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Allegorical animal symbolism
- Renaissance art was teeming with allegorical animal symbolism. Animals served as powerful metaphors, communicating a range of complex ideas and messages through their depictions. This practice was not limited to animals of any particular class, but spanned from tiny rodents to massive elephants, signifying diverse meanings and implications.
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Mar 18, 2019 · The animal kingdom has long been a rich source of symbolism – in the medieval period, bestiary manuscripts assigned a moral meaning to the behaviour of different creatures. In the Renaissance, animals frequently appeared in paintings as metaphors or emblems.
Images of birds often represented sacrifice, resurrection, the soul or death. The goldfinch was regularly used in Renaissance art and also symbolizes redemption and healing.
During the Renaissance period, artists used animals to illustrate their own religious and mythological narratives, often using older symbolism but changing their earlier meanings. One single animal, such as an ermine, could represent different, often contradictory, meanings.
- Ermine. Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani), ca. 1489–90. Image via Wikimedia Commons. William Segar, The Ermine Portrait, 1585.
- Dog. Jan van Eyck, Untitled (The Arnolfini Portrait), 1434. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Tiziano Vecellio, Last Supper, c. 1542–44.
- Rabbit. Titian, Madonna with Rabbit, c. 1530. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Lady with a Rabbit, ca. 1508. Image via the Yale University Art Gallery.
- Goldfinch. Raphael, Madonna of the Goldfinch, 1505-06. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Goya, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, 1787-88. Image via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“ Image and Moral Teaching through Emblematic Animals.” In Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory, 1500–1700, ed. Daly, P. M. and Manning, J., 93 – 108. New York, 1999.Google Scholar
- Simona Cohen
- 2014
In Renaissance art, animals were not merely portrayed for their physical characteristics but were imbued with layers of symbolic meaning. Each creature carried its own significance, often representing virtues, vices, or aspects of human nature.
Animals in religious iconography of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are often interpreted as expressions of Renaissance naturalism and secular genre, assuming that this entails the rejection of medieval symbolism.
