Given that art history is a field of history that takes art as its subject, there is no escaping the process by which art works or historical materials are evaluated on the basis of the periods when they were made and those who made them. Therefore the visual materials indispensable to such a task can be largely classified by artist, locale and subject. In this report, I focus on the Sir Robert Witt Library in England that served as a model when the Institute of Art Research, Tokyo, predecessor to the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, was established in 1930. I discuss the various debates concerning the foundation and further development of the Sir Witt Library.
  Witt began collecting photographs of Italian paintings when he studied Renaissance history at Oxford in the 1890s, and his collection grew to consist of more than 300,000 images by the mid-1920s. This overwhelmingly huge collection was suddenly brought to fame when it caught the eye of Fritz von Saxl, the German art historian, in 1926. Witt was completely uninvolved in the evaluation of the art works that became the subject of the images, or whether or not the images were of use as reference materials. He gathered as many visual materials as he could, filing them by name of the artist of the work, and thus forming one of the major collections of photographs of art works in the world.
  In the field of art history in contemporary Europe, new approaches by Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Dvorák and others dominated the field in Germany since art history was introduced to the German university curriculum in 1834. In particular, the iconography studies established by Worburg and his school flourished. In France and Italy, however, Berenson and Venturi led the field by systematically classifying the styles of Italian paintings, a method based on the stylistic analysis developed by d'Argenville and Morelli.
  A scholar belonging to the German circle mentioned above criticized the Witt collection for its lack of evaluation of artist or art work, and its classification by artist name, arguing that the images should be classified by subject matter rather than by artist. However, Witt, who had invested his own funds in the project, did not change his own methods. After Witt's death in 1952, his widow and descendents continued the work, while Witt's library became part of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London University, where the collection work is continued today.
  Yashiro Yukio went to Europe to study Botticelli under Berenson in 1921. There he met Witt while conducting his own studies in the library and praised it for its effectiveness. After returning to Japan, Yashiro proposed establishing an institution with the funds bequeathed to the nation by Kuroda Seiki. He envisioned a research center that would accumulate, organize and make publicly accessible a collection of visual materials on Asian art.
  In this paper, I will introduce the issues encompassed by the Witt Library and its current activities, given the ongoing diversification of art historical methodologies and changes in the information environment, and hope to provide points of reference for a consideration of the desirable methods of visual material collection and organization.