ional sign or
equivalent of some object or notion, to which it may perhaps bear no
visible resemblance, but with which the intellect or the imagination has
in some way associated it.

For instance, a city may be figuratively represented as a woman crowned
with towers; here the artist has selected for the expression of his idea
a human form animated with a will and motives of action analogous to
those of humanity generally. Or, again, as in Greek art, a bull may be a
figurative representation of a river, and, in the conception of the
artist, this animal form may contain, and be ennobled by, a human mind.

This is still impersonation; the form only in which personality is
embodied is changed.

Again, a dolphin may be used as a symbol of the sea; a man ploughing
with two oxen is a well-known symbol of a Roman colony. In neither of
these instances is there impersonation. The dolphin is not invested,
like the figure of Neptune, with any of the attributes of the human
mind; it has animal instincts, but no will; it represents to us its
native element, only as a part may be taken for a whole.

Again, the man ploughing does not, like the turreted female figure,
_personify_, but rather _typifies_ the town, standing as the visible
representation of a real event, its first foundation. To our mental
perceptions, as to our bodily senses, this figure seems no more than
man; there is no blending of his personal nature with the impersonal
nature of the colony, no transfer of attributes from the one to the
other.

Though the conventionally imitative, the figurative, and the symbolic,
are three distinct kinds of representation, they are constantly combined
in one composition, as we shall see in the following examples, cited
from the art of successive races in chronological order.

In Egyptian art the general representation of water is the
conventionally imitative. In the British Museum are two frescoes from
tombs at Thebes, Nos. 177 and 170: the subject of the first of these is
an oblong pond, ground-plan and elevation being strangely confused in
the design. In this pond water is represented by parallel zigzag lines,
in which fish are swimming about. On the surface are birds and lotos
flowers; the herbage at the edge of the pond is represented by a border
of symmetrical fan-shaped flowers; the field beyond by rows of trees,
arranged round the sides of the pond at right angles to each other, and
in defiance of all laws of perspectiv