Thomas Crow is one of the most exacting and vigilant of art historians, never prone to following received opinions, methods, or practices. His way of thinking has sometimes produced works that are exemplary in their circumspection and nuance; the theory of society and art embedded in the opening chapter of Modern Art in the Common Culture has yet to be adequately answered. The Intelligence of Art is an attempt to say more generally, but with the precision afforded by individual examples, where the discipline of art history might find promising models. Crow is especially concerned with what he takes to be art history’s current inability to account for artistic change. The excessive “theoretical emphasis on the fixed, contemplative gaze,” he says, has hampered historians’ ability to “follow the logic of change” (102). The book looks closely at three cases: Meyer Schapiro’s work on the portal sculptures at Souillac; Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Northwest Coast Native American masks; and Michael Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. In a final chapter, Crow contributes original material on depictions of extreme emotions in mid- to late eighteenth-century French painting. The central concern in each case is to demonstrate how properties intrinsic to the artwork...