Symbolism in Art
Explore the broad symbolism categories that connect recurring images across art history. Each page dives into the meanings, artworks, and key symbols that define the theme.
Architecture
In art history, architectural symbols such as balustrades and iron-and-glass canopies embody the complex interplay between modernity, social dynamics, and perception in urban and domestic settings.
10 symbols
Color
Color symbolism in art history encapsulates emotional intensity, cultural nuance, and artistic experimentation, with artists leveraging hues to convey complex narratives and atmospheres.
10 symbols
Domesticity
The “Domesticity” symbolism category traces how modern artists transform humble household objects, routines, and furnishings into a complex visual language of labor, intimacy, and psychological tension within the home and its adjacent social spaces.
75 symbols
Fashion
In Impressionist and related modern painting, fashion functions as a coded system of class, gender, and spectatorship, translating older allegorical and mythic meanings into the language of couture, accessories, and regulated bodily comportment.
58 symbols
Femininity
In late nineteenth‑century painting, femininity is articulated not as an essence but as a mutable ensemble of fashion, gesture, and setting, through which modern artists probe women’s visibility, labor, and agency within emerging urban and suburban worlds.
107 symbols
Gesture
Gesture in modern painting operates as a charged system of signs in which the smallest inflection of hand, arm, or posture encodes shifting relations of intimacy, labor, authority, and selfhood, reworking a long iconographic tradition for a newly self-conscious age of looking.
48 symbols
Humanity
The symbolism of humanity in art encompasses markers of personal connection, social roles, and emotional dynamics, reflecting complex layers of identity and interaction within modern life.
9 symbols
Identity
In Impressionist and related modern painting, symbols of identity shift from fixed heraldic attributes to unstable cues of class, gender, labor, and spectatorship, turning clothing, gesture, and gaze into a language for negotiating visibility in the modern city.
119 symbols
Intimacy
In the 'Intimacy' category, late nineteenth‑century artists redeploy traditional emblems of affection, care, and erotic exchange—hands, flowers, mirrors, and children—to probe the fragile, negotiated character of closeness in an age of public leisure, urban spectacle, and modern subjectivity.
87 symbols
Light
In this category, light operates less as a neutral illuminant than as a historically specific sign-system through which artists from Monet to Pissarro and Van Gogh encode modernity, time, labor, and social experience.
65 symbols
Mortality
The “Mortality” symbolism category in nineteenth‑century painting translates death from theological drama into terse, often secular signs—blood, smoke, wilted flowers, exhausted bodies—through which modern artists register the finitude of life and the procedural, sometimes anonymized character of modern violence.
24 symbols
Nature
Nature symbolism in modern painting becomes a laboratory for thinking about time, perception, and social modernity, as traditional emblems of fertility, stability, or menace are reworked through Impressionist and Post‑Impressionist attention to light and structure.
0 symbols
Objects
In modern painting, everyday objects become charged mediators of vision, labor, desire, and time, replacing inherited allegories with a material, self-conscious language of modern life.
292 symbols
Society
The Society symbolism category charts how nineteenth‑century artists encoded modern social relations—class hierarchy, gendered labor, spectatorship, and leisure—through recurring motifs of dress, gesture, and urban setting that transform everyday bourgeois and working-class life into a legible iconography of modernity.
29 symbols
Urbanity
“Urbanity” symbolism in modern painting encodes the city as a system of circulation, visibility, and managed sociability, using infrastructural motifs and crowd typologies to figure the new conditions of perception and collective life.
69 symbols
Vision
“Vision” symbols in modern painting mark not only what is seen but how seeing itself becomes a historical, technological, and psychological problem, turning light, reflection, and vantage into active agents of meaning.
95 symbols