Personification

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person. For the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities, see Anthropomorphism.

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.

Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person. It is, in other words, considered an embodiment or an incarnation.

four elements,[2] four cardinal winds, five senses,[3] and abstractions such as virtues, especially the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins,[4] the nine Muses,[5] or death
.

Hôtel Carnavalet
, Paris, c. 1550s.

In many

tutelary deities for major cities, survived the arrival of Christianity, now as symbolic personifications stripped of religious significance. An exception was the winged goddess of victory, Victoria/Nike, who developed into the visualisation of the Christian angel.[7]

Generally, personifications lack much in the way of narrative

classical myth at least gave many of them parents among the major Olympian deities.[8] The iconography of several personifications "maintained a remarkable degree of continuity from late antiquity until the 18th century".[9] Female personifications tend to outnumber male ones,[10] at least until modern national personifications
, many of which are male.

Sandro Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles (c. 1494–95), with 8 personification figures: (from left) Hope, Repentance, Perfidy, innocent victim, Calumny, Fraud, Rancour, Ignorance, the king, Suspicion.

Personifications are very common elements in allegory, and historians and theorists of personification complain that the two have been too often confused, or discussion of them dominated by allegory. Single images of personifications tend to be titled as an "allegory", arguably incorrectly.[11] By the late 20th century personification seemed largely out of fashion, but the semi-personificatory superhero figures of many comic book series came in the 21st century to dominate popular cinema in a number of superhero film franchises.

According to Ernst Gombrich, "we tend to take it for granted rather than to ask questions about this extraordinary predominantly feminine population which greets us from the porches of cathedrals, crowds around our public monuments, marks our coins and our banknotes, and turns up in our cartoons and our posters; these females variously attired, of course, came to life on the medieval stage, they greeted the Prince on his entry into a city, they were invoked in innumerable speeches, they quarreled or embraced in endless epics where they struggled for the soul of the hero or set the action going, and when the medieval versifier went out on one fine spring morning and lay down on a grassy bank, one of these ladies rarely failed to appear to him in his sleep and to explain her own nature to him in any number of lines".[12]

History

Classical world

Constance and Fortitude in Vienna. Early modern statues with classical iconography.

Personification as an artistic device is easier to discuss when belief in the personification as an actual spiritual being has died down;

Christianisation.[14] In other cultures, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, many personification figures still retain their religious significance, which is why they are not covered here. For example, Bharat Mata was devised as a Hindu goddess figure to act as a national personification by intellectuals in the Indian independence movement from the 1870s, but now has some actual Hindu temples.[15]

Personification is found very widely in classical literature, art and drama, as well as the treatment of personifications as relatively minor deities, or the rather variable category of

daemons.[16] In classical Athens, every geographical division of the state for local government purposes had a personified deity which received some cultic attention, as well as Demos, a male personification for the governing assembly of free citizens, and Boule, a female one for the ruling council. These appear in art but are often hard to identify if not labelled.[17]

Personification in the Bible is mostly limited to passing phrases which can probably be regarded as literary flourishes,[18] with the important and much-discussed exception of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, 1–9, where a female personification is treated at some length, and makes speeches.[19] The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation can be regarded as personification figures, although the text does not specify what all personify.[20]

According to James J. Paxson in his book on the subject "all personification figures prior to the sixth century A.D. were ... female";

Four Elements.[22] The predominance of females is at least partly because Latin grammar gives nouns for abstractions the female gender.[23]

Pairs of

ancient Roman coinage was an especially rich source of images, many carrying their name, which was helpful for medieval and Renaissance antiquarians. Sets of tyches representing the major cities of the empire were used in the decorative arts.[24] Most imaginable virtues and virtually every Roman province was personified on coins at some point, the provinces often initially seated dejected as "CAPTA" ("taken") after its conquest, and later standing, creating images such as Britannia that were often revived in the Renaissance or later.[25]

Lucian (2nd century AD) records a detailed description of a lost painting by Apelles (4th century BC) called the Calumny of Apelles, which some Renaissance painters followed, most famously Botticelli. This included eight personifications of virtues and vices: Hope, Repentance, Perfidy, Calumny, Fraud, Rancour, Ignorance, Suspicion, as well as two other figures.[26]

Platonism, which in some manifestations proposed systems involving numbers of spirits,[27] was naturally conducive to personification and allegory, and is an influence on the uses of it from classical times through various revivals up to the Baroque period.

Literature

The "Queen of Fortune", helped by four other personifications, turns her wheel. English miniature for John Lydgate's Troy Book, 15th-century.

According to Andrew Escobedo, "literary personification marshalls inanimate things, such as passions, abstract ideas, and rivers, and makes them perform actions in the landscape of the narrative."

The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524) by Boethius, which takes the form of a dialogue between the author and "Lady Philosophy". Fortuna and the Wheel of Fortune were prominent and memorable in this, which helped to make the latter a favourite medieval trope.[31]
Both authors were Christians, and the origins in the pagan classical religions of the standard range of personifications had been left well behind.

