The nature of the visual has recently moved to the centre of debates in the humanities. Art history as a discipline is now addressing some of the most basic questions about cultural production, questions such as how images function and how expectations and social factors mediate what we see. The new scope of art history has required a major expansion and reassessment of methods and terminology. This book is both an exposition and a demonstration of contested terms from the current art historical vocabulary. In individual essays, scholars examine the history and use of these terms by grounding their discussions in single works of art, reading each work through current debates and methods. This instructive combination of theory and practice allows readers to examine the terms as they are seeing them employed. Like its companion, "Critical Terms for Literary Study", this book should prove to be of use as a resource both for those beginning to learn about the visual theory and for scholars and historians.