To analyze a painting is to explain how it works: what it shows, how the painter built it, and what it was meant to say. Art historians follow a fixed order. First, describe what is physically on the canvas, without interpreting it. Then look at five things in turn, line, shape, color, light and composition, asking each time what they do to the eye. Only then ask what the picture means.
The middle part of that method is called formal analysis, because it studies the form of a picture, the way it looks, rather than its subject. It owes most to the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. In Principles of Art History, published in 1915, he set Renaissance and Baroque pictures side by side and compared their drawing, composition, light and color. Comparing two pictures in this way shows choices that neither reveals on its own.
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The order of the steps comes from another scholar, the German-born Erwin Panofsky. In Studies in Iconology, published in 1939, he separated three levels of looking at a picture. The first is plain description, what anyone can recognize from experience: people, objects, gestures. The second names the subject, which requires knowing the stories and symbols of the period. The third asks what the picture reveals about the culture that produced it.
Formal analysis sits between Panofsky's first level and the other two. It looks at how the picture is made before asking what it means, and it does not always end with a single answer.
Vermeer's The Milkmaid, painted around 1660, shows how this works. A first description is short: a woman pours milk into a bowl in a kitchen, and daylight comes through a window. Each of the five steps then looks for the decisions behind such a scene, the things the painter put in, moved or took out. Vermeer's kitchen hides one of them, and it comes at the end of this page.
What You'll Discover
What Van Gogh could not see from his window.
What is wrong with Cézanne's table.
Why Monet's sun vanishes in black and white.
Whom Caravaggio's light really points at.
What Vermeer painted over in the kitchen.
Van Gogh's village
Line comes first, and the first question about a line is whether it was there at all. Van Gogh's The Starry Night is a good test. He painted it in June 1889 at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, where he was staying in an asylum, and the view from his window inspired it.
That view did not include the village. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns the painting, notes that the village could not be seen from his window and was based on other views. Van Gogh also brought the cypress at the left much closer than it really was, and he reshaped the forms in the sky and made them glow.
The village, the cypress and the swirling sky are all lines that Van Gogh added, moved or redrew. Because they were chosen, they are worth reading, and what they may mean is the subject of what The Starry Night means.
Cézanne's tilted table
Shape is what the lines enclose. Paul Cézanne summed up his own idea of it in a letter of 1904 to the young painter Émile Bernard: nature should be treated through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. A painter, in other words, first finds the simple solids inside apples, bottles and tables.
Cézanne's The Basket of Apples, painted around 1893, shows what he did with those solids. The table tips up so steeply at the left that the fruit seems about to roll off. The basket leans forward to show the apples inside, and the bottle tilts to one side.
In single-point perspective, the whole scene is seen from one fixed spot. Cézanne's table breaks that rule, and one explanation is that he combined two slightly different viewpoints. The stacked cookies on the plate show it most clearly. The lower ones are seen from the side, and the two on top as if from above.
So shape raises two questions: which simple forms the picture is built from, and where the painter lets them break the rules of a single viewpoint.
Monet's disappearing sun
Color needs a test of its own, and Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise shows why. Monet painted the harbor of Le Havre, the port where he grew up, in 1872. A blue-gray haze covers the sky and the water, and a few orange touches cut through it, the sun among them.
Yet that sun is no brighter than the sky around it. The Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone has pointed out that the two have the same luminance, the same degree of lightness. In a black-and-white copy, the sun nearly disappears. The part of our vision that handles position and movement barely registers it, which may be why the sun seems to vibrate.
The test works on any painting. In a black-and-white copy, whatever drops out was carried by color alone. In Impression, Sunrise, what drops out is the sun, the focal point of the picture. When the painting was shown in Paris in 1874, it gave its name to a movement, told in what Impressionism is.
The beam in The Calling of Saint Matthew
Caravaggio used light to steer the eye. He painted The Calling of Saint Matthew in 1599 and 1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, the church in Rome where it still hangs. A beam of light crosses the faces of the men at a table, all turned toward Christ, while the rest of the room sinks into shadow.
That hard contrast between light and dark is called tenebrism, a sharper form of chiaroscuro. In this painting, the beam tells the viewer where to look, but it does not settle who is being called.
Most writers take Matthew to be the bearded man, who points at himself as if asking "Me?" Another reading has the same man pointing at the young man at the end of the table, as if asking "Him?" The painting allows both. To me, that doubt is what keeps the scene alive: the call has just been made, and the answer has not come yet.
Caravaggio's beam shows how a picture can direct the eye without deciding what it says. A full reading of the painting is in what the Calling of Saint Matthew means.
What Vermeer took out of the kitchen
Composition, the arrangement of everything inside the frame, brings the analysis back to The Milkmaid. X-ray research has shown that Vermeer first painted a basket of laundry on the floor, in the spot where a foot stove stands now. He also placed a rectangular object on the back wall, perhaps a map, and later painted it out.
A basket of laundry would have stressed the woman's household chores. Without it, nothing competes with the single gesture of pouring milk. Without the map, the wall behind her is bare, and the daylight from the window falls across it in clear contrasts of light and dark that set her firmly in the room.
Vermeer also placed the viewpoint slightly low, so that the viewer looks up at her a little. A kitchen maid at work takes on a monumental presence.
The foot stove and its meaning
The foot stove that replaced the basket brings the analysis to Panofsky's last two levels, the meaning of what remains. On the tiles behind it, small figures of Cupid appear, and a foot stove could stand for burning desire and fidelity in love.
Another reading sees in the picture the maid's devotion to caring for others. Neither reading comes from looking alone. Both depend on knowing what a foot stove and a Cupid meant to a Dutch viewer around 1660, which is exactly the knowledge Panofsky's later levels call for.
Vermeer's first idea has not vanished. The basket of laundry is still on the floor of the kitchen, under the foot stove, covered by paint and visible only in an X-ray.
About the Author
Julien Charles-Césari is a French art writer who tells the stories behind famous paintings and the lives of the artists who made them.
He created Cool Stories About Art on Instagram, followed by more than 320,000 people, and this Substack, where more than 200,000 subscribers learn art the fun way.
He also created Cool Stories About History, a Substack about the stories behind history. His book Destins d'artistes is published by Larousse.
