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An artwork can contain details that work on several levels at once.
A flower might simply be part of a still life, while also representing something such as mortality or wealth.
Objects, colors, gestures, animals, and clothing can carry symbolic meanings that viewers familiar with the period would have recognized.
This is known as iconography—the study of images, symbols, and their meanings.
The same object can even have different meanings depending on its historical and cultural context.
That means understanding an artwork sometimes requires knowing what particular objects meant to people when it was created.
A painting can therefore function almost like a visual sentence, with individual objects acting like words.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art