This chapter focuses on the titles of Western works of visual art and propounds the textual analysis of their form, function, and history. It begins by considering the inadequacies of the now substantial international literature on the subject, which it traces to an insecure grasp of the visual artwork title as a historical phenomenon and a related lack of precision in defining it. Building on the widespread assumption that such titles are a form of name, specifically a proper name, the chapter attempts to establish in what sense and in what measure this is true and how it relates to the gradually evolving conception, in the West, of artworks as endowed with individual identity, somewhat like that of persons. Applying an original model of state predication and its varieties, those varieties are shown not only to inform the roles titles may play in the discursive process but also to determine their internal structure. Lastly, the chapter enumerates the parameters that must regulate a textually oriented and minutely comparative genealogy of the visual artwork title, one tracking in detail the migration of the names used to refer to artworks across the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic boundaries of text. It closes by discussing a series of passages extracted from texts in different languages and dating from different periods and selected to illustrate the range and complexity of the comparisons envisaged.