3: Allegory at the Edges with Delacroix
Eugene Delacroix
Liberty Leading the People, 1830Oil on canvas, w325 cm x h260 cm (128" x 102.4")
The Louvre Museum, Paris, France
Allegorical history painting: basically an extended visual metaphor. It's where the artist depicts one subject (usually something abstract, like 'Truth' or 'Justice') via another subject (something more concrete, which can be on a spectrum from 'realistic group of people having a picnic' to 'mythology scene' to 'fantasmagoria what the hell is happening').
This type of painting is difficult to do without being emotionless and preachy, so swim through this category and you'll yourself moving through a shocking amount of sludge water. But, as always, we'll pretend we care about context:
Heyday for allegory pictures was probably more in the medieval period, when it was A) a way to pass along religious morality/theology lessons to an illiterate public, and B) one of the only acceptable forms of ornament in a time when religious faith was so completely integrated into daily life. Later, as audiences and artists became more sophisticated in visual 'language', and with the arrival of the Renaissance, allegory opened up to include more subjects, more nuance — and was often used to bridge one system of thought to another. For example, allegory could be used to bridge Christian theology to classical philosophy/literature, demonstrating that e.g. Greek gods could represent Christian concepts, and thus it wasn't a betrayal of faith to portray them1.
And I would say this is still where Allegory works best: at the fringes of paradigms of thought, where there is genuine confusion and it may be seriously helpful to show the new dressed up in the familiar.
So above is a more recent-than-Renaissance example of bridging, with a quite famous piece from France's 'July Revolution' of 1830 called 'Liberty Leading the People'. The figure of 'Liberty' is clearly allegorical (the bare-breastedness actually makes sure she'll be read that way, not that it's not still weird), but the rest of the picture is more grounded in what a contemporary revolution would (did) look like to Delacroix. Allegory is very merge-able with other types of history painting, mythology and actual history being the most common additives, and Delacroix wasn't the first by a long shot to mix depictions of the real world with allegory this way — but it's effective here, because Delacroix was genuine about his support for the revolutionaries and this was a way of showing that rightness, Liberty literally embodied, was on their side. For a Delacroix-contemporary audience, the allegory would work as a memorable visual reinforcement of ideology, and would also urge the joining of ideology and action in real life as in the picture.
NOTES:
1. There's another Botticelli piece that shows the Renaissance type of bridging, and it's actually one of the most famous allegory paintings in the world, because dude got around. But three days in a row seemed like a bit much, and that piece is complicated, so you get a Botticelli break.