Art History
art his·to·ry · ars: skill, craft · historia: inquiry
Art history is the study of works of art within their time period — analyzing what visual art meant to the people who made and saw it when it was created, not just how it looks to us now.
- Describe the object carefully in your own words before reading what critics say.
- Situate it — who made it, when, for whom, under what constraints.
- Read at least two conflicting interpretations and stake a position between them.
- Get permission and credit every reproduced image.
Related areas & concentrations
Art history borrows from the humanities and social sciences alike. Those neighbors are good places to find a second source or a co-advisor.
Related research areas
- Humanities: History, Culture Studies, Media Studies, Architecture
- Making & materials: Studio Art, Conservation, Museum Studies
- Social science: Anthropology, Religious Studies, Economics of patronage
Sample concentrations
- The Medieval Mediterranean: a confluence of cultures across Christian, Islamic, and Jewish worlds
- Leonardo da Vinci: one artist as a window onto a whole era
- Methodologies of art history: the different lenses scholars use to read art
- The Italian High Renaissance: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael
Four ways into a question
Most art-history papers read a work through one of these lenses. Picking yours tells you what evidence to gather and what your question can ask.
Formal Analysis
How the work is made — composition, line, color, light, and scale — and how those choices guide the eye.
How does the composition of one painting decide where a viewer looks first?
Iconography
The subjects and symbols in a work, and what those images meant to the audience it was made for.
What did a particular object or gesture signal to viewers at the time?
Social & Historical Context
Who paid for the work and why — the politics, religion, and patronage behind it.
How did the person who commissioned a work shape what it shows?
Reception & Legacy
How a work was copied, praised, ignored, or reinterpreted across the centuries after it was made.
How did reproductions change a famous work's meaning over time?
Turning an interest into a question
A topic isn't a research question. Narrow to one work (or a small set), one feature, and one thing you can actually argue about it.
Start from a work you can look at closely
Pick something you can study in a museum, or in a high-quality reproduction you can return to again and again.
Narrow to one work and one feature
Not “the Renaissance” but one painting; not “the whole painting” but its light, its gestures, or its setting.
Make it a “how / why” or a comparison
Questions that ask how or why, or set two works side by side, give you something to argue instead of just describe.
Check that you can find evidence
Is there scholarship, and can you look at the work itself in the time you have?
Methods & where to look
Pair a method you can carry out with sources that show how art historians build an argument.
Common methods
- Formal analysis: slow, structured close looking at the work itself.
- Iconographic analysis: decoding subjects and symbols against period sources.
- Contextual research: letters, contracts, and documents about who made it and why.
- Comparative analysis: two works side by side to reveal what each is doing.
- Provenance & reception: tracing a work's owners and how views of it changed.
For a school paper, a close formal analysis of one accessible work plus a comparison is very doable.
Where to find sources
- Databases: JSTOR, Grove Art Online (Oxford), and Google Scholar.
- Free & visual: Smarthistory, and the Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
- Journals: The Art Bulletin, Art History, and The Burlington Magazine.
- Reference: the survey texts Gardner's Art Through the Ages and Janson's History of Art.
Museum websites are great for reliable images and dates — but build your argument on peer-reviewed scholarship.
Reading an artwork
Strong art-history writing moves in order: describe what's there before you say what it means. Work through these three passes on any object.
Look
Describe only what you see — composition, color, line, scale, and where your eye goes. No interpretation yet.
Decode
Identify the subject and its symbols. What story, figure, or idea is shown, and how would its first audience have read it?
Situate
Place it in its world — who made it, when, for whom, and why. Only now connect form and meaning to context.
With images: credit every work you reproduce (artist, title, date, and where it's held), and check reuse terms — many museums now offer open-access images.