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. - 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 cultural clock runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. ... however, runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter recovered from refuse heaps and graveyards, from abandoned cities and buried villages. Only the arts of material nature have survived; of music and dance, of talk and ritual, of all the arts of temporal expression practically nothing is known elsewhere than in the Mediterranean world, save through traditional survivals among remote groups.

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.