Anthropomorphosis

For people in ancient societies, the world around them was filled with powerful, unstoppable forces. Storms raged with lightning and destructive flooding; powerful emotions gripped men and women, spurring them on to great heights or ruin. In response, ancient cultures crafted human representations of natural phenomena, geographic features, and abstract ideas or qualities. These human representations or personifications appeared in art, myth, literature, religion, and more. Though this phenomena of imagining abstract ideas as human figures was popular, discussions of what this process was called and how ancient people defined it are absent from ancient sources. Instead modern scholars must retroactively apply modern terminology like ‘personification’ and ‘anthropomorphic’ to the past and thus create individual definitions for this ancient phenomenon. In the context of this exhibit, we define personification as the act of representing an idea, emotion, place, or phenomena in human form. Using this definition, Anthropomorphosis: Giving a Face to the Abstract in Art attempts to unravel the rich practice and tradition of using personification in ancient art to bring to light new ways of understand the world around us.