A medieval creation was the

charity. The seven deadly sins were their counterparts.[32]

Petrach's Triomphi

The major works of Middle English literature had many personification characters, and often formed what are called "personification allegories" where the whole work is an allegory, largely driven by personifications. These include Piers Plowman by William Langland (c. 1370–90), where most of the characters are clear personifications named as their qualities,[33] and several works by Geoffrey Chaucer, such as The House of Fame (1379–80). However, Chaucer tends to take his personifications in the direction of being more complex characters and give them different names, as when he adapts part of the French Roman de la Rose (13th century). The English mystery plays and the later morality plays have many personifications as characters, alongside their biblical figures. Frau Minne, the spirit of courtly love in German medieval literature, had equivalents in other vernaculars.

In

Dante has several personification characters, but prefers using real persons to represent most sins and virtues.[35]

In Elizabethan literature many of the characters in Edmund Spenser's enormous epic The Faerie Queene, though given different names, are effectively personifications, especially of virtues.[36] The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan was the last great personification allegory in English literature, from a strongly Protestant position (though see Thomson's Liberty below). A work like Shelley's The Triumph of Life, unfinished at his death in 1822, which to many earlier writers would have called for personifications to be included, avoids them, as does most Romantic literature,[37] apart from that of William Blake.[38] Leading critics had begun to complain about personification in the 18th century, and such "complaints only grow louder in the nineteenth century".[39] According to Andrew Escobedo, there is now "an unstated scholarly consensus" that "personification is a kind of frozen or hollow version of literal characters", which "depletes the fiction".[40]

Visual arts

Agnolo Bronzino
.

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),[41] 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.[42] 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.[43]

A new pair, once common on the portals of large churches, are

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".[45]

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

Agnolo Bronzino has five personifications, apart from Venus and Cupid.[48] 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.[49]

Theory

Ariel between Wisdom and Gaiety with the Latin inscription obsculta, a word that doesn't mean just 'listen', but also 'obey' by Eric Gill, Broadcasting House, 1932.

Around 300 BC,

De copia and Petrus Mosellanus in Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, who were copied by other writers throughout the 16th century.[52]

From the late 16th century theoretical writers such as Karel van Mander in his Schilder-boeck (1604) began to treat personification in terms of the visual arts. At the same time the emblem book, describing and illustrating emblematic images that were largely personifications, became enormously popular, both with intellectuals and artists and craftsmen looking for motifs.[53] The most famous of these was the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, first published unillustrated in 1593, but from 1603 published in many different illustrated editions, using different artists. This set at least the identifying attributes carried by many personifications until the 19th century.[54]

From the 20th century into the 21st, the past use of personification has received greatly increased critical attention, just as the artistic practice of it has greatly declined. Among a number of key works, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936), by C. S. Lewis was an exploration of courtly love in medieval and Renaissance literature.[55]

Innovation

Sculptures Trade (male) and Tolerance (female) in Brno

The classical repertoire of virtues, seasons, cities and so forth supplied the majority of subjects until the 19th century, but some new personifications became required. The 16th century saw the new personification of the Americas and made the four continents an appealing new set, four figures being better suited to many contexts than three. The 18th-century discovery of Australia was not so quickly followed by an addition to the set, if only for reasons of geometry; Australia is not included in the continents at the corners of the Albert Memorial (1860s). This does have a set of three-figure groups representing agriculture, commerce, engineering and manufacturing, typical of the requirements for large public schemes of the period.[56] A rather late example is the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City (1901–07), which has large groups for the four continents by the entrance, and 12 figures personifying seafaring nations from history high on the facade.

The invention of

Lyons, a major printing center, along with "Typosine", a new muse of printing.[57] A large gilt-bronze statue by Evelyn Beatrice Longman, something of a specialist in "allegorical" statues, was commissioned by AT&T for the top of their New York headquarters. Since 1916 it has been titled at different times as the Genius of Telegraphy, Genius of Electricity, and since the 1930s Spirit of Communication. Shakespeare's spirit Ariel was adopted by the sculptor Eric Gill as a personification of broadcasting, and features in his sculptures on Broadcasting House in London (opened 1932).[58]

National personifications

the Kaiser
, who pretends not to care.
Main article: National personification

A number of national personifications stick to the old formulas, with a female in classical dress, carrying attributes suggesting power, wealth, or other virtues.[59]

Rule Britannia, and the two personifications were often combined as a personified "British Liberty",[63] to whom a large monument was erected in the 1750s on his estate at Gibside by a Whig magnate.[64]

