Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part 1. The academy -- Part 2. What is art? Answers from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Ancient theory ; Medieval theory : Christianity, the human, the divine ; The Renaissance (1300-1600) ; Nature, the ideal, and rules in seventeenth-century theory -- Part 3. The emergence of method and modernism in art history. Johann J. Winckelmann and art history ; Empiricism ; Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) ; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) ; Alois Riegl (1858-1905) ; Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) ; Visual supremacy : connoisseurship, style, formalism ; Sociological and Marxist perspectives ; The new art history and visual culture ; Feminism ; Reading art history : word, image, iconology, semiotics ; Deconstruction ; Psychoanalysis and art history ; Culture and art history ; Influence, originality, greatness : a case for intertextuality.

"Vernon Hyde Minor was the first to recognize and respond to the growing need for art historical theory made accessible at the introductory level, offering a reader-friendly introduction to historical writing about art history, including contemporary theory, and providing background on aesthetics to demonstrate that art history arises from general philosophical questions. Now in this second edition of his work, the author has expanded his survey to include the American critic Clement Greenberg, developed his treatment of New Art History and Visual Culture, and added a special essay on the learned art historian Erwin Panofsky and his contribution to Iconography and Iconology. Minor then considers the concepts of influence, originality, and greatness."--back cover