Allegory
Pictures in which figures and objects stand for abstract ideas such as justice, time, vice or the arts.
29 works · 10 related artists
About
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.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Alter Egos and Avatars
Americana
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Anatomy
Animal Portrait
Animals
Anthropomorphism
Antiquity as Subject
Architecture's Effects
Artist as Ethnographer
Atmospheric Landscapes
Attenuated Figure
Bars and Restaurants
Bathers
Bedrooms and Bathrooms
Bible Story
Body Parts
Caricatures and Parody
Celebrity
Censorship
