Ackerman and Kubler, in the opening statements of their essays on style, seem to provide contradictory assessments of the importance of formalism in art history in the early 1960s. From today’s vantage point, however, it is easy to recognize the validity of both views at the time. Ackerman refers to a venerable tradition that still carried considerable weight. Style was the primary method by which art and architecture were analyzed at least since Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his seminal Lives of the Artists in 1550. Kubler instead emphasizes the recent challenges posed to this tradition by German scholars. During the interwar period, Ernst Cassirer, Aby Warburg, and Erwin Panofsky had pioneered a new approach that located the meaning of art in its relationship to culture rather than aesthetics.3 Kubler’s concern about the threat this posed to formalism proved prescient. While the objectives and practice of iconology, as Warburg and Panofsky called their method, have evolved over the last half a century, the key principle, cultural contextualization, remains dominant in art history. Kubler’s provocative text notwithstanding, formalism alone is no longer considered serious scholarship.