Visual arts[edit]

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1544–45, Agnolo Bronzino.

Personifications, often in sets, frequently appear in medieval art, often illustrating or following
literary works. The virtues and vices were probably the most common, and the virtues appear in
many large sculptural programmes, for example the exteriors of Chartres Cathedral and Amiens
Cathedral. In painting, both virtues and vices are personified along the lowest zone of the walls of
the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto (c. 1305),[41] and are the main figures in Ambrogio
Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–39) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena.
In the Allegory of Bad Government Tyranny is enthroned, with Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory
above him. Beside him on the magistrate's bench sit Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and
War, while Justice lies tightly bound below. [42] The so-called Mantegna Tarocchi (c. 1465–75) are
sets of fifty educational cards depicting personifications of social classes, the planets and
heavenly bodies, and also social classes.[43]
A new pair, once common on the portals of large churches, are Ecclesia and Synagoga.[44] 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".[45]
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.[46] An unusually powerful single personification figure is
depicted in Melencolia I (1514) an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.[47] Venus, Cupid, Folly and
Time (c. 1545) by Agnolo Bronzino has five personifications, apart from Venus and Cupid. [48] 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.[49]