerable deliberation, he offered reflections on a range of critical discourse about such artists as Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, and Manet, but disregarding the historical grounding that lies behind the successive strata of interpretration.
Moshe Barash has undertaken an ambitious history of art theory as developed by artists, aestheticians, and critics, but with relatively little emphasis on art history.xlvi The problem of integrating the history of art theory with art history has not really been addressed.
Germany and Austria have witnessed more extensive efforts, directed at reestablishing contact with art history as an achievement of earlier German humanism. At the University of Hamburg a massive project has been launched to document some four hundred German and Austrian art historians who had gone into exile from the Hitler regime. Once these individual biographies are assembled, it will be possible to make generalizations about overall trends and about the way the refugee scholars adapted to their new homes. Symposium volumes in Germany allowed one to compare groups of art historians, while the Austrians concentrated on recovering individual figures. Heinrich Dilly essayed a sociological approach concentrating on the emergence of art history as a profession and the institutional framework that grew up along with it.xlvii A somewhat different focus appears in the pithy reflections of Hans Belting.xlviii
Thus far recent American and German scholars have generally refrained from offering an overview of the historiography of art history. It has been left for the Englishman Michael Podro to offer at least a partial synthesis. Seeking to isolate the main conceptual sources, rather that to trace biographies or institutional roots, his Critical Historians of Art treats the German traditions of historicism and perceptualism from Hegel to Panofsky.xlix
For a very large set of biographies of art historians online, see also the Dictionary of Art Historians: http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org.
             See also the Journal of Art Historiography: arthistoriography.wordpress.com.
Summary and Prospect.
The above discussion has yielded some basic observations that will help to guide further inquiry. Art history, which overlaps with art criticism and archaeology, has a long and varied pedigree. The views of art historians reached the public through various forms of language and rhetorical strategies. Not uniformly distributeed, the discipline of art history developed selectively and in particular places; the sociology of knowledge aids us to understand these rhythms, though an indispensible element of individual talent highlights the contributions of researchers in the field of art.
The ensuing chapters trace the separate founding of traditions in art history in Greco-Roman society and in imperial China. After a hiatus in the Middle Ages, the Greco-Roman tradition of art history triumphantly reasserted itself in Renaissance Italy, laying the groundwork for subsequent developments in the field. Stricken by the faltering of Chinese civilization, a process that became evident by about 1500 CE, the impact of Chinese art history was essentially limited to Korea and Japan. Eventually all three countries adopted concepts derived from the West.
The models developed by Italian art history dominated Western Europe until about 1760. At that time Winckelmann forged a new paradigm based on a fresh study of ancient Greek art. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this version of art history was challenged by the rising force of romanticism with its aesthetic pluralism that fostered a new appreciation of medieval, Egyptian and eventually many other art traditions. In Germany strict new methods of historical investigation lent rigor to all types of art historical research. Towards the end of the century Heinrich Wölfflin in Switzerland and Germany, working in concert with a cohort of Viennese savants, forged a synthesis that relied in large measure on the psychology of vision. This approach found its complement in an interest in subject matter (iconography) promoted by Emile Mâle, Aby Warburg, and Erwin Panofsky.
As professional art historians had neglected modern art, it was left to critics, dealers, and independent scholars to champion this field. Other scholars turned their attention to non-European art, especially the great traditions of Asia: China, Japan, India, and Islam. The formal interests of avant-garde artists helped to promote study of the tribal arts of Africa and Oceania.
Impressive as this heritage was, more remained to be done. The late twentieth century saw a growing sense that the boundaries of art study needed to be enlarged so as to include psychological, semiotic, economic, and gender issues. 
