Christopher S. Wood’s A History of Art History should thus have no trouble building an intelligible narrative. In fact, while offering an abundance of facts and names and dates, it is oddly lacking not only in clarity but in much else we might expect from a book about art history. There is hardly, for example, a single perceptive remark about any work of art; the paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer are characterised in the most perfunctory and banal way. Nor does the author seem to have much understanding of the art theory that accompanies early modern art-historical writing, or the humoral system that underpins the biographical genre from Vasari to Bellori.

The introduction contains a number of interesting observations – and at this stage in reading a book one is giving it the most sympathetic attention possible – but Wood’s attempts to build some kind of overall conceptual structure flounder in terms like ‘annalistic’ and ‘typology’, which are used in a vague and inconsistent way. The theme of ‘relativism’ is raised early but never properly defined (it is possible to judge different art traditions by their own standards but still clearly assess achievement within each tradition). Nor is there any critical framework for understanding art within its social and cultural history while also appreciating its capacity for transcendent or perennial meaning. These themes echo through the book, never resolved.

What follows is a long march through five centuries of art history in which arbitrary historiographical discursiveness drifts like a fog above a world of facts – of individuals, of works of art, of social contexts, of theoretical debates – that are too often poorly understood or referred to in the superficial way that facts of all kinds can be instantly found on the internet. Time and again, I felt that I would have gained a sounder idea of unfamiliar individuals from simply looking up their Wikipedia pages; in cases that I knew well, on the other hand, the discussion turned out repeatedly to be either facile or defective.

Wood fails to explain Vasari’s historiographical vision, and thus chides him for not showing greater appreciation of Giotto. But his own account is full of odd contradictions and gratuitous assertions: ‘Vasari lifts art out of world history: art now has its own history’; ‘Vasari may multiply the discriminations, but in the end he is just an annalist’; ‘How poor Vasari’s literary soil is, how uninspiring and unpoetic his comments on art’.

Wood himself, as I already mentioned, has little to say about art, but this doesn’t prevent him from making surprisingly cavalier assumptions about the intentions of artists. On page 116 alone, he writes: ‘Domenichino asserted’, ‘He was aware’, ‘He believed’, ‘Domenichino is saying’, ‘Domenichino was proposing’, and ‘Domenichino knew’. His discussion culminates in this unintelligible passage: ‘The contest between typology and authorial performance is now the dramatic content of art. Contradictions become the matrix of artistic achievement. Artistic beauty engulfs the beauty of bodies.’

A little further on, he seems to have no idea of what the biographer and theorist Gian Pietro Bellori owed to such predecessors as Agucchi, and how this helped to shape his judgment of Caravaggio and the Carracci, nor any awareness of the fundamental book on this subject by Sir Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947). This apparent ignorance allows him to declare breezily that Bellori’s doctrine is ‘simplistic’.

Roger de Piles, another notable figure and a crucial theorist in the age of Louis XIV, is mentioned without an adequate discussion of his relations with the Académie Royale de Peinture – first as its nemesis and finally as its spokesman – and with no mention of his starting point as a theorist in the translation of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s centrally important De arte graphica (1668). Once again, with so little awareness of context and meaning, we are hardly surprised to encounter the standard clichéd response to de Piles’s late Balance des peintres, a tabulation of the virtues of the great artists of the canon, whose real point was to achieve reconciliation between the partisans of line and colour.

Baudelaire is briefly quoted and then misinterpreted on the following page – ‘The implication, spelled out by Baudelaire, is that the modern artist [...] has no will to counteract the intrinsic fictionality of the image.’ But no: if Wood had troubled to read Baudelaire’s writing on art in any depth, he would realise the passage is making a familiar point about the role of the imagination, which the poet calls la reine du vrai (the queen of truth).

The discussion of Morelli follows a kind of mannerism which we saw already with Vasari, of successively declaring someone a pioneer and then a dead-end. Walter Pater appears without adequate context and with an almost breathtaking failure to recognise his unique impact on the modern appreciation of art, as the man who not only made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world but also created the popular mystique surrounding Botticelli and Giorgione – and indeed perhaps even Winckelmann. Pater himself would have winced at the misspelling of a Greek word on page 264.

Generally, Wood is more at home with the Germans, but even here the lack of a broader grasp of art history and theory is a hindrance: how can we appreciate the significance of Hildebrand without understanding both the Renaissance and Baroque paragone between painting and sculpture (as well as the debate between casting and modelling) and the dramatic transformation of the canon of ancient sculpture that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century?

By chance, I reviewed Daniel Thomas’s collected writings, Recent Past, a few weeks ago for The Weekend Australian. The contrast between the two books could not be greater. In every page of Thomas’s book there are moments of insight, glimpses into the intimate meaning of a work, the mind of an artist, or the changing social environment of artists and museums. Here, unfortunately, it is too often clichés and even errors disguised by the congested but loose-knit abstractions of academic waffle.