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| Jacob Jordaens Sacrifice of Isaac ca. 1625-26 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Louis Finson Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy 1612 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseilles |
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| Louis Finson Massacre of the Innocents 1615 oil on canvas Collegiale kerk Sint-Begga, Andenne, Belgium |
"One reason among others why the use of the term "formalism" is stultifying is that it begs a large part of the very difficult question as to just what can be sensibly said about works of art. It assumes that "form" and "content" in art can be adequately distinguished for the purposes of discourse. This implies in turn that discursive thought has solved just those problems of art upon whose imperviousness to discursive thinking the very possibility of art depends.
Reflection shows that anything in a work of art that can be talked about or pointed to automatically excludes itself from the "content" of the work, from its import, tenor, gist, or "meaning" (all of which terms are but so many stabs at a generic term for what works of art are ultimately "about"). Anything in a work of art that does not belong to its "content" has to belong to its "form" – if the latter term means anything at all in this context. In itself "content" remains indefinable, unparaphraseable, undiscussable. Whatever Dante or Tolstoy, Bach or Mozart, Giotto or David intended his art to be about, or said it was about, the works of his art go beyond anything specifiable in their effect. That is what art, regardless of the intention of the artists, has to do, even the worst art; the unspecifiability of its "content" is what constitutes art as art."
– Clement Greenberg, from Complaints of an Art Critic (published in Artforum, October 1967)
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| Peter Paul Rubens Last Supper ca. 1631-32 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Prometheus before 1637 oil on canvas Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Cephalus and Procris ca. 1610-20 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Hendrick van Someren The Smoker - Allegory of Transience ca. 1615-25 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"To decide that the point of criticism is to alter and to relocate meaning – adding, subtracting, multiplying it – is in effect to base the critic's exertions on an enterprise of avoidance, and thereby to recommit criticism (if it had ever left) to the domain of taste. For it is, finally, the exercise of taste which identifies meanings that are familiar; a judgment of taste which discriminates against such meanings as too familiar; an ideology of taste which makes of the familiar something vulgar and facile. Barthes's formalism at its most decisive, his ruling that the critic is called on to reconstitute not the "message" of a work but only its "system" – its form, its structure – is perhaps best understood thus, as the liberating avoidance of the obvious, as an immense gesture of good taste."
– Susan Sontag, from On Roland Barthes (1982)
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| attributed to Reyer van Blommendael Shepherd and Sleeping Shepherdess ca. 1650-60 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Jan Lievens Pilate washing his Hands before 1650 oil on panel Museum de Lakenthal, Leiden |
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| Jan Lievens Young Girl in Profile ca. 1631-32 oil on panel private collection on loan to Yale University Art Gallery |
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| follower of Rembrandt Portrait of a Young Woman 1632 oil on panel Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| attributed to Gerard Seghers A Musical Company before 1651 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Gerard Seghers Penitent Magdalen ca. 1627-30 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Anthony van Dyck Madonna and Child with St Anthony of Padua ca. 1630-32 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio before 1641 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |