What Is Symbolism in Art? The Art Lover's Guide

Symbolism in art is the use of objects, colors and figures to carry a hidden meaning beyond what they literally show. A skull is not just a skull. It is death, placed there on purpose.

It works on two levels: the secret symbols hidden inside paintings for centuries, and a whole art movement that made those symbols the entire point.

Now the part nobody tells you.

For most of art history, a painting was a puzzle.

Patrons and painters shared a visual code. A dog meant loyalty. A lily meant purity. A burning candle meant the shortness of life. The viewer was expected to read these clues like words. We have simply forgotten the language.

Once you learn it, paintings start talking.

Symbolism in one minute:

• The core idea: objects in a painting stand for ideas, not just themselves.

• The old layer: hidden symbols (skulls, candles, mirrors) coded into art for centuries. This is called iconography.

• The movement: a late 1800s wave of artists who made dreams, myth and emotion their only subject.

• The most famous hidden symbol: the stretched skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.

• Reading symbols is the key that unlocks the secrets hidden inside Leonardo’s Last Supper.

What is a symbol in art, really?

A symbol is an object doing a second job.

On the surface, it is just a thing in the picture: a flower, a mirror, a piece of fruit. Underneath, it carries a meaning everyone in that time understood.

This hidden layer of meaning has a proper name: iconography, the study of what images mean.

So when you learn that in old painting a skull means death, an hourglass means time running out, and a snuffed candle means a life ending, a quiet still life suddenly becomes a loud sermon about mortality. The objects were never random. They were a message.

How to read symbols: a quick decoder

Here is a starter key to the most common symbols in Western art.

• Skull: death, and the shortness of life (called memento mori, “remember you must die”).

• Burning or snuffed candle: time passing, a life ending.

• Lily: purity, often linked to the Virgin Mary.

• Dog: loyalty and faithfulness (often in marriage portraits).

• Mirror: vanity, truth, or self knowledge.

• Fruit, especially rotting fruit: abundance, but also decay and temptation.

• Hourglass or wilting flowers: the same warning, your time is finite.

Learn these seven and you can already read half of old European art.

The most famous hidden symbol in art

If you want one painting that proves the whole idea, it is this one.

🖼️ IMAGE : Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (with the anamorphic skull)

Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) shows two confident, wealthy men surrounded by symbols of learning and power. But across the bottom floats a strange, stretched, unreadable smear.

Stand to the side, look from the correct sharp angle, and the smear snaps into focus: a human skull.

The National Gallery, which holds the painting, explains how this distorted skull only resolves when seen from the edge, a trick called anamorphosis. The message is brutal and brilliant: all this wealth and knowledge, and death is still in the room with you. You just have to look from the right angle to see it.

Hidden meaning hides in famous faces too. Even the Mona Lisa may encode clues about her health, buried in the details most people walk straight past.

Then symbolism became the whole point: the movement

Here is where it gets confusing, so let me clear it up.

“Symbolism” is also the name of a specific art movement, in the late 1800s, and it is different from hidden symbols in old paintings.

🖼️ IMAGE : Odilon Redon, dreamlike pastel

Tate defines the Symbolism movement as a late nineteenth century reaction that rejected realism in favor of expressing an idea, a dream or an emotion. The term was coined in 1886 by the critic Jean Moréas.

Tired of painters simply copying the real world, the Symbolists turned inward. They painted dreams, myths, fears, desire and death. Artists like Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin filled their canvases with mysterious, unreal, mystical scenes.

🖼️ IMAGE : Gustave Moreau, The Apparition

So there are two symbolisms: the hidden code inside centuries of art, and the movement that dragged that code into the spotlight and made mystery the only subject.

4 painters who mastered symbols

Wikipedia gives you a list. Here are the ones who used meaning best, across both kinds of symbolism. My own picks.

1. Jan van Eyck. The master of the hidden code. His Arnolfini Portrait is a marriage contract written in objects: a little dog for loyalty, a single lit candle, shoes removed as if on holy ground.

🖼️ IMAGE : Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait

2. The Dutch still life painters. A whole genre, called vanitas, built on symbols. A gorgeous table of fruit, gold and flowers, with a skull tucked in, all whispering: this will all rot, including you.

🖼️ IMAGE : Dutch vanitas still life (skull, candle and wilting flowers)

3. Caravaggio. He hid meaning, and even his own signature in blood, inside his paintings. I decoded it here: The Caravaggio Code.

4. Odilon Redon. The Symbolist movement at its purest. Floating eyes, strange flowers, dream creatures. Pure imagination, no real world required.

Symbolism in art FAQ

• What is symbolism in art in simple terms? Using objects, colors or figures to represent deeper ideas. For example, a skull stands for death, a candle for the passing of time.

• What is the difference between symbolism and iconography? Iconography is the general study of hidden meanings in images. Symbolism can mean those hidden meanings, or the specific late 1800s art movement.

• What does a skull symbolize in art? Death and the shortness of life, a theme known as memento mori, “remember you must die.”

• What was the Symbolism movement? A late nineteenth century movement that rejected realism to paint dreams, myths and emotions instead.

The thing symbolism really teaches

Step back for a second.

We walk through museums reading labels, names, dates, and we think we have seen the painting.

But the old masters were not just showing us a scene. They were hiding a message in plain sight, trusting that we knew how to read it. The skull at your feet. The candle going out. The single dog at the bride’s hem.

When you learn the code, the gallery changes. The paintings stop being pretty surfaces and start being arguments, warnings, jokes and prayers.

A painting is never just what it shows you.

It is what it is trying to tell you, if you finally know how to listen.