How artists of the past talked about higher matters: Justice, vanity, the running of time and not only in allegorical images

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The great ability of fine art to show the invisible to the eye is primarily about allegories. How to write power on canvas? Running time? Justice? Hopelessness? How to display the artist's worldview without using words, but resorting only to the possibilities that brushes and paints give? Allegories are usually addressed to viewers who have a certain level of knowledge or are ready to receive this knowledge, because many allegories are based on elements of mythology, philosophy, art history and the history of mankind. For people who are versed in the meaning of old canvases, it is revealed in a new way, and the phenomenon of the immortality of art and its relevance in any era and in any historical conditions becomes clearer.

Allegories - why and how they arise

Painting is able to embody any image, including everything that words can express - this approach existed already during the Renaissance. In the case when the artist is required to capture someone's face, or a composition of several objects on the table, or a natural phenomenon, everything is more or less clear: what the eye sees is transferred to the canvas - with an inevitable subjective distortion of what he saw, simply because, that the author is a person.

However, sometimes the masters have to fulfill other requests - whether from customers, or maybe from themselves - to write something abstract, to create an artistic image of an idea, a philosophical concept, something that exists, but is intangible in nature. Postmodernists solved this problem by letting go of both fantasy and artistic means of self-expression, declaring the artist completely free in his activities. But the masters of past eras in art remained true to themselves and to the traditions that existed in their times.

Plants, animals, people, objects are the tools with which the allegory was embodied on canvas, and if the artist achieved his goal, then the viewer's impression of the picture corresponded to what the master put into it. Or - and quite often - the masterpiece did not work, and the picture became one of the unsuccessful allegories. Initially, the allegory arose where it was impossible or even dangerous to speak directly about the phenomenon, and first of all it was embodied in literature. The art of the Ancient East is filled with many allegories. In Egypt, they resorted to the image of gods with human bodies and the heads of various animals - this is how death, or power, or eternity was shown allegorically.

Thanks to Aristotle, the term "trope" appeared and, in general, a philosophical description of the transfer of the meaning of one object to another; this became the basis, among other things, for the further development of the fine arts.

Dove, dog and other examples of allegories

If the Italian Renaissance only paved the way for allegories in painting, then in the Baroque era, this artistic technique practically did not do without: the main supplier of images for paintings was antique and Christian myths, and sometimes their mixture. A role was also played by the fact that allegories, metaphors, allegories in the visual arts were loved by many of the patrons and customers, and the artists themselves willingly used the possibilities of this approach to reflect their own philosophical and life views, materialize their fears, hopes and aspirations.

Any genre of painting is able to accommodate the allegorical message of the master - including still life, and portrait, and landscape. You can often find traditional, familiar images in which artists encrypted abstract concepts: for example, a dog symbolized fidelity, a dove embodied the image of the Holy Spirit, a woman with scales and a blindfold - justice or justice, a ship walking on the sea - someone's life way.

"Allegory of Painting" by Jan Vermeer became the artist's favorite painting: he did not part with it until his death, despite problems with money. This work adorned the workshop and reflected what Vermeer considered the essence of a kind of activity. The book volume symbolizes the theoretical knowledge of art, the mask, perhaps, hints at imitating the great teachers, and the model, whose figure is hidden by antique draperies, personifies the artist's glory.

Allegories in paintings by other great artists

Allegories can be attributed not only to paintings that directly inform the viewer about their essence - like "Allegory of virtues" and "Allegory of vices" by Correggio. When in 1622 the French queen Maria de Medici, mother of Louis XIII, ordered Rubens a cycle of large paintings, which would tell about the main episodes of her life, it was to allegorical images that the great Dutch painter resorted to. The queen appears before the viewer in the form of an ancient goddess, surrounded by characters from Greek mythology, in her hand she has a symbol of justice, at her feet - defeated vices. Each of the paintings in this series carries a certain mood and meaning, conveyed using allegorical techniques.

Sandro Botticelli expressed the idea of strength in the image of a girl whose facial features resemble his own early Madonnas - but in this case her appearance is more rigid and stubborn.

The master of the allegory was Pieter Brueghel the Elder, among his works is a series of engravings that illustrate the seven deadly sins. Laziness is shown through images of snails, sleeping people, slowly crawling animals, dice, which are occupied by those who sit in the tavern - and many more symbols, not all of which have a generally accepted interpretation.

As a rule, the allegorical nature of the image and naturalism exclude each other; when using metaphors in painting, the artist often resorts to idealization to the detriment of portrait likeness. But here is a self-portrait by Nicolas Poussin, which allegorically shows the artist's ability to penetrate into the essence of things - it is symbolized by the face of a woman on the left - a muse - in profile, as if demonstrating the "third eye". Hands stretched out to a woman in an effort to hug, symbolize the artist's love for art, and all together conveys how Poussin felt in his life.

But "Still Life with a Chessboard" by Lyuben Bozena combines images of objects that together are an allegory of five human feelings. Notes and musical instruments symbolize hearing, mirror - sight, chessboard, cards, wallet - touch, flowers - smell, bread and wine - taste.

About the puzzles in the paintings of Rene Magritte: here.