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Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person, often as an embodiment or incarnation. In the arts, many things are commonly personified, including: places, especially cities, countries, and ; elements of the natural world, such as trees, the four seasons, the "four elements",Hall, 128–130 the Anemoi, and the Sense;Hall, 122 moral abstractions, especially the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins;Hall, 336–337 the nine Muses;Hall, 216 and death.
In many polytheistic early religions, deity had a strong element of personification, suggested by descriptions such as "god of". In ancient Greek religion, and the related ancient Roman religion, this was perhaps especially strong, in particular among the minor deities.Paxson, 6–7 Many such deities, such as the or 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.Hall, 321
Generally, personifications lack much in the way of narrative , although classical myth at least gave many of them parents among the Twelve Olympians.Hall, 216; the example here is the Muses, daughters of Apollo and Mnemosyne, herself the personification of Memory. The iconography of several personifications "maintained a remarkable degree of continuity from late antiquity until the 18th century".Hall, 128, speaking of the Four Seasons, but the same is true for example of the personification of Africa (same page). Female personifications tend to outnumber male ones,Melion and Remakers, 5; Gombrich, 1 (of PDF) at least until modern national personifications, many of which are male.
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.Melion and Remakers, 2–13; Paxson, 5–6. See also Escobedo, Ch. 1 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".Gombrich, 1 (of PDF)
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.Escobedo, Ch. 1 on daemons 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.Smith, 93–105
Personification in the Bible is mostly limited to passing phrases which can probably be regarded as literary flourishes,"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 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.Sinnott, Alica M., The Personification of Wisdom, 2017, Taylor & Francis, , 9781351884365. Subject of the whole book, but see Ch. 1 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.Mounce, Robert H., The Book of Revelation, 1998, 139–146, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, , 9780802825377, google books
According to James J. Paxson in his book on the subject " all personification figures prior to the sixth century A.D. were ... female";Paxson, 6 but major rivers have male personifications much earlier, and are more often male, which often extends to "Water" in the Four Elements.Hall, 128, 265 The predominance of females is at least partly because Latin grammar gives nouns for abstractions the female gender.Gombrich, 2 (of PDF)
Pairs of winged victories decorated the of Roman and similar spaces, and ancient Roman coinage was an especially rich source of images, many carrying their name, which was helpful for medieval and Renaissance antiquarians. Sets of representing the major cities of the empire were used in the decorative arts.The Calendar of 354 and the slightly later Esquiline Treasure provide examples, though the choice of 4th city varies between Antioch and Trier. 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.Sear, 36–42, 46–48, 49–51
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.Lightbown, Ronald, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, 234, 1989, Thames and Hudson
Platonism, which in some manifestations proposed systems involving numbers of spirits,Luc Brisson, Seamus O'Neill, Andrei Timotin, Neoplatonic Demons and Angels,1–5, 2018, Brill, , 9789004374980, google books 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.
A medieval creation was the Four Daughters of God, a shortened group of virtues consisting of: Truth, Righteousness or Justice, Mercy, and Peace. There were also the seven virtues, made up of the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude), these going back to Plato's Republic, with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. The seven deadly sins were their counterparts.Hall, 336; see "Further reading" for some recent examples of the very extensive literature on these.
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 (–90), where most of the characters are clear personifications named as their qualities,Melion and Remakers, 99–101 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 and the later 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 Italian literature Petrach's Triumphs, finished in 1374, is based around a procession of personifications carried on "cars", as was becoming fashionable in courtly festivities; it was illustrated by many different artists.Hall, 310 Dante has several personification characters, but prefers using real persons to represent most sins and virtues.Melion and Remakers, 73–77
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.Melion and Remakers, 121–122 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,"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 apart from that of William Blake.Howard, John, Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake's Lambeth Prophecies, 22–24, 1984, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, , 9780838631768, google books Leading critics had begun to complain about personification in the 18th century, and such "complaints only grow louder in the nineteenth century".Escobedo, Introduction 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".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.
A new pair, once common on the portals of large churches, are Ecclesia and Synagoga.Rowe, Nina, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century, 2011, Cambridge University Press, , , google books 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".Hall, 94
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.Hartt, 332–333 An unusually powerful single personification figure is depicted in Melencolia I (1514) an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.Bartrum, 188 Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time () by Agnolo Bronzino has five personifications, apart from Venus and Cupid.Hartt, 662 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.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.
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.Melion and Remakers, 13–26 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.Hall, 337
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, (1936), by C. S. Lewis was an exploration of courtly love in medieval and Renaissance literature.Paxson, 1–2 and passim; Escobedo, Introduction
The invention of movable type printing saw Dame Imprimerie ("Lady Printing Press") introduced to the pageants of Lyons, a major printing center, along with "Typosine", a new muse of printing.Melion and Remakers, 30 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).Jackson, Nicola, Building the BBC: a return to form, 28, 2004, BBC A more modern approach on the personification is, “Plantification” a form of comparing things to plants.
Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, had been important under the Roman Republic, and was somewhat uncomfortably co-opted by the Roman Empire;Sear, 39 it was not seen as an innate right, but as granted to some under Roman law.Fischer, David Hackett, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, around p. 22, 2004, Oxford University Press, , 9780199883073 She had appeared on the coins of the assassins of Julius Caesar, defenders of the Roman Republic. The medieval republics, mostly in Italy, greatly valued their liberty, and often use the word, but produce very few direct personifications. With the rise of nationalism and new states, many nationalist personifications included a strong element of liberty, perhaps culminating in the Statue of Liberty ( Liberty Enlightening the World). The long poem Liberty by the Scottish James Thomson (1734), is a lengthy monologue spoken by the "Goddess of Liberty", describing her travels through the ancient world, and then English and British history, before the resolution of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 confirms her position there.Higham, 59; text of Liberty online Thomson also wrote the lyrics for Rule Britannia, and the two personifications were often combined as a personified "British Liberty",Higham, 59–61 to whom a large monument was erected in the 1750s on his estate at Gibside by a Whig magnate.Green, Adrian, in Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England, 136-137, 2010, Boydell & Brewer, , 9781843835417, google books ; "Column to Liberty" , National Trust.
But, sometimes alongside these formal figures, a new type of national personification has arisen, typified by John Bull (1712) and Uncle Sam (). 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.Heuer, 43–44, 48–50 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 .Hubert de Vries, "The Dutch Virgin: Symbols of State of the Netherlands"
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