For 10 points, name this discipline pioneered by Giorgio Vasari, who chronicled many contemporary painters.
A major scholar in this academic discipline came up with a theory of constant modification of schematic conventions by trial and error, secured a publisher for Karl Popper's The Open Society and His Enemies, and spun his magnum opus out of a book for children after immigrating to London from Vienna. The foremost Neo-Kantian book in this discipline is Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy. A German archaeologist and murder victim made substantial contributions to this field by studying the (*) Greeks, inspiring Lessing to write his essay Laocoon. Ernst Gombrich and Johann Winckelmann studied this discipline, whose practitioner Erwin Panofsky placed iconology at a deeper level of meaning than iconography. Clement Greenberg's major essay in this discipline is "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." The first major book in this discipline was a set of biographies interspersed with anecdotes such as Piero di Cosimo's extreme misanthropy and Cimabue's brushing-off of a realistic-looking fly. For 10 points, name this discipline pioneered by Giorgio Vasari, who chronicled many contemporary painters.
A major scholar in this academic discipline came up with a theory of constant modification of schematic conventions by trial and error, secured a publisher for Karl Popper's The Open Society and His Enemies, and spun his magnum opus out of a book for children after immigrating to London from Vienna.
art history [or art criticism]