Includes bibliographical references (p. 263) and index.

In the domain of visual images, those from fine art form a tiny minority. This brilliantly original book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects -- painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking -- to study the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as those in any canonical painting. Providing scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization. Elkins blends philosophic insight with historical detail to produce startling new meanings for such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.