Short answers, pulled from the story.
Art history is an academic discipline devoted to the study of artistic production and visual culture throughout human history. Art historians use methods including historical materialism, critical theory, iconographic analysis, and formal analysis to examine art's relationship with societies, cultures, and politics. The field is distinguished from art criticism, which evaluates individual works, and from aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.
Giorgio Vasari, a Tuscan painter and sculptor, has been credited with writing the first true history of art in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. His work featured biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances, with Michelangelo as the most renowned.
Xenokrates of Sicyon, a Greek sculptor active around 280 BC, is identified as perhaps the first art historian. His ideas survive through Pliny the Elder's Natural History, completed around AD 77-79, which contains the earliest surviving writing classifiable as art history.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) shifted art study away from the biographies of artists toward the perspective of the learned beholder, marking the beginnings of art criticism. His 1764 work Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums was the first book to include the phrase "history of art" in its title. He also critiqued Baroque and Rococo excess and was instrumental in reforming taste toward Neoclassicism.
Linda Nochlin argued that women were excluded from the canonical history of art and from art training not because of any lack of ability but because of systematic cultural conditions that curtailed their participation in art-producing fields. Women who did succeed were treated as anomalies rather than as models for future artists. The essay remains one of the most widely read pieces about female artists and helped ignite feminist art history in the 1970s.
Walter Benjamin introduced the concept of aura in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He defined aura as an artwork's original presence in time and space, and argued that this quality was in a state of decay because it was becoming increasingly difficult to apprehend the specific time and place in which a work was created.