Too often, allegory, which relies on the use of recognizable symbols and personifications, reduces the poetic act of painting to the mere reading of pictures as text: This figure stands for so-and-so, this act represents such-and-such; combined, the message is X. But the fault lies not with the genre itself but with lackadaisical artists who attempt to hang too much meaning on symbols, and with lackadaisical art historians who limit the reading of a painting to the identification of its subjects and figures. Symbols alone have little weight. Artists have always understood that whether a work is allegorical or not, it is not the “what” in a painting but the “how.”

Paolo Veronese (1528-88) was a master of both the “what” and the “how.” A new, small exhibition at the Frick, “Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice,” shows how he gave new life to the age-old tradition of allegory, imbuing his canvases with theatricality, opulence, and richness that together transform symbolic characters into individuals – living beings with conflicting emotions.

Veronese’s figures may choose virtue over vice or love over war, but they are not mere robotic props going through the motions or devices used by the artist as moralizing teaching aids. Veronese builds layers of interaction between forms and figures. We may know that good is better than evil, but we also know that evil can be a lot more fun. In Veronese’s paintings, we explore the drama of decisions – that with every choice there is a trade-off and a road not traveled.

Two of Veronese’s large-scale allegory paintings, “The Choice Between Virtue and Vice” and “Wisdom and Strength” (both c. 1565), have, since 1914, anchored the Fifth Avenue end of the Frick’s West Gallery. This week, they have been temporarily reinstalled, along with three of the artist’s other large-scale allegory paintings, in the Frick’s Oval Room. And to my eyes, they have never looked better.

The installation also includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Venus and Mars United by Love” (1570s) and two works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Allegory of Navigation With an Astrolabe” and “Allegory of Navigation With a Cross-Staff” (both c. 1565). Curated by Xavier Salomon, this is the first exhibition in this country devoted to the artist since the Met’s 1988 retrospective. The show proves that a little juggling and a lot of love can offer fresh insight into an artist’s works and a museum’s collection.

Veronese was born in Verona to a family of sculptors and trained by the much lesser painter Antonio Badile. Somewhere between 1553 and 1555 he moved to Venice, where he established himself as an extremely successful and prolific painter of large-scale altarpieces, frescos, municipal buildings, and church decorations (including Venice’s masterful Ducal Palace and the church of San Sebastiano), as well as numerous portraits, devotional works, and mythological, historical, and allegory paintings. Not much else is known of his early years, but it is evident through his oeuvre that he traveled at least once to Rome, probably during the 1560s. There he saw classical ruins and the works of Raphael and Michelangelo, artists who would have as much influence on Veronese as his fellow Venetians Titian and Tintoretto.

Every great artist makes the most of his particular talents. Veronese, a Roman painter as much as a Venetian, never equaled Titian’s masterful fusion of form, space, and Venetian light. He never imbued his figures with the mannerist, bigger-than-life sculptural presence of Michelangelo, nor did he fill his spaces with the dramatic tilt of Tintoretto. But we can sense all of these influences in his pictures, in which high-key, local color – rustling, acidic oranges, limes, blues, and pinks – felt in satins, silks, and sky strike precise emotional chords.

In the erotic “Wisdom and Strength,” the female figure of Wisdom stands next to Hercules, who, looking downward, leans, over Cupid, on his club. Wisdom is at the center of the painting. She is looking up for divine guidance. Clearly she is the greater of the two. But Veronese wedges Hercules at an angle into the composition. He, along with Cupid (who is the diagonal entry into the painting), is the dynamic force of the picture, as well as the supporting base of the classical, architectural column. Wisdom and Strength, whose torsos pull toward each other, exist not as separate choices but as ideals that, in harmonic union through love, are structural pillars, in art as in life, that are equally necessary.

“The Choice Between Virtue and Vice” is not clear-cut, either. A man dressed in white satin (possibly representing purity or wealth and the leisure class) pulls himself, as if attempting to dislodge his body from between the legs of the female figure of Vice and into the awaiting arms of Virtue. Vice, her back to us, has ripped at his stocking, exposing his torn flesh; yet her spider-like hand tickles at his groin. And his left arm, extended seemingly through his long, tubular cloak, appears to reach back between her legs.

Vice gives birth to the man – or is she his jilted lover? She also is supported by, or giving birth to, the white figure of the Sphinx (representing Death), who emerges from between her legs like a lion from a cave. The Sphinx, its white breast and nipple glowing like a knife, is the anchor that holds the fleeing man to Vice. Obviously conflicted, he does not look to Virtue but, as if in need of our advice, to us. His body, at different junctures, rotates toward both women. He is both moving forward and turning back simultaneously: Although his right arm says “yes!” to Virtue, his legs, with a kind of moon-walk shuffle, say, “I’m not yet sure …”

Despite the either-or title of the painting, the figures’ inescapable union does not come down to a choice. Veronese knows that the world is not black and white but rather a myriad of grays – a beautiful, complex dance between conflicting forces.

Until July 16 (1 E. 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-288-0700).