Research: Personification

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Project 01: Identity and Space

Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person. In the arts, many things are commonly personified. These include numerous types of places, especially cities, countries, and continents, elements of the natural world such as the months or four seasons, four elements, four cardinal winds, five senses, and abstractions such as virtues, especially the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins, the nine Muses, or death.

Set of porcelain figures of personifications of the four continents, German, c. 1775, from left: Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. Of these, Africa has retained her classical attributes. Formerly James Hazen Hyde collection.
Jean Goujon, The Four Seasons, reliefs on the Hôtel Carnavalet, Paris, c. 1550s.
Personification in Art
In fine arts, personification is used for a variety of purposes. From ancient times, artists evoked images to represent natural phenomena and abstract concepts in an attempt to help others as well as themselves understand these intangible ideas. The best examples of personification from this era would be that of gods and goddesses of various mythologies or religions, many of whom are still revered today. This remained the primary purpose of personification for a very long time, although experiments with other purposes were made throughout the development of human society.
Personifications, often in sets, frequently appear in medieval art, often illustrating or following literary works. The virtues and vices were probably the most common, and the virtues appear in many large sculptural programmes, for example the exteriors of Chartres Cathedral and Amiens Cathedral. In painting, both virtues and vices are personified along the lowest zone of the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto (c. 1305), and are the main figures in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–39) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. In the Allegory of Bad Government Tyranny is enthroned, with Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory above him. Beside him on the magistrate’s bench sit Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and War, while Justice lies tightly bound below. The so-called Mantegna Tarocchi (c. 1465–75) are sets of fifty educational cards depicting personifications of social classes, the planets and heavenly bodies, and also social classes.
A new pair, once common on the portals of large churches, are Ecclesia and Synagoga. Death envisaged as a skeleton, often with a scythe and hour-glass, is a late medieval innovation, that became very common after the Black Death. However, it is rarely seen in funerary art “before the Counter-Reformation”.
When not illustrating literary texts, or following a classical model as Botticelli does, personifications in art tend to be relatively static, and found together in sets, whether of statues decorating buildings or paintings, prints or media such as porcelain figures. Sometimes one or more virtues take on and invariably conquer vices. Other paintings by Botticelli are exceptions to such simple compositions, in particular his Primavera and The Birth of Venus, in both of which several figures form complex allegories. An unusually powerful single personification figure is depicted in Melencolia I (1514) an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1545) by Agnolo Bronzino has five personifications, apart from Venus and Cupid. In all these cases, the meaning of the work remains uncertain, despite intensive academic discussion, and even the identity of the figures continues to be argued over.
The most basic use of personifying a concept is to give the perceiver a tangible figure that they can comprehend and connect to more easily. According to Dr. John G. Carlson, psychologist, people have a “tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (1992, 153). Thus, by giving an abstract concept personification, writers or artists can indirectly influence the audience’s perception and guide them to a better understanding of the concept. Many professionals have taken advantage of this human instinct to achieve better results in their line of work.
From the Renaissance period onward, personification began to appear in allegorical works as a way to express or question the ideals of the artists. Examples of this way of using the technique include The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity(1882) by Odilon Redon, and Death and the Masks(1897) by James Ensor.
In the above artwork, there is a hot air balloon with an eye carrying a skull above a black swamp. The eye serves to indicate the direction the balloon is going, which is upwards. From this simple gesture, we can imagine that the balloon pulled the skull out of the swamp. If the eye was not there, it would have been much harder to interpret such a movement in the image.
In James Ensor’s Death and the Masks, Death walks in the middle of a group of masked people. The people are seemingly not alerted to Death’s presence, possibly thinking of his visage as just another mask. This suggests the artist’s critical view of the ignorant side of contemporary society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification
https://medium.com/crossing-domains/the-personification-of-abstract-concepts-in-art-and-animation-6fc1b9ed7282
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