When a regular person wanders through a museum, they glance at art, get drawn to paintings with memorizing colors & after thinks it was a nice experience & call it a day but when someone who knows a bit about art & how it’s critiqued, they use Formal Analysis to look & understand art. This procedure helps someone describe a painting in detail through different steps & ideas. First off you look at the content of the picture (which most people do). Then you would look at it’s formal properties, including how it’s lines are drawn, what colors are in the painting, the composition of the art, how items are placed in the picture, in what way are the people modeling, how big it is through it’s scale and mass,  how it is designed, as an oil painting, sculpture, cinema, or others. Also, you would look at it’s historical context because where it was made can explain many things like a theme that would be unknown if it’s time of creation is unknown as well the technique used in a painting or sculpture could be unknown if there were two places which used similar art techniques but with two different outcomes, there could be a mix up. Without the knowledge of where a piece comes from, we won’t be able to figure out the full idea of the picture.