A History of Art History

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline.

The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance--Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari--measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however--Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich--struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.

Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history.
Christopher S. Wood's A History of Art History is a robust volume that traces and critically examines the evolution of art history as a discipline, beginning with the late middle ages and leading up to the emergence of contemporary art history. . . . It is . . . [the] close re-examination of the role of the art historian, of individuals and their writing, that Wood offers a rethinking of art's history.---Jenna Dufour, ARLIS/NA
Well informed and extremely personal, this is a brilliant overview of writings on art, from responses to the recovery of art representing ancient gods c. 800 CE through to the anti-formalist revolution of the present day. The amount of carefully considered information packed into this compact volume is breathtaking. Wood (NYU) takes on not only professional writers on art but also practitioners such as Piranesi and William Blake--whose emotional critiques of the past made them, in effect, historians of art. Writing in a rather leisurely narrative style, Wood places selected authors within a precise historical moment. Original perceptions are scattered like bonbons--for example, an analysis of Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl locates them as very different but very much related classifiers of the image within late 19th and early 20th century devotion to formalism. There is a fascinating chapter on the foundation of the Louvre in the context of the French Revolution. . . . The book stands as a much-needed contribution at a time when the discipline badly needs an appreciative, even-handed view of the past.---Debra Pincus, Choice
Christopher Wood cares for the idea that art history could consist in what he calls a 'biography of form'. This is one of the chief sympathies underpinning his huge and hugely impressive chronological narrative A History of Art History.---Julian Bell, London Review of Books
Magisterial . . . [A History of Art History] includes little-known factual gems, eloquent witticisms, or unexpected insights. . . . Undoubtedly, Wood has set the bar high for any future overview in terms of the diversity of his interests and analytic depth.---Thijs Weststeijn, History of Humanities

The research compiled here does not stumbled into abstractions that the topic invites, but really delivers an accurate
history of the changes in this culture-defining field . . . this book is really needed.

---Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Review
This substantial volume is more than just a chronicle of half-forgotten scholarship or a thrashing out of methodological issues of little import. In fact, A History of Art History will be eye-opening for anyone who cares about art.---Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic
Wood's history is one of only a handful of book-length attempts to offer a synthetic treatment of the history of art history. . . . Owing to its extraordinary range and original insights, it is destined to become the standard work for many years to come.---Sam Rose, Apollo Magazine
[A History of Art History] by Christopher Wood will live constantly on my priority bookshelf. Wood's welcome synthesis of the essential sources from which art history created itself as a discipline is revelatory on many levels, not least because it clarifies the extent to which such a historiography can never be totally comprehensive nor totally consensual. . . . Every informed reader will come away from the book with some startling new coalescence of insight.---Sally Hickson, Renaissance and Reformation
Wood's intimacy with the material is self-evident. He offers any number of remarkably lucid exegeses of complex and easily misunderstood concepts (Riegl's Kunstwollen) and texts (Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics), and brings in numerous lesser-known thinkers.---Rachel Wetzler, Art in America
Shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year, Apollo Magazine
Wood's account of what art historians do - and how they have done it over the centuries - is a typically learned and polemical work that challenges the reader with its many approaches and arguments.-- "Apollo Magazine"