What Is Art History? Methods, Museums, Funding, and Image Rights

Art history is the scholarly study of visual art and material culture: who made objects, when, where, how, for whom, and what they meant then and mean now. Art historians do not simply describe pictures. They date and attribute works, trace where they have been, interpret their imagery and form, and argue about how art relates to religion, politics, commerce, gender, and technology. This guide explains what art history is as a research discipline, what its main methods are, how the field divides into subfields, how it connects to museums and conservation science, how the discipline developed, how people train in it, who funds the work, and what researchers need to know about image rights when they publish.

What Is Art History?

Art history is a humanities discipline concerned with the production, circulation, reception, and interpretation of works of art and architecture and, increasingly, of the wider category often called visual and material culture. Its evidence is the object itself, together with whatever documents survive around it: contracts, inventories, letters, sale records, exhibition catalogues, criticism, and the artist’s own statements.

Three features set it apart from neighbouring fields:

• The object is primary evidence. A historian can read a treaty without seeing the original paper, but an art historian usually needs to look closely at the work, or at reliable reproductions, and to understand how it was made. Material, technique, scale, condition, and original setting all carry meaning.
• Looking is treated as a method. Visual analysis, the disciplined description of what a work actually shows and how it is organised, is taught and argued over as a research skill rather than assumed.
• Interpretation is plural. Competing approaches, from formal analysis to social history to theory, are an accepted part of the field, and a single work can be read through several of them.

Art history overlaps with but is distinct from the studio practice of making art, from art criticism (which evaluates contemporary work for a public audience), and from museum curation (which applies scholarship to collections and exhibitions). It sits close to history, archaeology, architecture, anthropology, literary studies, and cultural studies, and it borrows methods from each.

Scope: What Art Historians Study

Traditional art history concentrated on painting, sculpture, architecture, and the so-called decorative arts in Europe. The scope of the field is now far wider. Art historians study:

• painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture from every region and period;
• photography, film, video, performance, installation, and digital and new-media art;
• textiles, ceramics, metalwork, manuscripts, and other objects once classed as craft or decorative art;
• the institutions around art, including workshops, patrons, dealers, collectors, academies, museums, exhibitions, and the art market.

Whether a given object counts as art is itself a live question. Many scholars treat the boundary as historically produced rather than fixed, and that is one reason the field overlaps so heavily with cultural studies and anthropology.

Core Methods

There is no single art-historical method. Researchers combine several, and a strong project usually says which it is using and why.

Connoisseurship and Attribution

Connoisseurship is the trained comparison of works to decide who made them, when, and whether they are authentic. It relies on sustained looking, on a close knowledge of an artist’s or workshop’s habits, and on comparison with securely documented works. The nineteenth-century Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli is often credited with popularising the study of small, habitual details, such as the way an artist painted ears or hands, as evidence of authorship, and the approach was carried forward by specialists such as Bernard Berenson.

Formal Analysis

Formal analysis examines how a work is built: line, colour, composition, space, scale, surface, and materials. It is the entry-level skill of the discipline, taught in introductory courses worldwide. The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl are leading figures in the formalist tradition, which sought to explain changes in style by tracing patterns in visual form. Formal analysis remains essential, but most current work uses it as a starting point for arguments about meaning and context rather than as an end in itself.

Iconography and Iconology

Iconography identifies and classifies the subjects, symbols, and conventions in images, for example recognising a saint by an attribute or a mythological scene from its textual source. Iconology, as developed by Erwin Panofsky in the twentieth century, goes further by interpreting what an image reveals about the culture, beliefs, and intellectual climate that produced it.

Social History of Art

The social history of art asks how patronage, class, economics, politics, religion, and institutions shaped what was made and how it was received. It looks at who commissioned and paid for works, how workshops and academies were organised, and how art circulated through markets. Scholars working in this mode, including T. J. Clark and many others, drew on Marxist and other social theory to argue that art cannot be separated from the conditions of its making.

Critical Theory and Feminist, Postcolonial, and Queer Approaches

From the 1970s on, art historians increasingly asked who had been left out of the canon and why. Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” is widely cited as a turning point for feminist art history. Postcolonial, queer, disability, and Indigenous approaches have since challenged the Eurocentric framing of the field, reopened questions about which objects count as art, and prompted renewed attention to how museums acquired their collections.

