The Allegory and Metaphor in Visual Arts
Esraa Abdelfatah
Helwan University, Egypt
Abstract
Throughout the history of civilizations, the language of visual art has expressed the hidden concepts under the apparent forms and the invisible deduced through the visible. Furthermore, this process takes place through various mediums to convey complex and abstract ideas and meanings through symbols, allegories, and metaphors. Additionally, all those mediums represent hidden meaning and veiled language, a meticulously packaged lesson ready to reveal itself. This research will provide a new method of seeing and interpreting the creative experience of visual art from many aspects by monitoring and studying the development of symbolic thinking through theories of reading, receiving, and interpretation. This, in turn, requires the necessity of dealing with the artwork as a concept and not just looking at its formal aspects only. Thus, this calls for a reconsideration of visual and conceptualism metaphors and tropes in artists’ practices, using metaphorical structures as one of the most important ways of contemporary thinking.
Keywords: Conceptual perspective, allegory, metaphor, visual arts