Illustration by Wilhelm Dilich, from Historische Beschreibung der Kindtauf des Fräuleins Elisabeth zu Hessen (1598).

Source: @bsbmuenchen

Available to buy as a print.

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/61bd4bb7-c012-4385-bf9f-2b4cf8acd1e8

#watercolours #royalty #costumes #botanical-art #processions #allegory #pageantry #parties #horses #flowers #knights #plants #art #publicdomain

The people of Mao, when a hundred flowers bloomed.

#ai #allegory

https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

"The Sower," Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

Y'all know van Gogh.

In 1888 he was living in Arles and having his breakthrough success as an artist. This scene is a riff on an artist he admired, Jean-Francois Millet, who had done a similar painting of a sower.

Here, we have the man boldly striding across the plowed field, scattering seeds. But in the background, we see the sun rising over fully grown grain. This painting isn't supposed to be a realistic landscape, but a circle-of-life allegory, a religious scene of the sower of divine will planting the seeds of salvation.

Van Gogh's mental health would decline and in a few months he was hospitalized; I wonder if this painting was an expression of a troubled soul seeking some form of salvation or rescue.

From the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

#Art #VincentVanGogh #PostImpressionism #Allegory

The Seven Stages of the Office Seeker (1852) by Edward Williams Clay.

Source: Library of Congress

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/3995a335-4eea-4a66-885b-a8789bd62dd2

#lebenstreppe #caricatures #aristotle #cartoons #stufenalter #allegory #shakespeare #art #publicdomain

Illustration by Théodore Marcile, from Civitas veri sive morvm (1609).

Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Internet Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/a04719fa-8963-4bae-a95c-24cc62228987

#classical #aristotle #dystopia #nature #ethics #emblems #allegory #landscapes #mythology #morals #utopias #architecture #truth #art #publicdomain