7. In Catholic countries allegorical art, sacred as
well as profane, flourished. The twofold character of
symbolic representations, mentioned above, persisted
in the seventeenth century. Aristotelian rational sym-
bolism, which used images as words, was widespread
in the orthodox Catholic iconography of the Counter-
Reformation, as well as in the humanistic visual lan-
guage codified by Ripa and others. A mystical Neo-
Platonic symbolism transcending reason reappeared
too. Its outspoken document is the treatise by Chris-
toforo Giarda, Bibliothecae alexandrinae icones sym-
bolicae of 1626 (Gombrich, 1948). For Giarda symbolic
images give the beholder a direct insight into the
mysteries of religion, which are not accessible to rea-
son.
Thanks to symbolic images, the mind which is banished from
heaven into this dark cave of the body, its actions held in
bondage by the senses, can behold the beauty and form
of the Virtues and Sciences divorced from all matter and
yet adumbrated if not perfectly expressed in colours, and
is thus roused to an even more fervent love and desire for
them.... Who, then, can sufficiently estimate the magni-
tude of the debt we owe to those who expressed the Arts
and Sciences themselves in images, and so brought it about
that we could not only know them, but look at them as
it were with our eyes, that we can meet them and almost
converse with them...
(Gombrich [1948], pp. 188f.).
Great allegorical compositions covering the ceilings of
baroque churches are often realizations of this princi-
ple. For those however, who conceived allegory as a
rational operation, as a language used for didactic aims,
the main problem remained the clarity of the allegori-
cal message. The larger the audience to whom allegory
was addressed, the simpler, more obvious its symbolism
should have been. The banality of allegorical language
provoked criticism in the eighteenth century. Fran-
cesco Algarotti (1762) prefers without any doubt his-
torical representations to the “empty allegories and
complicated mythological allusions” (Garas [1967], p.
280). Especially criticized was the obscurity of these
allegories in which completely original, unknown sym-
bols were used. Roger de Piles praises his favorite
master Rubens, who “introduced only such allegories,
elements of which were already known from ancient
art” and opposes him to Charles Lebrun, who “instead
of taking symbols from some known source as the
ancient fable and medals, has invented almost all of
them and thus the pictures of this kind became riddles,
which the beholder does not want to take the task to
solve.” To keep the balance between platitudinous
redundancy and utter incomprehensibility was the
crucial problem of late baroque allegorism. What is
interesting, however, is that the idea of the picture
as a riddle was not foreign to the seventeenth century.
It appears in France as well as in Sweden, where David
Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (1694) proposed that pictures
present riddles that could not be solved by everyone.
In France, however, the “painted enigma,” fostered
by the Jesuits in their schools, flourished especially well
in the seventeenth century (Montagu, 1968). These
“painted enigmas” lent themselves to various inter-
pretations and gave interpreters an opportunity to
show their ingenuity. These pictures and their inter-
pretations seem to prove that a considerable flexibility
of meaning was intended.
We might rather accept that a work of art was regarded
in the seventeenth century as, in a certain sense, an open
symbol, raw material like the myth or sacred story which
it illustrates, on which the interpreter might exercise the
power of his ingenuity, turning it into an allegory of Chris-
tian doctrine or a panegyric in honour of his patron
(Montagu [1968], p. 334).
Such a situation probably existed only in some specific
circles. It was a limiting case. The other extreme was
to use in an uninteresting, routine way Ripa's symbolic
images, or those of other popular symbolic handbooks.
Such practice continued well into the eighteenth cen-
tury. The general trend, fed by ideas of the Enlighten-
ment was to make allegories more and more obvious.
It is understandable that some theorists, like the Count
de Caylus, looked for new subject matter, presenting
as he did Tableaux tirés de l'Iliade (1755), or that
J. J. Winckelmann tried to revive allegory and to give
it a new force. It was, however, too late. In the eight-
eenth century, together with the whole system of
humanistic tradition, the systems of iconography began
to disintegrate. The great break in the tradition con-
cerned not only style but also iconography. Emblem-
atic roots may be discovered in Goya's symbolism as
well as in the reasonable allegories of the Enlighten-
ment, but generally speaking, there was a search for
new, not known, or not used sources—as in William
Blake's biblical individualistic imagery—or the new
staging of the old ones, as in Jacques Louis David's
classical subjects.
