Symbolism in art has two meanings. In a painting, a symbol is an object that stands for an idea: a skull for death, a lily for purity.
Written with a capital S, Symbolism is also the name of a movement of the 1880s and 1890s, whose painters set out to paint dreams and ideas rather than the world the eye sees.
The first meaning applies to any picture from any century in which an object carried a sense its first viewers were expected to know. The second belongs to one group of painters, whose images plainly pointed to something and often refused to say what.
The English word goes back to the Greek symbolon, a token matched against its other half to prove that something was genuine. A painted symbol works like that token. Object and idea fit together only for a viewer who holds the missing piece, the knowledge of what the object is meant to say.
The German-born painter Hans Holbein the Younger showed how much could be hidden this way in The Ambassadors, painted in London in 1533. Two richly dressed men stand at each end of a tall table with two shelves, crowded with instruments and books.
On the floor between them lies a long gray shape that makes no sense from the front. A viewer who looks at it from the right, almost along the surface of the canvas, sees it turn into a skull.
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The skull was Holbein's own idea. Other symbols that everyone repeats today were never chosen by the painter at all. They were assigned centuries later, by art historians reading the picture.
The best-known case is a dog. In the Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434 by the Flemish master Jan van Eyck, a man holds a woman's hand in a room furnished with a bed, a chest and a window. A little dog stands at their feet.
Above the couple hangs a chandelier with a single lit candle, and a convex mirror shines on the back wall. For many years, each of these objects was explained as part of a wedding, with the dog as a sign of marital fidelity.
Scholars have since dropped that reading. A marriage record turned up in the archives, and it did not fit the date painted on the wall.
Keys, wheels and lilies
Most symbols in older European painting were neither hidden nor invented later…
What You'll Discover
Why Holbein's lute has a broken string.
Who decided that a dog means loyalty.
How a poet's newspaper article named a movement.
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