Provenance Research

Provenance is the documented chain of ownership and location of an object from creation to the present. Provenance research reconstructs that chain from sale records, inventories, exhibition histories, labels, stamps, correspondence, and archives. It supports attribution and authenticity, and it is also central to ethical questions about looted, confiscated, or illicitly exported material. The 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a non-binding agreement endorsed by 44 countries, encouraged systematic provenance research on works confiscated during the Nazi era and the publication of results so that owners and heirs could come forward. The Getty Provenance Index, a long-running project of the Getty Research Institute that Getty describes as holding more than 12 million records, makes archival data on art collecting and the art market searchable as linked open data. The word also has a parallel use in data work, where it means a record of an object’s origin and handling; see the dictionary entry on C2PA content provenance for how that idea is applied to digital media.

Technical Art History and Scientific Analysis

Technical art history studies how works were physically made, using the tools of conservation science. Common techniques include X-radiography, infrared reflectography to see underdrawing, ultraviolet examination, microscopy, pigment and binder analysis, and dendrochronology for dating wooden panels. They work best when interpreted alongside historical documents, which is why technical specialists, conservators, and art historians often co-author studies.

Digital Art History

Digital methods include image databases, linked open data, network analysis of collectors and dealers, computational analysis of large image sets, three-dimensional modelling of architecture and sculpture, and online catalogues raisonnés. Related infrastructure for humanities researchers is discussed in the guide to DARIAH-EU.

Subfields

Art history is usually organised by period, region, and medium, with cross-cutting specialisms:

• By period: ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, eighteenth and nineteenth century, modern, and contemporary art.
• By region or tradition: European, American, African, Asian, Islamic, Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Americas, Oceanic, and global or world art history. Many departments now stress connections across regions rather than treating each in isolation.
• By medium: architectural history, the history of photography, print culture, film and media, textiles, ceramics, and manuscripts and book arts.

Architectural history, in particular, is often its own field with separate societies and journals; see What Is Architecture? for how it relates to design and building research.

Art History, Museums, and Conservation Science

Museums are both employers of art historians and primary research sites. Curators build collections, research objects, and organise exhibitions; registrars and collections staff manage records and loans; provenance researchers investigate acquisition histories; educators and publication teams translate scholarship for the public.

Conservation is the professional care of objects, combining hands-on treatment, preventive care, documentation, and scientific analysis. Conservators and conservation scientists often work in the same building as curators, and the relationship matters for research: an object’s condition and treatment history are part of its evidence. Large institutions, including the Getty through its Getty Conservation Institute, run dedicated conservation research programmes. The Getty Foundation, which is separate from the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute within the J. Paul Getty Trust, describes its grantmaking as covering art history, art conservation, museums and archival collections, and professional development, and its Conserving Canvas initiative funds training in the care of historical paintings on canvas.

A Short History of the Discipline

Writing about artists is old: Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550, is often treated as the founding text of art-historical biography. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century study of ancient art is commonly credited with giving the subject a historical, period-by-period shape. Art history became an academic discipline in German-speaking universities in the nineteenth century, and the field then spread through scholars’ networks to Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, aided by the emigration of European scholars in the 1930s. In the United States, the College Art Association was founded in 1911, and its journal The Art Bulletin began publishing in 1913. In the later twentieth century the discipline expanded sharply in subject matter and theory, which is why a current graduate programme may be as much about visual culture and social theory as about style and attribution.

Training and Careers

A typical path is an undergraduate degree in art history or a related humanities subject, followed by a master’s degree and then a doctorate for those pursuing a research or university teaching career. Doctoral training generally includes historiography and methods courses, reading knowledge of research languages, specialist seminars, comprehensive examinations, and a dissertation, often supported by archival and museum work abroad. Museum-focused routes may include internships, fellowships in museum departments, or professional master’s degrees in museum studies or conservation. Conservation itself is a distinct professional path with its own graduate programmes and practical apprenticeship.

Graduates work in universities, museums, galleries and auction houses, archives and libraries, heritage organisations, publishing, arts administration, and government cultural agencies.

Societies, Journals, and Publishing

The main U.S. professional body is the College Art Association (CAA), founded in 1911, which describes itself as promoting the arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners. It holds an annual conference and publishes The Art Bulletin, a leading English-language journal for art historians, and Art Journal, which focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture. Other widely read journals include The Burlington Magazine and Art History, the journal of the UK Association for Art History. Specialist societies, such as the Society of Architectural Historians, serve particular subfields, and the international committee CIHA (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art) links national communities.

Publishing conventions differ from the sciences. The monograph and the exhibition catalogue remain prestige outputs, and the single-author book carries heavy weight in hiring and tenure. Art history citation commonly follows Chicago-style notes and bibliography; see the overview of citation styles and referencing formats. Authors planning a book should read the guides on how to write an academic book, writing a university press book proposal, and open access monograph publishing. A scholarly monograph in this field often costs more to produce than a text-only humanities book because of the images, which leads directly to the permissions question below.