The art of romanticism was a definite break with
the past, much more in the field of ideas and iconogra-
phy than in a stylistic respect, where romanticists
retrospectively looked back either to medieval and
pre-Raphaelite, or to baroque sources. Symbols and
allegories yielded to an all-pervading mood, and the
traditional repertory of religious, allegorical, mytho-
logical, and historical iconography gave way to a new
iconography. Although several encompassing images
of Christian and humanistic art survived, they received
new content and essentially changed their character.
New attitudes of the individual to the world of nature
and history, to society and destiny, to time and death,
and new problems resulting from the striving after
freedom (which was a new, perhaps most important
principle of human behavior in all fields of human
activity), found expression in new thematic fields and
in new particular themes such as “Storm-tossed Boat,”
“Lonely Wanderer in the Mountains,” “A Death of the
Hero” (Eitner, 1955; Hofmann, 1960; Białostocki,
1966).
Romanticism has not formed and could not have
formed an iconographic system, for, since they strived
first of all for originality of individual conception, the
romantics interpreted images in a subjective way as
expressions of mood. Romanticism has, on the other
hand, introduced new heroes and martyrs into art,
instead of religious ones: the national, social, and artis-
tic ones. It created a new image of history, seen now
as a set of political and moral examples—as in
baroque—but often put together now according to a
very individualistic principle of choice. A correlative
to pathetic and heroic romanticism was a bourgeois
and intimate romanticism; its expression was, for ex-
ample, the new imagery of the open window, which
shows to the viewer wide perspectives, but shelters him
at the same time from the dangers of the unknown
(Eitner, 1955).
When the world of ideas and images, created at the
moment of the flowering of romanticism, began to be
popularized for the use of the large bourgeois masses,
the content—ideological and iconographical—of ro-
manticism lost its original authenticity and left be-
hind not a new system of original images, but a dispo-
sition to melodramatic experiences and an inflation of
a theatrical gesture (Hofmann, 1960; Białostocki, 1966).
The nineteenth century developed a realistic por-
traiture of man and nature and took over worn out
clichés of the Renaissance and baroque allegories. It
introduced new subject matter, taken partly from tra-
dition, partly from observation of reality, tinted with
vague symbolism, such as “Forge” or the “Funeral of
the Peasant,” but it did not create a new system of
iconography, in spite of short-lived revivals of symbol-
istic attitudes in such movements—incidentally not
limited to, and not initiated in, the visual arts—as
“symbolism.”
New, ephemeral artistic movements, which consti-
tuted the history of European art in the last hundred
years, show an interesting bracketing of style and icon-
ography, in spite of a preponderant lack of iconogra-
phic interest. Their representatives chose subjects suit-
able to specific artistic aims and means which they
developed and were interested in. Impressionists
painted seaside scenes, landscapes, and genre pictures
showing the life of artistic and intellectual milieus.
Cubists introduced a specific repertory of still-life
motifs, symbols of the artist's atelier and of the life
of the bohème: bottles, musical instruments, books,
fruits, flowers, newspapers. How much these motifs
were connected with specific cubist style appears when
one looks at works of artists foreign to the original
cubist group, but imitating its style, as for instance
several Czech artists like Emil Filla. They adopted
cubist iconography together with cubist style. Abstract
movements in general lacked iconography, although
they were not foreign to symbolic tendencies, espe-
cially in sculpture (Brancusi, Moore). Only in the dec-
ades of 1950-70 can a revival of more articulated and
programmatic symbolism be observed. One may sup-
pose that this revival is at least in part brought about
by the development of research in iconography and
symbolism, which took place in the second and third
quarters of our century.
