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Art historians have long wrestled with the use of verbal language in analyzing visual images, or finding “words for pictures,” as Michael Baxandall put it. This session considers the historical and contemporary role of ekphrasis, epistle, poetry, and criticism in the discipline. These genres are often considered passé, improper, or ineffectual as modes of art historical analysis, though they serve as valuable archives and resources for academic writing. Spanning the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, papers in this session rethink the value and efficacy of these genres in light of what critics and scholars have termed the ‘global turn’ in art history. Drawing on materials from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, they address the objecthood of words, the temporality of writing, and geographies of art. They construe language broadly to include questions of form and style, affect and presence, adaptation and appropriation, multilingualism and intermediality, aesthetics and politics. In so doing, these papers revisit the complex relationship between language, vision, and translation in art history, and present new models of art-writing.