ABSTRACT
Art history possesses its own mythology. Like all social organizations, an intellectual discipline coheres around a community with a shared history, a common language, and seemingly similar beliefs and goals. Fundamental to any social organization is a myth of its origins. Art history, as practiced and theorized in the West, enjoys a particularly active etiological impulse. Perhaps in an effort to minimize differences within the various endeavors described as “Art History,” historiographers of the discipline are keen to assert and reassert our common intellectual heritage. We have an abundance of fathers. Among the most frequently cited are Giorgio Vasari (often called “the father of art history”); J.J. Winckelmann (busier than Vasari, he is known as “the father of archaeology” as well as “the father of modern art history”); Georg Hegel (Gombrich’s “father of art history”); and recently Bernard Smith has been given the appellation “father of art history in Australia.” An orphan discipline, apparently, art history goes motherless.
