ANCIENT IMAGES. The Oresteia cycle of plays by Aeschylus encapsulated ancient Greek notions of revenge, retribution and eventual reconciliation. But the process was one of inevitable human tragedy resolved only by divine intervention, as in this scene where Orestes appeals for Athena’s mercy against inevitable punishment by the Furies.

MEDIEVAL IMAGES of penitence demonstrated the sacramental and societal nature of reconciliation. Here a bishop accepts the public submission and penitence of offenders in a rite of confession and penitence, which remains a sacrament of the Catholic Church.

THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE of reconciliation is well attested in this twelfth-century French illumination. It shows two individuals embracing amid a cloud of witnesses. These may represent the former opposing factions, the feuding families, or the legal witnesses. Most likely they were one and the same.

LATE MEDIEVAL IMAGES of reconciliation stressed the act of embrace by former enemies, usually in a public ceremony designed to symbolize and effect the ending of hostilities, mutual forgiveness, and public assurances of continued amity.

RENAISSANCE IDEAS of reconciliation combined the personal and the political, as in this detail of the Master of Marradi’s “The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines”  (c. 1470–80), in the collection of Harwood House, Leeds. Historical marriages ended military and political enmity, while this cassone painting of the event celebrated a real-life marriage.

THE HIGH RENAISSANCE employed the same themes from ancient Roman history to reflect the political realties of its own day. “The Reconciliation of Marcus Emilius Lepidus and Fulvius Flaccus” by Domenico Beccafumi (1486–1551) a ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena was painted between 1530 and 1532.

IN THE BAROQUE ERA, “The Reconciliation of Jacob and Laban” by Cirro Ferri (c.1634-1689), now in a private collection, portrayed a widely used theme from the Hebrew Bible, a tale from the cycles of betrayal, feud and reconciliation that mark the scriptures.

IMAGES OF PEACE AND JUSTICE also reflected early-modern thinking on Reconciliation. Long before the modern slogan of “No Justice, No Peace” religious and political thinkers were aware of the tension between “Peace and Justice.” This painting by Laurent de la Hyre (1606–1656), in the Cleveland Museum of Art, symbolizes their eventual harmony.

THIS ROMANTIC IMAGE of the “Reconciliation of Helen and Paris” (1805) by Henry Westall combined two forms of embrace — that of lovers and that of peacemaking — to graphically illustrate mythological tensions. It is now in the Tate Galleries, London.

PHOTOGRAPHY was one of the tools that the Romantic era used to imagine its ideals. Here “The Kiss of Peace” by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79)  creates an eerie ambivalence: is this embrace of mother and child the peace of security or is it the kiss of a mother for her dying child, now resting in “peace”?

TOO LATE for Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets reconcile their bloody differences over their children’s bodies. In 1855 Frederic Lord Leighton used Shakespeare’s play to illuminate the tragic nature of too many reconciliations: they come after sacrificing our children to hatred, violence and death.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS ART attempted to incorporate the iconography and spiritual power of earlier Christian traditions while staying true to some notions of abstraction and materials. A good example is the statue of “Reconciliation” from 1977 and originally named “Reunion” by Josefina de Vasconcellos, now in Coventry Cathedral.

THE KISS OF PEACE. This rather chaste version of the kiss demonstrates a more secularized attempt to reestablish ritual meaning through physical gesture in a modern community setting. The image is taken from a Faith House gathering in New York City on June 14, 2008.

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Truth and Reconciliation commissions continue the long and painful process of bringing former enemies, oppressors and the oppressed, back into social and spiritual harmony. South Africa led the way, but now nearly twenty nations worldwide have established such offices. This image, from a 2009 London production of Tshabalala’s Electra, brings the process full circle. But will the cycle of violence, revenge and retribution — first made drama by Aeschylus — ever be broken?