Historians of art have long studied the technical, optical and iconographic development of art, and thus the intelligence accumulated in the skills and knowledge base of practice. They have also researched into the cognitive content of historical art, from the recording of plant and animal life, landscape and geology, metrology and anatomy through to the details of everyday life and art’s significant role in national cultures strongly oriented towards the visual. What do these studies –by Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Podro, Martin Kemp, Barbara Stafford and others– tell us about the evolution of visual intelligence and its contemporary situation?