This introduction considers where scholars have located the origins of the discipline of Art History in temporal and geographic terms, with responses ranging from ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy to Medieval Europe and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also suggests that while the origins of Art History may still be contested, there is a general consensus that the discipline's institutionalization in universities and museums from the mid-nineteenth century onward, particularly in German-speaking lands, was, if not necessarily an originary moment, undoubtedly a defining one. The introduction sets out as well the parameters of the present volume as a whole. This includes critical (re)considerations of key methodologies and fundamental concepts, alongside new approaches to visual and material culture based on a much broader definition of “art” itself as a category.
