Rumors of the death of the Western canon have been greatly exaggerated, and no more so than in the field of art history. There Giotto and Michelangelo, Cézanne and Picasso soldier bravely on, holding the high ground, and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically, the conservative character of art history is guaranteed by its very dispensability. The undergraduate who takes the introductory course expects, at a minimum, to get a rough inventory of the works he might one day see in Florence or in Paris. Tamper with that inventory too much, and the student is gone—no Michelangelo, no art history. As a consequence, the undergraduate has generally been spared the worst of the theoretical excesses of the new art history, at least until graduate school.

This fundamental conservatism is ratified by the principal textbooks of the discipline, above all H. W. Janson’s hefty History of Art, the principal undergraduate textbook since 1962. Although the current sixth edition version is more unwieldy than ever, a $95.00 leviathan augmented by considerable new material on the art of Asia and Africa, the essential story remains intact. The stage is more crowded, and the principal figures are now shouldered in among a much larger cast of bit players, but they still hold pride of place. And the narrative still progresses in linear fashion, in which choice examples unfold in a dynamic evolutionary sequence.

So the history of art has been taught in the West since