Content in a work of art refers to what is being depicted and might be helpful in deriving a basic meaning. Sometimes, content is straightforward, while, at other times, it is more vague and requires additional information. Content appears in the visual arts in several forms, all of which may be figurative (realistic) or abstract (distorted). Among them are portraiture, landscape, still-life, genre, and narrative.
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position, Philip Burne-Jones Holding a Cat. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.
Philip Burne-Jones Holding a Cat
George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in art of landscapes – natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view – with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
Henri Matisse. Landscape at Collioure (1905)
Oil on canvas. 38.8 x 46.6cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Matisse was a member of the Fauves (French for “wild beasts”), who used bold colors to convey emotions.
A still life (plural still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on). Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.
Maria van Oosterwijk. Vanitas Still-Life (1668)
Oil on canvas. 73 x 88.5cm. Kunsthistorisches Musuem, Vienna.
Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations (also called genre works, genre scenes, or genre views) may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist.
Nicolaes Maes. The Idle Servant (1655)
Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. Dutch Baroque genre scenes often have important moral lessons as their subtexts.
Narrative art is art that tells a story, either as a moment in an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Some of the earliest evidence of human art suggests that people told stories with pictures. However, without some knowledge of the story being told it is very hard to read ancient pictures because they are not organized in a systematic way like words on a page, but rather can unfold in many different directions at once.
Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros. Laocoön and His Sons (First century BCE)
Marble. Vatican Museum, Rome. This marble sculpture depicts a scene from Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, in which the Trojan seer Laocoön foresees the Trojan Horse and the destruction of Troy by the Greeks. Before he can warn his fellow townspeople, the sea god Neptune (an ally of the Greeks) sends his serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons.