A Beginner’s Guide to Appreciating Fine Art
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Self, History, Psychology, Culture, Art

When you visit a gallery or museum to see art in the flesh, pick only a few pieces to focus on. Some places have collections of thousands of works of art, and if you try to take in hundreds or even just dozens of them, you will quickly feel fatigued. Especially when there are multiple galleries in a museum, really concentrate on a few and just take a look at the others. Think in terms of love at first sight, and take note of what catches your eye. Better still, preplan by visiting the museum’s website and picking the pieces so you can make a beeline for them on your visit. And keep in mind that you may be able to visit the museum again.

Once you make a selection and really start looking at it, my advice is to start simple. Many people find art so intimidating or difficult because they look too hard for complication. Think again about love at first sight—that experience of being attracted to something before you really know anything about it. All you know is how the look or essence of it makes you feel. And then you can progress to a complicated analysis if you want.

Simple approaches:

The overall size and shape of the artwork

Whether it’s abstract or realistic

The shapes within it

The colors

The tones

The painting alone isn’t going to tell you the whole story of what is happening.

More complicated approaches:

The style of the artwork

The theme of the artwork

What the artwork represents

The allusions the artwork makes to other things

The wider cultural meaning of the artwork

Visitors in an art gallery will often take a quick look at the artwork, read the interpretation panel for a while, take a longer look at the artwork, and then walk away. That is, they tend to skip straight to the complicated stuff, trying to get into the meaning of the piece and what it represents before they really get to grips with how the piece works.

My advice is to look at the picture for a long time before you read the interpretation panel. Ask yourself: What is the artist trying to make me do? Where is the artist leading my eye? How does the artist want me to feel or think, and how are they achieving that?

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne is a beautiful painting in the collection of the U.K.’s National Gallery. Working through some of the approaches listed above, here are eight ways to look at the painting with increasing complexity.

‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ by Tiziano Vecellio (known as Titian), 1522–23. Image: VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

1. Overall size and shape

Bacchus and Ariadne is considered medium-sized because the picture doesn’t require much movement from the viewer; you can stand in the same spot and take it all in. It’s also almost square, which is a format that compresses the elements to give the picture a feeling of drama before you even know what you are looking at.

Huge pictures or sculptures with life-sized figures tend to either involve the viewer in the action or were designed to be placed far away but still seen. In contrast, small pictures demand intimacy. Medium pictures like this one, however, can give some detachment. They allow a person to consider the artwork without much interaction with the piece.

2. Shapes within the image

Some broad shapes in the picture can be spotted if you look at how the elements are clustered. Notably, in this piece, there is a strong triangle shape that divides the picture in half diagonally. This is common in paintings. Most of the figures here are compressed into a wedge that thins from right to left. By noticing the wedge, you realize even more that attention is drawn to two principal figures: One is half-in and half-out of the triangle, and the other’s feet are at the bottom left corner.

Image remixes: Steven Gambardella

3. Color tones

The triangular composition also marks a division between the cooler blues and greens of the sky, trees, and other greenery and the warmer colors of earth and flesh. Taking this a step further, when the painting is pixelated to help us see past the details, it stands out how the two principal figures are also paler than the rest of the figures are. So tone is also functioning in the painting to concentrate our attention.

4. Intended movement

Painters, sculptors, and other artists often try to make your eye move around their artwork. They do this using the composition and the way the parts of the piece interact.

In Bacchus and Ariadne, my gaze always rests on the figure in the air for a moment, but his strong gaze to the left pushes mine to the woman. I’m then drawn down to the urn, then the dog that also in the near foreground. The dog’s attention is on the young satyr (a mythical creature that’s half-human, half-animal), and so my gaze goes there, then to the revelry behind the satyr and right up to the break in the trees at the top right corner. From there, my eye is drawn to the leaping figure’s cloak and back to his eyes again.

This creates a cycle that moves both around the picture and in and out of depth—from the pile of drapery in the very close foreground to the figure asleep in the background.

We can start to get a bit more complex here by meshing this movement with our previous shape and color observations. Titian has used the placement of cool and warm colors to animate a viewer’s eyes. The warm tones are compressed in their space in the bottom right while the cool ones expand in their space in the top left. (This effect is one that happens in everyday life, too: Think of the difference in feeling when a room is painted all red and feels closed in versus when it’s painted a pale blue and feels more open.)

Using color filters like the ones below, you can get an even clearer sense of the contrasts and how they are distributed around the composition. The push and pull of warm and cool in the painting ensures your eyes never settle for long.