History painting, the depiction of stories drawn from myth, scripture, and ancient and modern history, dominated European art for six centuries as the most prestigious genre a painter could attempt. This opening lecture from a Yale course traces how Renaissance theorists and artists set the rules for the genre, defining its goals and conventions, and follows how painters bent and expanded those rules as narrative picture-making evolved. The lecturer works through numerous examples spanning the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, when the genre's prestige finally collapsed. The lecture sets up the terms the rest of the course will use, covering how subject matter, composition, and moral purpose were meant to work together in a history painting, and why the form eventually lost its central place in Western art.