thejohnconway 4 days ago

Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of symbolism. Sometimes it’s so obvious that we don’t recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but other things aren’t (spiral = ?).

The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art

More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism modern audiences can no longer “read”.

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irrational 4 days ago

I read about an American professor that was visiting the various cathedrals in France and started noticing that the stained glass windows were interweaving the parable of the good samaritan with the story of the garden of eden in a fairly consistent manner. He didn't understand why they were doing that until he found records of medieval sermons explaining why they were combining these two stories. It was a symbolic message that would have made sense to medieval peoples, but had been lost over the intervening centuries.