The History of Vision

One of the most influential ideas of twentieth‐century art history and aesthetics is that vision has a history and it is the task of art history to trace how vision has changed. This claim has recently been attacked for both empirical and conceptual reasons. My aim is to argue for a new version of the history of vision claim: if visual attention has a history, then vision also has a history. And we have some reason to think that at least in certain contexts (namely, in the context of looking at pictures), visual attention does have a history.