Marian Sokołowski (b. Czyżewo, d. in Cracow), defined the identity of art history in Poland at the end of the 19th century. Setting aside institutional reasons (he worked primarily with Jagiellonian University) and the great commitment to the tradition of the so-called “Cracow School”, the model of the discipline he developed has survived well into the 20th century. This article attempts to introduce M. Sokołowski’s history of art and examine it at its deepest level, that is, at the level of the structures which determine the presentation of the results of one’s research, and even their scope. The scholar’s biography allows us to not so much identify specific facts, as to see the environment in which the discipline was formed, and the range of its concepts. It also meets the semiotic demand placed on the study of history to bring back the subject of the history. Art criticism and journalism, areas neglected thus far, are restored and treated here as the result of a certain philosophy of the discipline, with its deep commitment to the present time. The next section of the article presents the mechanisms of constructing a complete picture of the Kingdom of Art, which impose a formal approach on the level of the analysis of disegno, and define, after allgemeine Kunstgeschichte, the task of an art historian as tidying up an overgrown garden. This picture of interconnected links in the chain allows us to consider Polish art as part of the garden of European art, whilst the formal differences with oriental art emphasize the significant role of Polish art history. The outlined similarities and differences are in fact semantically charged, creating an identity and autonomy of Polish art in accordance with Sokołowski’s belief in the parallelism between changes in the form and the structures of imagination and society. Finally, we are reminded of art history’s involvement in the making of contemporary art, its educational role in society, so that an appropriate level of Bildung might be achieved, and its role in guiding the hand of the artist when re-establishing the interrupted continuity of artistic tradition.