This included eight personifications of virtues and vices: Hope, Repentance, Perfidy, Calumny, Fraud, Rancour, Ignorance, Suspicion, as well as two other figures.

Platonism, which in some manifestations proposed systems involving numbers of spirits, was naturally conducive to personification and allegory, and is an influence on the uses of it from classical times through various revivals up to the Baroque period.