In a pre-scientific world, these allegorical tales served a dual purpose.

BBC: Mystical tales from Transylvania

He was referring to "The Voyage of Life, " a series of allegorical paintings about childhood, youth, manhood and old age, a set of which resides at the National Gallery in Washington.

WSJ: Hudson River Schooling

Allegorical pictures of contemporary events have a way of weaving in and out between the symbolic and the semi-psychotic.

NEWYORKER: The Big Reveal

But people just like violent otherworldly stuff, and give it a lot of non-allegorical license to do its thing.

NEWYORKER: The Big Reveal

The result blends a vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard scrabble world that sustains it.

ECONOMIST: Oxford

In Medicine, an allegorical Hygiena stands in front of Suffering Humanity, a huddled mass of men, women and children.

FORBES: Gustav Klimt At 150: Is He The Father Of Kitsch?

In this rare, silk allegorical embroidery, Wisdom watches over four students viewing a large unframed map and points to a classical temple, signifying the importance of maps in higher learning.

WSJ: Charting the Role They Played | Common Destinations | Winterthur | By Judith H. Dobrzynski

Now Mr Lukashenka is embroiled in a diplomatic row with the West that captures with almost allegorical perfection the essential elements of his style and policy.

ECONOMIST: Alexander Lukashenka, Europe’s odd man out | The

Backlit in gloomy purple and red, and accompanied by strings, flute, percussion and a harpsichord, a trio slipped into each other's roles in an allegorical depiction of how all are victims and perpetrators.

NPR: Opera About Nazi Atrocity Shown In Austria

The director Zhang Yimou returns to the allegorical drama in this simple but at times trenchantly emotional tale of Takada (the excellent Ken Takakura), a widowed Japanese fisherman.

NEWYORKER: Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles