Allegory

Master I.A.M. of Zwolle (Netherlandish printmaker)
Allegory of the Transience of Life
ca. 1480-90
hand-colored engraving printed on vellum
British Museum

Master M.Z. (German printmaker)
Allegory of Light and Darkness
ca. 1500
engraving
British Museum

Monogrammist P.P. (Italian printmaker)
Allegory of the Moon
ca. 1500-1510
engraving
British Museum

Giulio Bonasone
Allegory of Astrology
ca. 1546
drawing (print study)
British Museum

Lelio Orsi
Allegory of Sleep
ca. 1555-65
drawing
British Museum

Domenico Campagnola
Allegory of Venice
before 1564
drawing
British Museum

Jacopo Ligozzi after Otto van Veen
Allegory of Fortune
ca. 1590
drawing (after-print)
British Museum

Jacob Jordaens
Veritas Dei (Allegory of the Church)
ca. 1630-40
watercolor and gouache on paper
(modello for tapestry)
British Museum

Filippo Passarini
Allegory of the Triumph of the Church
(Pope on Proscenium Stage in Chariot of Faith)
1698
etching
British Museum

Francesco Solimena
Allegory of the Arts in Papal Rome
(Clement XI Albani enthroned at left)
ca. 1703
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Battista Cipriani
Allegory of Innocence taught by Love and Friendship
before 1785
watercolor and ink on paper
British Museum

Giovanni Battista Cipriani
Allegory of Virtue directed by Prudence and Honour
before 1785
watercolor and ink on paper
British Museum

Johann Heinrich Ramberg
Allegory of the Reign of George III
ca. 1785
watercolor on paper
British Museum

François Valentin
Allegory of Philosophy illuminating Paris
1792
drawing
British Museum

David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville
Allegorical Composition extolling the French Revolution
1797
drawing
British Museum

Thomas Stothard
Allegory of the Victory of the Nile
1798
drawing (design for transparency)
British Museum

Louis Josef Kramp after Franz Pforr
Allegory of Friendship
ca. 1832-34
lithograph
British Museum

    This seemeth to be the voice of nature in almost all the religions of the world; this is that general testimony, charactered in the minds of the most barbarous and savage people; for all have had some roving guesses at ages to come and a glow-worm light of another life, all appealing to one general judgment throne.  To what else could serve so many expiations, sacrifices, prayers, solemnities and mystical ceremonies?  To what such sumptuous temples and care of the dead?  To what all religion, if not to show that they expected a more excellent manner of being after the navigation of this life did take an end?  And who doth deny it must deny that there is a Providence, a God; confess that his worship and all study and reason of virtue are vain, and not believe that there is a world, are creatures, and that he himself is not what he is.   

    But it is not of death, perhaps, that we complain, but of time, under the fatal shadow of whose wings all things decay and wither.  This is that tyrant which, executing against us his diamantine laws, altereth the harmonious constitution of our bodies, benumbing the organs of our knowledge, turneth our best senses senseless, makes us loathsome to others and a burthen to ourselves; of which evils death relieveth us.  So that, if we could be transported (O happy colony!) to a place exempted from the laws and conditions of time, where neither change, motion nor other affection of material and corruptible things were, but an immortal, unchangeable, impassible, all-sufficient kind of life, it were the last of things wishable, the term and centre of all our desires. Death maketh this transplantation; for the last instant of corruption or leaving-off of anything to be what it was, is the first of generation or being of that which succedeth.  Death then, being the end of this miserable transitory life, of necessity must be the beginning of that other all excellent and eternal; and so causelessly of a virtuous soul it is either feared or complained on. 

– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)