Art historical studies are confronted with a stream of novelties, innovations, imitations, secessions, and further variants of small and big change. The term innovation, however, is not used in a consistent manner. The chapter presents influential positions from art history and its neighboring disciplines that use the concept of innovation. In a first section, the contributions selected show how innovation is interpreted differently when the term is incorporated into various explanatory models. In a second section, the concept is used to address significant changes on three levels of magnitude: epochal ruptures, style inventions, and everyday novelties. Innovation is an intuitively understandable term across these levels. For social science research, two results are significant: the fundamental distinction between innovations in the practices and techniques through which artworks are created and innovations within esthetic forms of expression; and the insight that artistic creations in earlier historical epochs dealt with different, not with “less advanced” problems.