Marks on a surface: composition, material, maker, viewer and market.
Ways in
Formal analysis, iconography, eye-tracking, feminist critique, phenomenology.
The longer story
Paintings and drawings have been studied longer than almost any cultural form—and we're still arguing about how. Formal analysis attends to composition, colour, brushwork. Iconography decodes symbolic content. Social history asks who made it, for whom, under what conditions. Eye-tracking reveals where people actually look. Feminist critique examines representation and gaze. Phenomenology attends to the encounter itself. The 'same' painting supports radically different research questions. What you see depends on what you're looking for.