Reading on more than one level
Medieval thinkers were used to the idea that a text or image could mean several things at once. Biblical commentators described levels of interpretation: a literal meaning, an allegorical one tied to Christian belief, a moral one about how to live, and a final one about the future life. This habit of layered reading spilled into art. A picture of an animal might simply depict an animal, or it might serve as a moral lesson, or both.
Allegory, then, means using a figure, scene or story to stand for an abstract idea. Rather than cataloging single symbols, this article looks at how meaning was built into whole images and books, and how far secular culture used the same habits.
Bestiaries
Bestiaries were illustrated books describing animals, real and imaginary, together with moral or religious lessons drawn from their supposed habits. Many drew on an earlier Greek text known as the Physiologus, expanded with material from other writers, and they were popular especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with some of the best-known copies made in England and France.
A few well-known examples show the method. The pelican was said to wound itself to feed its young, which was read as a figure of Christ’s sacrifice. The phoenix, reborn from flames, suggested resurrection. The unicorn, said to be tamed only by a virgin, was interpreted in several ways, often linked to Christ or purity. The fox, which feigned death to trap birds, stood for cunning and deceit. Many of the “facts” were folklore or errors, and medieval readers may have taken some literally and others as parables. We cannot always tell how seriously a given reader took each claim.
For artists, bestiaries provided a repertoire of recognizable creatures. Their pictures were sometimes lively and carefully observed, sometimes copied and stylized.
Moral images and personifications
Allegory also took the form of personified abstractions: Virtues and Vices as women or figures with attributes, Death as a skeleton or corpse, and Fortune as a woman turning a wheel. Church sculpture and wall paintings used these to show lessons that were easy to remember. The cycle of the seven virtues and the deadly sins appeared in many media. The wheel of Fortune, with kings rising and falling around its rim, illustrated how human success can turn.
Late medieval art often turned to reminders of mortality. The “Dance of Death,” in which skeletons lead people of every rank in a dance, became popular in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; scholars discuss how much it was a response to repeated epidemics and how much it built on older traditions. Another example is the satirical “Ship of Fools,” a literary and visual theme that mocked human folly, associated with Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century poem.
Other allegories covered ideas of how the world worked. The four elements, for instance, were sometimes illustrated by figures or creatures, and the Ages of Man were pictured as stages of life. Some allegorical images drew heavily on classical or literary sources, including the love allegories of courtly poetry.
Secular symbolism and heraldry
Not all symbolic art was religious. Heraldry developed from the twelfth century as a system of identifying individuals and families through shield designs. Colors and figures, called charges, were chosen to show lineage, loyalty or claims. A lion might suggest courage, and birds, stars or crosses carried other meanings, though the supposed meanings were often later inventions, and many arms were chosen for family connections or puns on a name. Medieval heraldry thus functions as a visual identity system as well as symbolism, and the details are covered in their own articles.
Other secular images used symbols freely: lovers’ gifts, hunting scenes with coded meanings in poems, and tapestries whose flowers and animals may carry associations. A famous set of late medieval tapestries featuring a lady and unicorn is often interpreted as an allegory, but scholars propose different readings, a good reminder that interpretation can remain open.
Marginal images
The edges of manuscripts and carved church furniture host hybrids, musicians, monkeys and bawdy or satirical scenes. Some have been read as moral warnings, some as jokes, some as simple decoration. There is no single accepted explanation, and scholars generally prefer to treat each case separately.
Limits of interpretation
Allegorical readings can be persuasive but should be backed by evidence: texts of the time, comparable images, and the setting. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers sometimes assigned elaborate hidden meanings that medieval sources do not support. A sensible approach is to look for connections the original audience could plausibly have made, accept ambiguity where it exists, and remember that artists sometimes simply liked a good picture.