allegory

Examples of allegory in the following topics:

• Academic Painting and Sculpture

  • Hence, many paintings by academic artists are simple nature allegories with titles like Dawn, Dusk, Seeing, and Tasting, where these ideas are personified by a single nude figure, composed in such a way as to bring out the essence of the idea.
  • Because history and mythology were considered as plays or dialectics of ideas and were a fertile ground for important allegory, using themes from these subjects was considered the most serious form of painting .
  • A caricature mocking Academic Art's use of idealized form and mythical allegories, while ignoring contexts of daily or modern life.
  • Academic Art, especially in the Neoclassical period, typically used Roman and Greek allegories and simple nudes to depict idealized forms.

• French Architecture in the Baroque Period: Versailles

  • A common feature of sculpture and decoration at Versailles is the use of classical mythology as allegory.
  • This fountain depicts scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, chosen as allegories to revolts during the king's reign.

• The Temple of Athena Nike

  • The scenes on the Temple of Athena Nike are similar to the battle scenes on the Parthenon, which represented Greek dominance over non-Greeks and foreigners in mythical allegory.

• Modern Sculpture

  • Rodin's work signified a departure from the traditional themes of mythology and allegory prevalent during his time, and instead modeled the human body with intense realism, celebrating the individual character, psychological states, and physicality of his subjects.

• Classical Greek Philosophy

  • Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible and that the visible world is the least knowable and most obscure.
  • In the allegory, Socrates describes a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave facing a blank wall.

• Impressionist Sculpture

  • Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory, in favor of modeling the human body with realism, and celebrating individual character and physicality.

• Neoclassical Paintings

  • Its subject matter usually relates to either Greco-Roman history or other cultural attributes, such as allegory and virtue.

• Renaissance Sculpture in Florence

  • Conceived entirely in the round and independent of any architectural surroundings, it was the first known free-standing nude statue produced since antiquity and represented an allegory of civic virtues overcoming brutality and ignorance.

• Painting in the Early Byzantine Empire

  • In contrast, earlier Christian art had relied more on allegory and symbolism.

• Flemish Textiles of the Northern Renaissance

  • Subsequently, Christian scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary.