art history 
noun [mass noun]
The academic study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and the other visual arts: a degree in art history [as modifier]: the art history department...
- Pater was writing just when the working methodology of academic art history was being established.
- The study of art history in a Ph.D. program took up the better part of the next 15 years.
- Hegel has been called the father of history for the historicizing model he offered the field of art history.
Derivatives
art historian
- France Morin is an independent contemporary art curator and art historian based in New York.
- Much has been made of Smyth's family background, for he is the son of Renaissance art historian Craig Hugh Smyth and was brought up in Italy.
- Along with Ruskin, Pater is the late-nineteenth-century English art historian whose writing and arguments remain of living interest.