Tag: art

Aug 17 2026

Book review: Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini

My next review is of Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini which I discovered is part of a series: Guide to Imagery which looks interesting. I found this book by searching because I was interested in understanding more about allegories in art. I knew from watching various TV programmes that there was more to paintings than their surface appearance.

Symbols is divided into an introduction, and four sections on Time, Man, Space and Allegories, each of which describe twenty or so items. Each entry describes the linguistic and mythological origins of a term and is illustrated with at least one painting or sculpture with parts of the artwork labelled. Sometimes subsequent pages show more related artworks with labels.

Most of the paintings are from the Medieval and Renaissance periods but there are some artworks from the 19th and even 20th century. I think they are all from Western Europe presumably the allegorical language elsewhere is different.

Allegorical content in artworks evolved over time, in the Medieval period it was very much about good and evil, focussed around the Christian faith. Much of the iconography of early Christian art was based on earlier mythology. During the Renaissance there was a greater direct focus on Classical themes and mythology. Later the use of allegories was codified into documents – it was a pity not to see references to an example of this. Within Christian iconography there is an evolution from the Medieval period.

I think this book is intended for the somewhat expert in art history, it doesn’t talk about why allegories appeared in paintings and who made art for whom.

In many cases the paintings helpfully contain the word “allegory” in the title, so the reading is not as blind as you might think.

Since there are a limited number of sections each section is quite broad, so the section on time includes seasons, months, times of the day, ages of man and the world and items representing the flow and circle of time.

The Seasons appear early in the book and are a good illustration of how sets of things are represented allegorically. The seasons are associated with different phases of human life birth (spring), maturity (summer), decline (autumn) and death (winter). They are also associated with animals (ram, lion, bull and snake) and gods (Zeus, Helios, Dionysus, and Hades) in Greek mythology. Seasons can also be represented by women, we can identify which season by their headwear – Spring is represented by a woman with a crown of flowers, Summer with a crown of wheat stalks. More widely figures are recognised by the objects they hold or are close to, Saturn for example is shown as an older man carrying a scythe or hourglass.

The section on man contains entries on key biblical figures like Christ, the Virgin Mary, Eve, the Trinity, angels and Satan. As well as a range of monsters of different types. There are also what seem like miscellaneous entries on eggs and mirrors. The idea of the Trinity was created in 325AD at the Council of Nicea; angels only gained wings in art in the 4th century AD and that the iconography of the Virgin Mary derives from earlier gods such as Artemis and Isis. I was interested to learn that haloes come from Indo-Iranian deities via Roman and Byzantine emperors before reaching Christianity.

One of the pictures for the Monsters entry is Piero di Cosimo’s, Perseus Frees Andromeda which features members of the Medici family – a hidden meaning not otherwise covered in the book.

The section on space covers the astronomical (sun, sky, cosmos, moon), the earthly (garden, mountain, forest, tree) and the religious (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Limbo). Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1321, is cited a few times as a source for depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Limbo. The representations of Hell stabilised in this period.

The final section on “Allegories” is a bit different from the others, it covers items like The Senses, The Virtues, The Vices but there are rather fewer items than in the earlier sections but each is illustrated by more examples. Love is included in this section where we learn the parrot is a symbol of lust! Young women represent the cardinal virtues: fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance and the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. The cardinal virtues derive from ancient Greek philosophy whilst the theological ones are medieval.

I must admit this book got me thinking about data. Is there a global database of paintings? How often does “allegory” appear in the title? And the somewhat off-topic question of what fraction of the paintings made in any particular period / place survive?

I found this book interesting and readable although I was expecting more on the framework into which allegorical depictions lay. The parent series definitely seems worth a look.

May 19 2018

Book review: The Anatomy of Colour by Patrick Baty

anatomy_of_colourThe Anatomy of Colour by Patrick Baty is a history of painting as decoration for houses and buildings stretching back 350 years or so. The Painter’s Company dates all the way back to 1283, and the practice of decorative house painting back into antiquity. There is direct evidence for this preserved in Pompeii.

As I recall I’ve been following Patrick on social media for quite some time, in part because what he does relates to my former professional interests. Anatomy picks up on work I used to do in colour measurement. I did it in a different context – for a “fast moving consumer goods” company making washing liquid, shampoo and the like. It also has some relevance to work I do now on dating buildings.

At the beginning of the book the materials used to generate colours and paints are discussed. Typically these are minerals or plant materials, synthetic colourants only started to become available in the 19th century. Lead carbonate (white lead) was long used as the basis for many oil paints (of all colours), despite it’s known toxicity. It was replaced by zinc oxide in the later 19th century and now titanium dioxide is used. Confusingly from the early period “pink” used to mean a yellowish colour derived from plant material. Also mentioned are the linseed oil that formed the carrier for most paints well into the 20th century.

Following this introduction a number of broad themes are discussed in successive periods so for example in each period we learn about the favoured colours and colour schemes, colour theories and systems, and the key books relating to decorating and colour. Technology is a slowly changing background to this. In the beginning painters bought the pigments and oils and made their own paint, possible making pigments from raw materials. Pigment pastes in metal tubes came into use in the 19th century with tinned paints a 20th century innovation, as far as I can tell.

I’ve always had a problem with distemper, a suspension of chalk in a glue base which can be washed off and reapplied, mainly because I learnt about distemper, the disease of dogs first! Distemper was used as a disposable wall covering until the late 19th century when it started to be replaced by other commercial formulations until they were in turn replaced with emulsion paints sometime after the Second World War.

Something I hadn’t considered before was the importance of colour in horticulture and zoology. Darwin took a book on colour on his trip around the world. He needed it to describe the colours of animals and plants as they were collected since there was no photography and specimen preservation techniques would not necessarily preserve colour. More recently colour systems have been developed around the needs of horticultural. The red of a robins breast is probably as good a reference to a colour as could be obtained artificially until into the 20th century. Similar the yellow of a daffodil.

The colour systems discussed are a little different from those I used in scientific colour measurement, the closest approach is the Munsell “hue, saturation, value” system. In general the systems presented here are focused around defining words to describe colours to aid communication and specification, and establishing harmonious colour combinations. My work was more involved in measuring colour in a machine to see the effect of different washing liquid formulations, or similar.

In the 20th century Britain saw standardisation of colours with recommendations for the painting of commercial and public buildings. The post-war rise in DIY is well-known but housepainting was seen as something a gentleman might undertake even in the 18th and 19th century.

Early on in the book Baty shows some paint cross-sections which are discussed very briefly. I must admit I find this forensic side very interesting and I was a bit disappointed that there was not more of this – I can see how it doesn’t fit with the main audience for the book. I found the chapter / section numbering a bit confusing, there are two levels in the hierarchy and both use Roman numerals!

The book is beautifully illustrated with colour reproductions of many of the different colour systems used over the years, as well as photographs of interiors following the styles discussed. For practioners in the investigation (and recreation) of decorative schemes I can see this book being absolutely essentially, and as a more casual reader I enjoyed it too.