Allegory

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For allegories in category theory, see Allegory (category theory).
Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi (between 1475 and 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.

Allegory is a literary device in which characters or events in a literary, visual, or musical art form represent or symbolize ideas and concepts. Allegory has been used widely throughout the histories of all forms of art; a major reason for this is its immense power to illustrate complex ideas and concepts in ways that are easily digestible and tangible to its viewers, readers, or listeners. An allegory conveys its hidden message through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, and/or events. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. One of the best known examples is Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." In this allegory, there are a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to the allegory, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality.

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Etymology [edit]

First attested in English 1382, the word allegory comes from Latin allegoria, the latinisation of the Greek ἀλληγορία (allegoria), "veiled language, figurative",[1] from ἄλλος (allos), "another, different"[2] + ἀγορεύω (agoreuo), "to harangue, to speak in the assembly"[3] and that from ἀγορά (agora), "assembly."[4]

Types [edit]

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory," ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature.[citation needed] 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.

Many ancient religions are based on an astrological allegories, that is, allegories of the movement of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth. Examples include the cult of Horus/Isis.

Classical allegory [edit]

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). 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; Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.[citation needed]

Other early allegories are found in the Hebrew Bible, for instance in the extended metaphor in Psalm 80 of the Vine, which is Israel[5] and Ezekiel 16 and 17.[6]

Medieval allegory [edit]

Main article: Allegory in the Middle Ages

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the 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 facts on which is based a demonstration with 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 15th 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.

The denial of medieval allegory as found in the 11th-century works of Hugh of St Victor and Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607, 1653) and its replacement in the study of nature with methods of categorization and mathematics by such figures as naturalist John Ray and the astronomer Galileo is thought to mark the beginnings of early modern science.[7]

Modern allegory [edit]

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes misinterpreting their author's intent. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars. But the author, J. R. R. Tolkien, emphatically stated in his introduction to the second 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."[citation needed]

If the requirement of realism is set aside, allegory can often be easily seen. Some examples of this are:

Examples by genre [edit]

Allegory of Arithmetic, by Laurent de La Hyre, c. 1650

Not every resonant work of modern fiction is an allegory. Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for instance, is character-driven historical drama with contemporary relevance, but is not an allegory in spite of its parallels with McCarthyism, linking the hunt for communists in the 1940s and 1950s to the hunt for witches in the late 17th century. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is plot-driven fantasy narrative in an extended fable with talking animals and broadly-sketched characters. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is another example of a work sometimes seen as allegorical, yet, as the author explained, it is not - rather it is an example of what he referred to as applicability.

Art [edit]

Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximate chronological order:

  • Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (1514): Unused tools, an hourglass, an empty scale surround a melancholic woman, other esoteric and exoteric symbols point to her alleged mental state.

  • Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1545): The deities of love are surrounded by allegories of Time (a bald, man with angry eyes), Folly (the young woman-demon on the right, possibly also so old woman on the left).

  • Titian, Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence (c. 1565–1570): The three human heads symbolise past, present and future, the characterisation of which is furthered by the triple-headed beast (wolf, lion, dog), girded by the body of a big snake.

  • The English School's Allegory of Queen Elizabeth (c. 1610), with Father Time at her right and Death looking over her left shoulder. Two cherubs are removing the weighty crown from her tired head.

  • Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–39)

  • Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting (c. 1666): Painting is shown as related to history and politics, the young woman being Clio, the muse of history, and other symbols for the political and religious division of the Netherlands appearing.

  • Jan van Kessel, Allegory of Hearing (17th century): Diverse sources of sound, especially instruments serve as allegorical symbols.

Poetry and fiction [edit]

An allegorical story is a narrative having a second meaning beneath the surface one. An allegorical poem has two meanings - a literal meaning and a symbolic meaninig. Some unique specimens of allegory in poetry can be found in the following works :

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ ἀλληγορία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  2. ^ ἄλλος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  3. ^ ἀγορεύω, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  4. ^ ἀγορά, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  5. ^ Kennedy, George A. (1999). Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Second ed.). UNC Press. p. 142. ISBN 0-8078-4769-0. Retrieved 2009-08-07. 
  6. ^ Jones, Alexander, ed. (1968). The Jerusalem Bible (Reader's ed.). Doubleday & Company. pp. 1186, 1189. ISBN 0-385-01156-3. 
  7. ^ Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the rise of natural science, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59196-1, pages 1 to 10 ("Introduction")
  8. ^ Cäcilia Rentmeister: The Muses, Banned From Their Occupations: Why Are There So Many Allegories Female? english summary from Kvinnovetenskaplig Tidskrift, Nr.4. 1981, Lund, Sweden as PDF. Retrieved 10.July 2011 Original Version in German: Berufsverbot für die Musen. Warum sind so viele Allegorien weiblich? In: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, Nr. 25/1976, S. 92–112. Langfassung in: Frauen und Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, Juli 1976, Berlin 1977, S.258–297. With illustrations. Full Texts Online: Cäcilia (Cillie) Rentmeister: publications

Further reading [edit]

External links [edit]

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