When did the notions “form” and “content” occur as basic aspects of a work of art?

Answer 1

This is a great question! Today, in art history courses and in informal settings alike, we use the terms "content" and "form" to differentiate between what we see and how it appears. Viewers of art have done this, with different terms and in different languages of course, across disparate times and places. There are entire branches of art history devoted to the history of style, which deals primarily with questions of form over content. In much of Western (Anglo/European) art history, this differentiation and methodology occurs as early as the Middle Ages with certain precedents in Greco-Roman antiquity; these terms, however, were codified in the eighteenth-century, especially in Germany, where the discipline of academic art history first emerged. The "formal" or "close" analysis emerging in that particular context remains essential to looking at, writing about, and researching art today.

For those who might be more interested in the history of these terms, I would recommend Christopher Wood's A History of Art History as well as Art History: A Critical History to Its Methods by Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk.

I hope this helps!

Best,

Alejandro N. (Harvard PhD Candidate, History of Art)