Traditionally, art historians have relied on iconography, biography, and connoisseurship as the fundamental means of studying images. These approaches and methods stress the singularity of an image, its authenticity, and its authorship; therefore, they reflect an enduring debt to the humanist tradition of individualism. The image is understood principally as the product of the unique and privileged inspiration of an individual artist and is regarded as a measure of this individual's genius. Iconographical and biographical research secure authorial intent; connoisseurship authenticates the work. While this scholarly apparatus certainly offers the art historian indispensable tools, it is important to understand that its commitment to original intent is singularly ill-equipped to assess the reception of images, the ongoing history of response that keeps images alive within a culture from generation to generation.