Image Rights and Reproduction Permissions

Images are the hardest practical problem in art-historical publishing. A book or article may need dozens or hundreds of reproductions, and each can involve several layers of rights: the copyright in the artwork itself, the rights in a photograph of it, the rules of the museum or archive that holds the object, and the licence terms of the publisher. Four points help researchers plan.

• Artwork copyright and photograph rights are separate. Works by artists who died long ago are generally out of copyright, but a recent photograph may carry its own rights, and the holding institution may impose conditions or fees. Works by living or recently deceased artists are usually protected, and permission often comes through the artist, an estate, or a collecting society. Terms differ by country, so check the law that applies to where you publish. For the licensing vocabulary, see the dictionary entries for Creative Commons and Rightslink, and the comparisons CC0 vs. public domain and CC BY vs. CC BY-NC.
• Open-access collections have reduced the barrier. In February 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art made images of public-domain works in its collection available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, covering more than 375,000 images at launch, and other museums have adopted comparable open-content policies. Always read the specific terms for each institution and each image, because open policies typically cover only works the institution has determined to be in the public domain.
• Fair use is possible but must be reasoned. In 2015 the CAA published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, developed by Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. It addresses analytic writing, teaching, making art, museum uses, and online access to archival and special collections. It is a statement of community practice on U.S. fair use, not legal advice, and it does not apply automatically outside the United States. Publishers still set their own rules.
• Budget and negotiate early. Reproduction fees, high-resolution file costs, and permission lead times can add months and thousands of dollars to a project. Many presses expect authors to secure and pay for permissions, and a contract that is silent on images can create disputes later. Raise image costs when you submit a book proposal and when you apply for funding. Grant budgets can often cover permissions and reproduction fees; confirm what a given funder allows.

Keep a permissions log recording each image, its source, rights holder, licence or permission terms, credit line, and any use restrictions (print, online, territory, print run). The same discipline helps if the work later moves to an open-access edition, because print-only permissions often do not extend to open online distribution. For general rules on rights and attribution when work is deposited or archived, see research repositories vs. archives. Work-for-hire arrangements, covered in the dictionary entry on work made for hire, can also affect who holds rights in commissioned photography.

Funding for Art-Historical Research

Art-historical research is funded mainly through fellowships and project grants rather than large laboratory budgets. The most relevant sources include:

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The main U.S. federal funder of humanities research, including fellowships, summer stipends, and digital humanities and public programmes. Grant conditions change, so check current notices. See NEH Summer Stipends and the guide to NEH data management plans for digital humanities grants.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A leading private funder of humanities, arts, and cultural institutions in the United States, and the funder of the CAA fair-use code described above. See Andrew W. Mellon Foundation humanities and arts research funding.
• The Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute. The Getty Foundation lists art history, conservation, museums and archival collections, and professional development as core grantmaking areas, and has run initiatives such as Connecting Art Histories, which supports international exchange among art historians. The Getty also offers scholar and research programmes through the Research Institute; check the Getty site for current programmes and eligibility.
• Outside the United States. Humanities councils and national academies fund the field, for example through the British Academy; see British Academy postdoctoral fellowship.

Art History in Research Administration

For a research office, art history has its own cost structure and compliance profile. Practical points include: budgeting for archival and museum travel, reproduction fees, and image permissions; confirming the access and loan rules of collections; planning for digital outputs such as image databases and how they will be preserved, using data repository options where appropriate; checking cultural-property, export, and repatriation rules for objects and samples; handling interviews with artists, collectors, or community members under institutional human-subjects policy, since oral-history style work may or may not count as research; and recognising books, catalogues, and exhibitions as legitimate outputs in assessment and tenure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is art history in simple terms?

Art history is the scholarly study of art and visual and material culture across time and place. It asks who made an object, when and why, how it was made, where it has been, and what it meant to the people who made, used, and saw it.

What do art historians actually do?

They examine works and archives, attribute and date objects, research ownership histories, interpret imagery and form, and write books, articles, catalogues, and exhibitions. Many also teach, curate, or work in conservation, collections, or provenance research.

What is provenance research?

It is the reconstruction of an object’s documented ownership and location history. It supports attribution and authenticity and is central to investigating works that may have been looted, confiscated, or illicitly exported.

Do I need permission to reproduce an image of an artwork in my publication?

Often yes, but it depends. Rights can sit in the artwork, in a photograph of it, and in the holding institution’s terms. Public-domain works from museums with open-access policies may be free to use, and fair use may apply in some U.S. contexts. Check the terms for each image and the law where you publish, and confirm requirements with your publisher.

How is art history funded?

Mainly through fellowships and project grants from government humanities agencies such as the NEH, private foundations such as Mellon and the Getty Foundation, museums, libraries, and universities.