While the usefulness of periodization in general has been questioned before,1 the established periodizations of Central and Eastern European art histories have not been systematically compared or criticized. At the heart of the issue is the relation-ship between Western models of periodization and the emerging discipline of art his-tory in the region. Western (particularly Austrian, French and German) discourses constructed the dominant grand narrative of European art: rooted in antiquity and progressing through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modernity, it was successfully institutionalized in the form of canons. Early Central and Eastern European art historians, trained in Western ideas but operating within the powerful context of nation-building projects, initially discovered and rationalized their regions’ artistic identities in response to the Western narrative. In other words, the search for what was local was framed by knowledge of what was Western. Yet the perio-dizations of Western art history, used to prove synchronicity between regions, were not always well-suited to the artistic production of Central and Eastern Europe. Par-ticularly problematic was the dominant centre–periphery model, in which perceived distance from the Western ‘centres’ of art led to the uncomfortable equation of ‘differ-ence’ with ‘belatedness’, ‘derivation’ and ‘peripherality’.2 This book looks at how art historians responded to such issues. Its chapters identify instances where established Western periodizations (such as Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance or Baroque) were adopted, adapted or contested, as well as cases where alternative local or regional periodizations were proposed. It explores how local art historians refined, ignored or hybridized Western periodizations, while still retaining the West as a point of reference and, in many cases, maintaining the desirability of synchronous development with it. The issue is not whether Central and Eastern European art historians were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or whether they were ‘biased’ or ‘objective’: a perfectly ‘objective’ history of art did not exist and is probably impossible to produce; nevertheless, it is fruitful to investigate the historicity of its production and the nature of its biases.