The seventeenth-century academic separation between fine and useful arts first fell out of fashion nearly a century ago. - George Kubler

Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it.

The history of art... resembles a broken but much-repaired chain made of string and wire to connect the occasional jeweled links surviving as physical evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects.

The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.