  Investigation of the spacelike and timelike electromagnetic form factors of
hadrons, within a relativistic microscopical model characterized by a small set
of hypothesis, could shed light on the components of hadron states beyond the
valence one. Our relativistic approach has been successfully applied first to
the pion and then the extension to the nucleon has been undertaken. The pion
case is shortly reviewed as an illustrative example for introducing the main
ingredients of our approach, and preliminary results for the nucleon in the
spacelike range $-10 (GeV/c)^2\le q^2 \le 0$ are evaluated.
