ABSTRACT
Pseudomorphosis managed to withstand the wholesale elimination of humanistic subject matter from late nineteenth-century art and enjoy popularity to the day as well as in comic cartoons and serious advertisements: Father Time and Blind Cupid. In Renaissance and Baroque art, Father Time is generally winged and mostly nude. To his most frequent attribute of a scythe or sickle are added, or sometimes substituted, an hourglass, a snake or dragon biting its tail, or the zodiac; and in many cases he walks with crutches. The development of the figure of Father Time is instructive in two respects. It evidences the intrusion of mediaeval features into an image which, at first sight, seems to be purely classical in character; and it illustrates the connection between mere 'iconography' and the interpretation of intrinsic or essential meanings.
