I. Inventing a History of Art. The significance of Winckelmann's history ; A new paradigm ; History as system
II. Fact and Fantasy. A lover's discourse ; Rise and decline ; Dichotomies of freedom ; Presences and absences
III. Style. The high style and the beautiful style ; Precedents ; Visual facts ; Verbal and visual ; The rhetoric of the image
IV. Beauty and Sublimity. The sex of the sublime ; Beautiful masculinity ; The sublime fetish
V. Ideal Bodies. The Greek ideal and the ideal ego ; Oneness and ideal beauty ; The body of Narcissus ; Nightmare and Utopia
VI. Freedom and Desire. A free subject ; Politics, patronage, and identity ; Friendship and desire ; Endings
VII. Afterlife. Jacobin politics and Victorian aestheticism ; Revolutionary heroes ; Modernity and its discontents.