ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book gathers some signal voices in the discipline of art history to reflect upon the strengths and weaknesses, also on the pasts and futures, of comparative practice in the history of art. Its contributors include some of the field's leading practitioners of comparative art history, as well as several of the most potent current thinkers about its methods and basis. The book, based on a conference at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York that was the product of a large Mellon initiative into the current status and practice of the discipline of art history, both explores some methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the subject and sketches some insights into the larger issue of the place of the comparative in how art history may develop in the future.
