Keeping the fundamental act of art history - the process of interpreting art and making it "intelligible" - foremost, Thomas Crow contributes a refreshing analysis of the present state of the discipline and its practice.

He aims to relocate the discussion of theory and method in art history away from models borrowed from other disciplines by presenting what he considers three of the most successful and challenging works in the literature of art history: Meyer Schapiro on the Romanesque portal sculpture of the abbey church of Sainte Marie in the French town of Souillac, Claude Levi-Strauss on the Native American masks of the Northwest Coast, and Michael Baxandall on the limewood sculptors of Renaissance Germany.

In each of these cases, part of the genius of the interpreter lies in recognizing how much an exceptional work of art enacts its own analysis, dramatizing in the process the loss of the object to which all interpretation is condemned.