Personification
Abstract ideas, places and forces shown as human figures, recognised by the attributes they carry: scales, torches, trumpets, crowns.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Ideas are hard to paint, so artists give them bodies and tell them apart by what they hold. Justice carries scales and a sword, Time an hourglass or scythe, Fame a trumpet. Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes of Good and Bad Government (1338–39) in Siena's town hall seat Peace, lounging in white, among Justice and the civic virtues, and the engraved Italian cards known as the Mantegna Tarocchi (c. 1465) set out Muses, Liberal Arts and planets as an instructive series.
Nations and causes took up the same language. Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) sends a bare-breasted Liberty over a Paris barricade with the tricolour, and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World (1886) raised her in copper at the entrance to New York's harbour. Britannia, Marianne and Columbia have long appeared on coins, stamps and posters, keeping personification part of everyday visual life.
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Political Events
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Portrait
Portraits without a Face
Provocative
Psychoanalysis
Racial and Ethnic Identity
References to Art History
