The Binding of Personifications and the Image of the Enslaved, 1460–1560

This paper considers a selection of allegorical artworks, in which personifications are bound or fettered, in relation to images of enslaved people and prisoners broadly. A visual tradition that originates as a commentary on the power of love becomes, in the hands of Benvenuto Cellini, an assertion of the force of the artistic imagination. Milestones separating the love allegories of the fifteenth century from Cellini’s designs for the seal of the Accademia del Disegno (1564) are the unearthing of the Laocoön, with its twisting snakes, and the making of Michelangelo’s Schiavi. Drawing as it did on historical ideas about enslavement, imprisonment, and servitude, binding was the perfect metamotif for signifying the capture of concepts as figure.