On the status of allegory in contemporary art

For TEXT magazine

A double portrait by Piero della Francesca stayed with me long after a visit to the Uffizi last summer, depicting Battista Sforza and Federico de Montefeltro. An unusual aspect is that Battista Sforza is portrayed as ethereally pale, and art historians have alluded to the fact that she was deceased at the time the painting was made, 1472/73. A duality emerges here in the imagery of death. Piero’s iconographic ambiguity is almost casual: whether the woman’s skin tone is merely fashionable or if we are looking at a corpse, to all intents and purposes. Despite the pervasiveness of images of the dead in mass media, this has failed to translate into contemporary art’s iconographic lexicon; the languages art uses to address death and grieving – allegory, memento mori – have faded: in this context the dead no longer claim a place. It is worthwhile examining this abandonment of allegory and whether a retrieval may be possible, or indeed useful. What earlier generations had relied on – variations of symbolism, as a system of common references, concepts and generalizations of the existential, the human condition – has fallen into disfavour: overarching notions of death, for instance, no longer appear to be a valid artistic strategy. This may derive from a growing discomfort with humanistic concepts of truth, with artists rather lacking the desire to represent these truths through their work.