The Institute was established as the Research Group for Art History within the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1969. Its predecessor was the Documentation Center for Art History operating within the framework of the Ministry for Culture. Having become part of the Academy, its main responsibility was to create a general documentation collection. To be able to fulfill these requirements, along with the collections received from the Ministry (Collection of Archival Regestae, Collection of Plaster Copies of Medieval Seals, Lexicon of Hungarian Artists, Archive) other collections had been added to the newly founded institution (Library and Photographic Archive). In 1991 the name of the Institute was changed to Research Institute of Art History. According to the program of reorganization of the academic institutes, our Institute operates as part of the Research Center for the Humanities established in 1 January 2012. As of fall 2019 the Institute is part of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network.