Art history is an academic discipline devoted to the study of artistic production and visual culture throughout human history. Art historians use a historical method or a philosophy, such as historical materialism or critical theory, to analyze artworks. Among other topics, they study art's impact on societies and cultures, the relationship between art and politics, and how artistic styles and formal characteristics of works of art have changed throughout history. As a discipline, art history is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with establishing a relative artistic value for critiquing individual works, and aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.
The study of art’s history emerged as a way to document and interpret artistic production. Early traditions of art-historical writing developed in several cultures, including Ancient Greece, Imperial China, and Renaissance Italy, each producing influential figures and approaches that shaped later scholarship. As an academic discipline, art history emerged in the 19th century and was a largely Eurocentric field, concentrating on Western definitions of the fine and decorative arts, particularly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture.
In the contemporary era, however, art history has expanded to examine broader aspects of visual culture, including the various cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues related to art. Today, art history is a broad academic field encompassing numerous methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of artistic production globally, including European, Asian, African, or American Indigenous arts, among others. Some of the subfields include Marxist art history, feminist art history, iconography and the study of symbols, visual culture studies, and design history.
Methodologies
Art historians employ a number of methods in their research so they can examine work in the context of its time. This is professionally done in a manner which respects its creator's motivations and imperatives; with consideration of the desires and prejudices of its patrons and sponsors. A comparative analysis of themes and approaches of the creator's colleagues and teachers along with consideration of iconography and symbolism is part of the examination. This approach examines the work of art in the context of the world within which it was created.
Art historians also often examine work through an analysis of form; that is, the creator's use of line, shape, color, texture and composition. This approach examines how the artist uses a two-dimensional picture plane or the three dimensions of sculptural or architectural space to create their art. The way these individual elements are employed results in representational or non-representational art.
An analysis of iconography is a large branch of art history which focuses on particular design elements of an object. Through a close reading of such elements, it is possible to trace their lineage, and with it draw conclusions regarding the origins and trajectory of these motifs. In turn, it is possible to make any number of observations regarding the social, cultural, economic and aesthetic values of those responsible for producing the object.
Art historians may also work alongside or as art conservators, helping restore and conserve artworks. Conservation is a scientific field that is crucial to historians work, due to them needing to observe a work that is a condition good enough to be examined. Training in art conservation typically involves coursework in chemistry as well as the practice and history of art.
Notable concentrations and fields of study
Most art historians choose a specific historical period within art history to specialize or gain an academic degree in. Concentrations on art movements, periods and certain fields such as Prehistoric art, Ancient art, Medieval art, Renaissance art, Romanticism, Realism, Modern art, Contemporary art, Pop art, Feminist art, Queer art, and much more are common in the academic world. These periods of art movements attempt to cover the broader aspect of art history while distinctively separating them.
Feminist art history
In the 1970s, Linda Nochlin's essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" helped to ignite feminist art history and remains one of the most widely read essays about female artists. This was followed by a 1972 College Art Association Panel, chaired by Nochlin, entitled "Eroticism and the Image of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Art". Within a decade, scores of papers, articles, and essays sustained a growing momentum, fueled by the Second-wave feminist movement, of critical discourse surrounding women's interactions with the arts as both artists and subjects. In her pioneering essay, Nochlin applies a feminist critical framework to show systematic exclusion of women from art training, arguing that exclusion from practicing art as well as the canonical history of art was the consequence of cultural conditions which curtailed and restricted women from art producing fields. The few who did succeed were treated as anomalies and did not provide a model for subsequent success. Griselda Pollock is another prominent feminist art historian, whose use of psychoanalytic theory is described above.
While feminist art history can focus on any time period and location, much attention has been given to the Modern era. Some of this scholarship centers on the feminist art movement, which referred specifically to the experience of women. Often, feminist art history offers a critical "re-reading" of the Western art canon, such as Carol Duncan's re-interpretation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Two pioneers of the field are Mary Garrard and Norma Broude. Their anthologies Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, and Reclaiming Feminist Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism are substantial efforts to bring feminist perspectives into the discourse of art history. The pair also co-founded the Feminist Art History Conference.
Museum studies
Art historians are often employed by museums due to their expertise in the field. Galleries, and archives are places where art historians may be in charge of exhibits, research or collections, depending on specialization factors. Museum studies, including the history of museum collecting and display, is now a specialized field of study, as is the history of collecting.
Timeline of prominent methods
Pliny the Elder and ancient precedents The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History (–79), concerning the development of Greek sculpture and painting.The Historie of the World by Pliny the Elder, translated by Philemon Holland, 1601 (first English translation). Retrieved 8 April 2023. From them it is possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon (), a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the first art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has thus been influential from the Renaissance onwards. (Passages about techniques used by the painter Apelles c. (332–329 BC), have been especially well-known.) Similar, though independent, developments occurred in the 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was established by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The artists are described in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, by Victor H. Mair, p. 51. Retrieved 25 January 2010
Vasari and artists' biographies
Giorgio Vasari, a Tuscan painter, sculptor and author of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, has been credited with writing the first true history of art.website created by Adrienne DeAngelis, currently incomplete, intended to be unabridged, in English. retrieved 25 January 2010 He emphasized art's progression and development, which was a milestone in this field. His work was a personal and a historical account, featuring biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances. The most renowned of these was Michelangelo.
Vasari's writings about art were enormously influential, and served as a model for many.
Winckelmann and art criticism Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) criticized Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and argued that the real emphasis in the study of art should be the views of the learned beholder and not the viewpoint of the artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. His two most notable works that introduced the concept of art criticism were (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks), published in 1755, and (History of Art in Antiquity), published in 1764 (this is the first occurrence of the phrase 'history of art' in the title of a book). Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in reforming taste in favor of Neoclassicism. Winckelmann's work marked the entry of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.
Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoön group occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.
Wölfflin and stylistic analysis Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, is considered to be one of the most influential scholars of modern art history. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He argued, among other things, that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. By comparing individual paintings to each other, he was able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. He proposed the creation of an "art history without names." He also studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.
Riegl, Wickhoff, and the Vienna School