Picturing Art History: The Rise of the Illustrated History of Art in the Eighteenth Century

Today’s book buyer takes for granted that books on art history will be illustrated with quality full-color reproductions of famous masterpieces. Yet it was only in the eighteenth century that art books began to be illustrated. In Picturing Art History, Ingrid R. Vermeulen investigates the role that illustrations played in the emergence of the field of art history, arguing that the reproduction collections of such scholars as Giovanni Bottari, Johann Winckelmann, and Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt led to the belief that the artistic past should not be pictured as a history of artists, but as a history of works.