Value

Karl Isakson
Studio Interior
ca. 1918-20
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Isaac Israëls
Basket of Flowers
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Bernardino India
Seated Woman
ca. 1584
drawing
British Museum

Heinrich Max Imhof
Portrait of Marchesa Marianna Florenzi
1833
marble
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Legs of Angel
(study for painting, Voeu de Louis XIII)
1821
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Figure Studies
(study for painting, Romulus victorious over Acron)
ca. 1812
drawing
Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Figure of the Virgin
(study for painting, Voeu de Louis XIII)
1821
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean-Antoine Marie Idrac
Cupid stung by a Bee
1876
bronze
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Georgios Iakovidis
Académie
ca. 1880
drawing
National Gallery, Athens

Sanja Iveković
From the Work of Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
2001
photomontage
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Innocenzo da Imola
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1520-30
oil on panel
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Augustus John
Study of Lady Ottoline Morrell
1909
watercolor on paper
Manchester Art Gallery

Augustus John
Study of artist Gwen John
ca. 1900
drawing, with added watercolor
Manchester Art Gallery

Augustus John
Portrait of artist Gwen John
1900
drawing
Manchester Art Gallery

Gwen John
The Convalescent
ca. 1923-24
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Gwen John
The Letter
1924
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

It may be taken for granted that art history deserves to be counted among the humanities.  But what is the use of the humanities as such?  Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past.  Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?  The answer to this question is: because we are interested in reality.  . . .  There is nothing less real than the present.  To grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present.  Philosophy and mathematics do this by building systems in a medium which is by definition not subject to time.  Natural science and the humanities do it by creating those spatio-temporal structures which I have called the "cosmos of nature" and the "cosmos of culture."  And here we touch upon what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the humanities and the natural sciences.  Natural science observes the time-bound processes of nature and tries to apprehend the timeless laws according to which they unfold.  Physical observation is only possible where something "happens," that is, where a change occurs or is made to occur by way of experiment.  And it is these changes which are finally symbolized by mathematical formulae.  The humanities, on the other hand, are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead.  Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to stop, they penetrate into a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it.  Gazing as they do at those frozen, stationary records of which I have said that they "emerge from the stream of time," the humanities endeavor to capture the processes in the course of which those records were produced and became what they are. 

– Erwin Panofsky, from The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline (1940)