Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi. Tempera on panel, 61 × 51 cm, c.
1500.
The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the
High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.
An allegory (from Greek αλλος, , "other", and αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to
speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a
meaning other than the literal.
Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be
expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic
painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art.
The etymological meaning of the word is broader than the common use of the word. Though it
is similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a metaphor, and appeals to imagination, while an
analogy appeals to reason or logic. The fable or parable is a short allegory
with one definite moral.
Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes
distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars,
while in fact it was written well before the outbreak of World War II, and J.R.R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the
introduction to the American edition "It is neither allegorical nor topical....I cordially dislike allegory in all its
manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."
Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", ranging from what he
termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queen, to the more private allegories
of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not
fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral
quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.
Examples
Allegory has been a favourite form in the literature of nearly every nation. It represents
many tales. In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave
in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the
stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32); and several occur in
Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Late Antiquity
Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male
needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests; Matianmus Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.
Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was
as true as superficial facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam
(1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the
allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as actual facts which take the place of a logical demonstration, yet
employing the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as
if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors,
they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" (complete text).
In the late fifteenth century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with
its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on
contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.
Titian's
Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence, with three human heads symbolising age and
the triple-headed beast (dog, lion, wolf) standing for prudence.
Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximately
chronological order:
Modern allegories in fiction tend to operate under constraints of modern requirements for verisimilitude within conventional expectations of realism. Works
of fiction with strong allegorical overtones include:
Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface,
as in the work of Bertold Brecht or Franz Kafka on
one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are
common, as with Dune.
Allegorical films include:
The English School's
Allegory of Queen Elizabeth with
Father Time at her right and
Death looking over her left shoulder. Two cherubs are removing the weighty crown
from her tired head.
Allegorical artworks include:
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
External links
Further reading
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