 
i Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
ii For one aspect of this ferment, see Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The impact of deconstruction, feminism, semiotics, gender studies and other recent trends is discussed in Chapter Eighteen, below.
iii Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, New York: William Morrow, 1991.
iv See, e.g., Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., "The Politics of Liberal Education," special number of The South Atlantic Quarterly, 89:1 (Winter 1990).
v Much has been written on this issue.  An early intervention was Paul Berman, ed., Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, New York: Dell\Laurel, 1992.
vi To be sure, the term "works of art" begs a question. Some have argued that every human artifact is actually a work of art, while others would restrict the definition to works that are deemed to have aesthetic merit. Each art historian must choose for him or herself the kinds of works to be studied.
vii The quarterly Word and Image, founded in 1984, is devoted to all sorts of interactive relationships between verbal and visual expression.
viii Some would say that investigations of the three kinds cited are already art history. This may be true if the discipline is defined broadly, but in this study we are concerned primarily with the narrative core, with art history in the strict sense.
ix There is an extensive recent literature on the concept of narrative; see, e.g., Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986; and Philip J. M. Sturgess, Narrativity: Theory and Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. For narrative in art works, see Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984; and Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreves Simpson, eds., Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1985 (Studies in the History of Art, 16).
x Gerald A. Press, "History and the Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity," History and Theory, 16 (1977), 280-96; Arnaldo Momigliano, "The Origins of Universal History," On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986, pp. 33-57.
xi This term is more common in Britain than in North America. See A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello, eds., The New Art History, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988.
xii For a similar argument see Edward Stein, in Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Construction Controversy, New York: Garland, 1990, p. 346ff.
xiii Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
xiv Some recent theorists, such as the late Roland Barthes, have sought to place critical writing on the same plane as "original" creations. One may well be persuaded by this, and still concede that, historically speaking, writing about art has not enjoyed the same universality as the making of art.
xv Elaborate parallels, not always convincing, have been traced by Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1955; and idem, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature, New York: Random House, 1960. The concept of the sister arts has been traced back ultimately to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (ca. 556-468 BCE), who held that painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.
xvi For an account of recent vicissitudes in this realm, see Robert Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 327-54. Hegelian sources are stressed (and deplored) by E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
xvii There is no up-to-date history of art criticism. Lionello Venturi's now antiquated History of Art Criticism (2nd ed., New York: Dutton, 1964) swamps criticism proper in a study of other matters, while Joseph Darracott's Art Criticism: A User's Guide (London: Bellew, 1991) is too brief and diffuse. For the founding traditions, see Anita Brookner, The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, The Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans, New York: Phaidon, 1971; and Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire,
New York: New York University Press, 1990. Literary criticism basks in the light of a truly monumental survey: René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, 8 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955-92.
xviii For the foundations of the discipline in Mediterranean lands, see Ulrich Hausmann, ed., Allgemeine Grundlagen der Archäologie Munich: Beck, 1969 (Handbuch der Archäologie). For the Northern traditions, see Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency, London: Thames and Hudson, 1989; and Glyn Daniel, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology, London: Penguin Books, 1967. Recent trends are surveyed from a somewhat Marxian standpoint by Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
xix Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History, New York: Macmillan, 1966.
xx A recent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek lexicon is Robert Atkins, Artspeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, New York: Abbeville Press, 1990.  More formidable and useful is Robert W. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (in-depth studies of 22 key terms; marred by some postmodern jargon).
xxi For these and other examples, see Jerome J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
xxii Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, Kirchengeräte, Kreuze und Reliquiare der christlichen Kirchen, 3d ed., Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992.
xxiii Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
xxiv For a roster of French art terms, but without etymological analysis, see Louis Réau, Dictionnaire polyglotte des termes d'art et d'archéologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953.
xxv Walter Ullmann, Language and Style, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964, pp. 85-88; Ludwig Schrader, Sinn und Sinnesverknüpfungen, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1969.
xxvi Hans Eichner, ed., 'Romantic' and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972.
