This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
History of Art traces the style, meaning and attribution of visual works of art and architecture across periods, its method a stylistic and iconographic analysis that situates a work's form and imagery within the tradition that produced it. It is classified among the humanities, and its founding as an independent discipline is generally dated to 1764, when Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity first organized ancient art by period and style rather than by anecdote about the artists who made it, giving the field a method that could compare one period's work against another's on formal grounds.
For an atlas of religion and belief, the field underlies nearly every account given here of sacred architecture and devotional imagery. A temple's floor plan, an icon's composition, a manuscript's illumination, are not read by this discipline as objects of taste but as datable, attributable evidence: a style of carving or a manner of depicting a sacred figure situates a building or an image within a period and a tradition as precisely as a written date would, and can identify a devotional image's origin, its influences and its later copies even where no text records any of them.
That is why it matters to this atlas specifically. Sacred art carries doctrine and devotion in visual form as often as scripture carries it in words, and history of art is the discipline equipped to read that visual record on its own terms, tracing what an image or a building actually says and where that visual language came from.