Art Historical Method: Formal Analysis, Iconography, Technique, Context and Terminology
This domain supplies the toolkit used in every other section. The PAU tests whether you can move from description to analysis, use iconographic vocabulary correctly, identify materials and techniques, and connect a work to its patron, function and audience. Examiners reward precise terms and penalize plot summary.
Formal analysis
- Work through line, shape, color, value, texture, space, composition, scale, proportion, light and viewpoint. For each, ask what the choice does - where the eye is led, what is isolated, what feels stable or unstable.
- Describe before you interpret, but do not stop at description. "The light comes from the right and isolates the hand" is analysis; "it is dramatic" is not.
Iconography and iconology
- Panofsky's three levels: pre-iconographic (what is depicted), iconographic (subject and symbols, requiring textual knowledge), iconological (cultural meaning).
- Learn attributes: keys for Peter, wheel for Catherine, lily for purity, skull for mortality. Distinguish attribute from symbol and from emblem.
Technique and context
- Know the constraints of fresco (fast work on wet plaster), tempera (linear, layered), oil (glazes, blending), mosaic (tesserae, fixed viewing distance), marble and bronze casting, and print media.
- Context includes patron, commission, original location, function, audience and political or religious setting. A work moved to a museum has lost its original context, which matters for interpretation.
Terminology
- Use terms precisely: contrapposto, sfumato, tenebrism, foreshortening, tympanum, pendentive, hypostyle, muqarnas. Avoid vague evaluative words such as beautiful, emotional or realistic unless you define them.
Worked example: Las Meninas (Velázquez, 1656)
Formal: a deep room, a vanishing point near the doorway figure, light from the right, a mirror at the back. Iconography: the infanta, her maids, the dwarf, the painter at the easel, and the reflected king and queen. Context: the court of Philip IV and the painter's ambition for noble status. Iconology: the painting is about looking, representation and the presence of the monarch - the viewer stands where the king and queen would be. Note how each level depends on the one before it; that structure is what the exam wants.
Traps that cost marks
- Retelling the subject instead of analyzing it.
- Confusing iconography (identification) with iconology (meaning).
- Using technical terms loosely or anachronistically.
- Ignoring medium and original location when interpreting.