xxvii Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
xxviii A characteristically disappointing, but perhaps faithful reflection of this dearth of analysis is Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds., The Language of Art History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
xxix Robert K. Merton, Science, "Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England," Osiris, 4 (1938), 360-632. See I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. On Merton's work as a whole, see Piotr Sztompka, Robert K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986; and
Charles Crothers, Robert K. Mertin, New York: Tavistock, 1987.
xxx Martin Bernal, Black Athena, vol. 1, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, pp. 212-15.
xxxi See Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963 (rev. ed., 1986); Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972; and Daryl E. Chubin, Sociology of Sciences: An Annotated Biblography on Invisible Colleges, New York: Garland, 1983.
xxxii See Chapter Eighteen, below.
xxxiii Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur, Vienna: Schroll, 1924; Julius Schlosser Magnino, La Letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna, trans. by Filippo Rossi, edited by Otto Kurz, 3d ed., Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964.
xxxiv Julius von Schlosser, "Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte: Rückblick auf ein Säkulum deutscher Gelehrtenarbeit in Österreich," Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung (Ergänzungsband), 13:2 (1934), 145-210.
xxxv Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 2 vols., Leipzig: Seemann, 1924. The reprint (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1986) contains a short memoir by the author's son Stephan (1, pp. 1-4). See also Peter Betthausen, Peter H. Feist, and Christiane Fork, eds, Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999; and Karen Michaels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft: Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im Amerikanischen Exil, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999.  Ten autobiographical accounts appear in Martina Sitt, ed., Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache: Zehn autobiographische Skizzen, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990.  For one particular country, see the very inclusive compilation of Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis and Ana Reyes Pacios Lozano, eds., Diccionario de historiadores españoles del arte, Madrid: Cátedra, 2006.
xxxvi Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, trans. by Charles Marriott, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936; enlarged ed. 1964.
xxxvii Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Some changes and additions appear in the paperback version: A Documentary History of Art, 2 vols., New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1957-58.
xxxviii Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century, Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1966; idem, ed., The Art of All Nations: 1850-1873: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics, New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1981; idem, ed., The Expanding World of Art 1874-1902: Volume 1: Universal Expositions and State-Sponsored Arts Exhibitions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. For the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, see Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
xxxix Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History, New York: Knopf, 1959 (first published in German as Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte, Munich: Beck, 1958).
xl Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft, Vienna: Econ Verlag, 1966 (trans. as The History of Art History: Art History through World War II, Pleasantville, N.Y.: Abaris Books, 1993). The shortcomings of this work reflect the obscurity of the theme at the time it was conceived, for the enterprising author was plowing a lonely furrow. 
xli Luigi Grassi, Teorici e storia della critica d'arte, 3 vols., Rome: Multigrafica, 1970-79.
xlii Germaine Bazin, Histoire de l'histoire de l'art de Vasari à nos jours, Paris: Albin Michel, 1986. In addition to self-imposed limitations ("Ce livre ne concerne que l'art occidental, tel qu'il s'est développé en Europe, puis projeté sur le continent Américain, à l'exclusion de l'Antiquité et Byzance."), this book has a rather subjective character governed by the author's own interests and is often inexact with regard to detail. Another disappointment (too brief and present-minded) is Vernon Hyde Minor, Art History's History, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1994.
xliii See the papers in Art Journal, 42:4 (Winter 1982), edited by Henri Zerner. For criticism of the crisis notion, see Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 1-20.
xliv Thomas Lyman and Daniel Smartt, French Romanesque Sculpture: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
xlv David Carrier, Principles of Art Writing, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
xlvi Moshe Barash, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann, New York: New York University Press, 1985; idem, Modern Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire, New York: New York University Press, 1990; and Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky, New York: Routledge, 1998.
xlvii Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.
xlviii Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? trans. Christopher S. Wood, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
xlix Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.  See, however, the useful anthology of Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.  Two similar collections are W. Eugene Kleinbauer, ed.,
Modern Perspectives in Western Art History; an Anthology of 20th-century Writings on the Visual Arts, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971; and Eric Fernie, Art History and its Methods, London: Phaidon, 1995.