Marc Chagall, Painter of Symbols

I was recently shopping calendars at Barns & Noble when I came across a Marc Chagall edition. I fell in love with his symbolism, which I have been researching the past few days.

His frequently repeated subject matter was drawn from Jewish life and folklore; he was particularly fond of flower and animal symbols

Use of symbolism

I gleaned from the web, in most cases I've tried to add my own thoughts. I'm not an art historian so my thoughts are just my thoughts.
Personally the notion that the horses in Chagall's paintings only represent freedom seems absurd. Horses were work animals, they plowed fields and pulled carriages and wagons. Nearly every painting with a horse it seems to portray strength, support, commitment and loyality. In one painting the horse is painted directly on the crotch of the male subject... duh, looks like sexual prouness to me.

• Cow: Substainer of life. Another notion is that Chagall is striving to unite the bestial and the rational, the spontaneous and the studied, man and beast.
• Goat: The goat is a Jewish symbol for the day of atonement - a feast when the sins of the people were once symbolically expiated
• Tree: another life symbol.
• Cock: At times fertility, often painted together with lovers.
• Red Rooster: Forgiveness & atonement.
• Bosom: eroticism and fertility of life (Chagall loved and respected women).
• Fiddler: Celebration and mourning. In Chagall's village the fiddler made music at cross-points of life (birth, wedding, death). Its wider Russian significance is that of the failed revolution of 1905. The leader of this revolution was a Jewish fiddler named Sormus, who led workers through the streets to fight for their rights. Chagall saw himself in the fiddler, a solitary, isolated individual.
• Herring (often also painted as a flying fish): commemorates Chagall's father working in a fish factory.
• Pendulum Clock: time, and modest life (in the time of prosecution at the Loire River the pendulum seems being driven with force into the wooden box of the pendulum clock).
• Candlestick: Some say it's purely a Jewish religious symbol - two candles symbolize the Shabbat or the Menorah, and therefore the life of pious Jews.
  I think the candles represent far more that a religious icon; unity, love, warmth, direction, and romance... depending on the painting you must decide.
  
• Windows: Chagall's Love of Freedom, and Paris through the window.
• Houses of Vitebsk (often in paintings of his time in Paris): feelings for his homeland.
• Scenes of the Circus: Harmony of Man and Animal, which induces Creativity in Man.
• Crucifixion of Jesus: an unusual subject for a Jewish painter, and likely a response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the late 1930s.
• Horses: One source said the horse represents freedom, in many Chagall paintings this doesn't seem to fit. I see the horse representing strength, particularly in the marriage union (Kunstler And His Wife), sexuality (Couple In Blue)
• The Eiffel Tower: Up in the sky, freedom.

"I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment."
Marc Chagall