Allegory

About Allegory

An allegory says one thing by showing another. Ideas such as justice, time or melancholy take bodily form, and the viewer reads the picture attribute by attribute: scales for Justice, an hourglass or scythe for Time, a skull for mortality. Ambrogio Lorenzetti covered a council chamber in Siena with the Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–39), setting a thriving city beside a ruined one.

The Renaissance and Baroque loved the puzzle. Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I (1514) surrounds a brooding winged figure with tools and a magic square, and Johannes Vermeer's The Art of Painting (c. 1666–68) poses a model as Clio, muse of history. Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) sets a personification among real Parisian fighters, and public sculpture kept the language alive on a colossal scale in Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World (1886), better known as the Statue of Liberty.