ABSTRACT
In Michel Foucault's grand narrative of the Renaissance, allegory was the key to all knowledge. Allegory was the key to reading texts as well as to understanding the universe as an intelligible, meaningful entity. It is open to doubt whether Renaissance thinkers were constrained by the epistemological framework Foucault invented for them, but no observer or reader can deny the pervasive presence of allegory in Renaissance art and in its written texts. 'Allegory' was in fact a word with a very long history, well embedded in the interpretative and expository systems of Greco-Roman antiquity and of Jewish and early Christian exegesis. Allegory is the vehicle whereby an enlightened reader moves from a literal, incomplete, understanding of a text to one that is deemed to find its full significance in a different context. Allegory and its cognates were to be employed as stylistic ornaments, eliciting assent as a response to sheer cleverness or aesthetic pleasure.
