In art, an allegory is a picture in which figures and objects stand for ideas. A woman holding scales is Justice, and a winged old man with an hourglass is Time.
For centuries painters used this language to show Love, Prudence or Deceit as people a viewer could recognize.
The name is Greek: allegoria joins allos, "other," to agoreuein, "to speak in the assembly," and so names a speech that says one thing to mean another.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino crowded his An Allegory with Venus and Cupid with such figures. At the center, a naked Venus turns toward Cupid, who leans in to kiss her.
Around the couple, the others press in from every side. On the right, a boy is about to throw rose petals, and behind him stands a girl whose body ends in a scaly tail. On the left, behind Cupid, a figure howls and clutches its head.
Across the top, a bald, winged old man with an hourglass on his shoulder stretches out an arm and holds a blue curtain, as if he were about to cover the scene, or to uncover it. He is Time.
In 1568, about twenty years after the panel was painted, Giorgio Vasari, a painter who also wrote the lives of the Italian artists, described a picture like it in his biography of Bronzino. He listed Venus kissed by Cupid, with Pleasure and Play on one side and Fraud and Jealousy on the other.
Vasari was almost certainly describing this very panel, and he worked for the same patrons in Florence as Bronzino. Yet his list says nothing of Time, one of the largest figures in it. Even someone close to the painter had missed a piece of the puzzle.
Justice and Peace on the walls of Siena
Allegory is far older than Bronzino. Two centuries before his panel, in Siena, a city of Tuscany in central Italy, the men who governed met every day beneath painted virtues, and their painter had found a simple way to keep anyone from misreading them.
What You'll Discover
Who the howling figure in Bronzino's picture might be.
What Titian's three animal heads stand for.
The book painters opened to find an idea's face.
Why Vermeer's studio scene is more than a studio.
How a realist painter called his canvas an allegory.