ABSTRACT
Everyone knows that the Department of History of Art is comparative: that, in addition to teaching the arts of the modern Euro-American tradition, its members of faculty teach the arts of ancient and modern Asia, the arts of the ancient Near East and the classical Mediterranean world, the arts of Paleolithic and African prehistory, and so on. This chapter distinguishes between the visibility of human-made things, especially things made to be used visually, such as pictures and artworks, and their visuality. Because of bivisibility, art history, sometimes it can be defined as an attempt to reconstruct historical visualities, is inherently comparative. Inaugurally, it moves between the visibility of its objects in the present and their putative original visuality in the past. Kantor's and Smith's concept of interconnectedness, though far from unique to them, was a hallmark of their comparativism.