But, sometimes alongside these formal figures, a new type of national personification has arisen, typified by John Bull (1712) and Uncle Sam (c. 1812). Both began as figures in more or less satirical literature but achieved their prominence when taken into political cartoons and other visual media. The post-revolutionary Marianne in France, official since 1792, is something of a mixture of styles, sometimes formal and classical, at others a woman of the streets of Paris personified.[65] The Dutch Maiden is one of the earliest of these figures, and was mainly visual from the start, her efforts to repulse unwelcome Spanish advances shown in 16th-century popular prints.[66]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Definition of PERSONIFICATION". www.merriam-webster.com. 1 April 2024. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  2. ^ Hall, 128–130
  3. ^ Hall, 122
  4. ^ Hall, 336–337
  5. ^ Hall, 216
  6. ^ Paxson, 6–7
  7. ^ Hall, 321
  8. ^ Hall, 216; the example here is the Muses, daughters of Apollo and Mnemosyne, herself the personification of Memory.
  9. ^ Hall, 128, speaking of the Four Seasons, but the same is true for example of the personification of Africa (same page).
  10. ^ Melion and Remakers, 5; Gombrich, 1 (of PDF)
  11. ^ Melion and Remakers, 2–13; Paxson, 5–6. See also Escobedo, Ch. 1
  12. ^ Gombrich, 1 (of PDF)
  13. ^ Paxson, 6–7; Escobedo, Introduction
  14. ^ Although given the persistence of ideas from Neoplatonism and folk religion this cannot be entirely certain. See, for example Gombrich 5–6 (on pdf)
  15. ISBN 0 7141 1442 1
  16. ^ Escobedo, Ch. 1 on daemons
  17. ^ Smith, 93–105
  18. ^ "the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands", Book of Isaiah, 55:12
  19. ISBN 1351884360
    , 9781351884365. Subject of the whole book, but see Ch. 1
  20. ISBN 0802825370, 9780802825377, google books Archived 2022-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
  21. ^ Paxson, 6
  22. ^ Hall, 128, 265
  23. ^ Gombrich, 2 (of PDF)
  24. Calendar of 354 and the slightly later Esquiline Treasure provide examples, though the choice of 4th city varies between Antioch and Trier
    .
  25. ^ Sear, 36–42, 46–48, 49–51
  26. ^ Lightbown, Ronald, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, 234, 1989, Thames and Hudson
  27. ISBN 9004374981, 9789004374980, google books Archived 2022-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
  28. ^ Escobedo, Ch. 1
  29. ^ Escobedo, Introduction
  30. ^ Hall, 336, with much more in Paxson.
  31. ^ Hall, 127–128
  32. ^ Hall, 336; see "Further reading" for some recent examples of the very extensive literature on these.
  33. ^ Melion and Remakers, 99–101
  34. ^ Hall, 310
  35. ^ Melion and Remakers, 73–77
  36. ^ Melion and Remakers, 121–122
  37. ^ "All the commonplace figures of poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications, with the whole heathen mythology, were instantly discarded" according to William Hazlitt in "On the Living Poets" in Lectures on the English Poets, 1818
  38. ISBN 0838631762, 9780838631768, google books
  39. ^ Escobedo, Introduction
  40. ^ Escobedo, Ch. 1. He does not share this view. In particular, personifications mostly remain tied to a single character trait, that of embodying their quality.
  41. ^ Hartt, 64
  42. ^ Hartt, 116–119
  43. ISBN 0931537150
  44. ISBN 978-0-521-19744-1, google books Archived 2022-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
  45. ^ Hall, 94
  46. ^ Hartt, 332–333
  47. ^ Bartrum, 188
  48. ^ Hartt, 662
  49. ^ Bartrum, 188, says Melencolia I "must be the most written-about image in the history of art", but at least the Botticellis must run it close.
  50. ^ Paxson, 12
  51. ^ Paxson, 16–19
  52. ^ Paxson, 23
  53. ^ Melion and Remakers, 13–26
  54. ^ Hall, 337
  55. ^ Paxson, 1–2 and passim; Escobedo, Introduction
  56. ^ These were all given consideration at the highest levels. The designs for the continents had "changes [which] may (although there is no evidence of it) reflect the promptings of 'statesmanlike' discretion. Participation in the guidance of America's progress was relinquished by the figure of Canada and it was left wholly to the United States. In the group of Europe, the link of olive leaves between France and England was dropped, as was the gesture indicating England's reception of the Bible of the Reformation from Germany, and each of the national figures was more isolated. In 'Africa', Egypt, instead of listening to the counsels of Britain, herself instructed Nubia." 'Albert Memorial: The memorial' Archived 2014-11-04 at the Wayback Machine, Survey of London: volume 38: South Kensington Museums Area (1975), 159–176. Accessed: 22 May 2019
  57. ^ Melion and Remakers, 30
  58. ^ Jackson, Nicola, Building the BBC: a return to form, 28, 2004, BBC
  59. ^ Heuer, 48–50
  60. ^ Sear, 39
  61. ISBN 0199883076
    , 9780199883073
  62. ^ Higham, 59; text of Liberty online
  63. ^ Higham, 59–61
  64. ISBN 184383541X, 9781843835417, google books Archived 2022-12-06 at the Wayback Machine; "Column to Liberty" Archived 2019-05-29 at the Wayback Machine
    , National Trust.
  65. ^ Heuer, 43–44, 48–50
  66. ^ Hubert de Vries, "The Dutch Virgin: Symbols of State of the Netherlands" Archived 2018-12-13 at the Wayback Machine

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Personifications.

Further reading
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