Allegory Of Immortality Essay

Words: 636
Pages: 3

There is a darkness to humanity that never kisses light. Consumed with cycles and destruction, we are guilty of our own corruption. Trapped, we strive to get out alive when our fate is inevitably death. However, to be trapped in such despair for an eternity seems far more tragic as seen with a life of immortality. Two pieces of art, An Allegory of Immortality by Giulio Romano, and The Court of Death by Rembrandt Peale intrigue viewers to look deeper into the paintings as symbols and lessons are portrayed to discuss immortality and mortality.

Giulio Romano, was born in Rome, Italy between the year 1492 and 1499. As a child he was apprenticed to Raphael and marked as a painter of the late Renaissance. His piece, An Allegory of Immortality, is a representational piece of art which portrays natural objects in recognizable form. (Sayre 26) An Allegory of Immortality is an oil on canvas with dimensions of 27x27 without the frame, being a small-scale painting. This piece was considered a type of puzzle of symbols that were often collected by educated nobles due to the sophisticated literary references to immortality that only they were able to identify along with very few others. Some examples of the symbols used are the golden sphere which represents the universe, the snake biting its tail that represents the endless
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Taking after the artistic works of his father, Peale was known as a portrait and history painter of the eighteenth-century. However, his work, The Court of Death, of 1820 was one of moral didactic that reached beyond portraiture. This large-scale painting consists of oil on canvas and reaches the dimensions of 11ft 6 in. x 23ft 5in. Similar to Romano’s piece, The Court of Death is also representational. The overall goal that Peale was trying to achieve in this production was to give a moral lesson. Similar to An Allegory of Immortality, The Court of Death uses visual