Art History Now: Objects, Concepts, Approaches

This volume presents definitive essays by internationally renowned experts and innovative younger scholars on the wide range of approaches used by art historians past and present to analyze images, objects, buildings, and performances.It provides critical considerations of key methodologies, from formalism and iconography to social history and psychoanalytic approaches. It foregrounds fundamental concepts, from the artist, the beholder, and the frame to museums, canons, and periodization. At the same time, it broadens art itself as a category by considering photographs, dgtl media, performance, architecture, and visual culture more generally. The chapters also explore new approaches and new points of view that have expanded Art History’s remit in exciting ways in recent years by addressing growing interest in race, ethnicity, and the legacies of colonialism; gender identity and sexuality; ecocritical approaches to making and consuming art; materiality and the senses; dgtlly informed methods; the nascent field of Disability Studies; and scientific research on vision and on the technical analysis of works of art.This comprehensive collection will be indispensable for students and scholars of Art History, as well as for readers coming from other disciplines who are seeking fresh approaches to visual and material culture.

About the Author

Geraldine A. Johnson is Head of the History of Art Department at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. She has published widely on sculpture from the late Medieval period to the present day, gender and the visual arts, the history of photography, and the historiography of Art History. She co-edited the prize-winning Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy and edited Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension . She is also the author of Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction . Most recently, she co-edited Photo Archives and the Place of Photography (Routledge, 2025) and she is currently co-curating a major exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum on art and the senses in the global Early Modern period.