Allegory

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. Allegory has been used widely throughout history in all forms of art, largely because it can readily illustrate complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners.

Writers or speakers typically use allegories as literary devices or as rhetorical devices that convey hidden meanings through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, and/or events, which together create the moral, spiritual, or political meaning the author wishes to convey.

One of the best-known examples of allegory, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, forms a part of his larger work The Republic. In this allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall (514a-b). The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows, using language to identify their world (514c-515a). According to the allegory, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality, until one of them finds his way into the outside world where he sees the actual objects that produced the shadows. He tries to tell the people in the cave of his discovery, but they do not believe him and vehemently resist his efforts to free them so they can see for themselves (516e-518a). This allegory is, on a basic level, about a philosopher who upon finding greater knowledge outside the cave of human understanding, seeks to share it as is his duty, and the foolishness of those who would ignore him because they think themselves educated enough.

Allegory (Filippino Lippi)

Allegory is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Filippino Lippi, executed around 1498. It is now housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.

The work had been variously assigned, from Leonardo da Vinci to an unknown 15th century painter.

Description

The scene is set on a hill, with Florence in the background. It features a man, whose legs are tied by a serpent, who closes to an aged one, dressing in red and sitting near a tree. The latter is holding several lightnings. Next to the walking man is a small stoat, a symbol of purity.

The same character, with the serpent getting out from his jacket and looking at him, has fallen in the foreground. An inscription gets out from his mouth, saying NULLA DETERIOR PESTIS Q. FAMILIARIS INIMICUS ("Nothing is more dangerous than a family's enemy") and going towards the old man.

The subject has been variously interpreted: as the story of Laocoön, an allegory of two enemy brothers, or, more likely, of the civil wars that followed the fall of Girolamo Savonarola in Florence. The last version is supported by the fact that, in Renaissance art, the presence of a well defined city (Florence in this case) had always a meaning. The man dressing in red would be God or Jupiter; in the latter case, the man nearing him would be nearing paganism, the serpent being a symbol of the Devil making him stumble later.

Allegory (category theory)

In the mathematical field category theory, an allegory is a category that has some of the structure of the category of sets and binary relations between them. Allegories can be used as an abstraction of categories of relations, and in this sense the theory of allegories is a generalization of relation algebra to relations between different sorts. Allegories are also useful in defining and investigating certain constructions in category theory, such as exact completions.

In this article we adopt the convention that morphisms compose from right to left, so RS means "first do S, then do R".

Definition

An allegory is a category in which

all such that