The concept of liberty has frequently been represented by personifications, often loosely shown as a female classical goddess. Examples include Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic and its values of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and the female Liberty portrayed in artworks, on United States coins beginning in 1793, and many other depictions. These descend from images on ancient Roman coins of the Roman goddess Libertas and from various developments from the Renaissance onwards. The Dutch Maiden was among the first, re-introducing the cap of liberty on a liberty pole featured in many types of image, though not using the Phrygian cap style that became conventional. The 1886 Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi is a well-known example in art, a gift from France to the United States.

The ancient Roman goddess Libertas was honored during the second Punic War (218 to 201 BC) by a temple erected on the Aventine Hill in Rome by the father of Tiberius Gracchus. In a highly political gesture, a temple for her was raised in 58 BC by Publius Clodius Pulcher on the site of Marcus Tullius Cicero's house after it had been razed. When depicted as a standing figure, on the reverse of coins, she usually holds out, but never wears, a pileus, the soft cap that symbolised the granting of freedom to former slaves. She also carries a rod, which formed part of the ceremony for manumission. In the 18th century, the pileus turned into the similar Phrygian cap carried on a pole by English-speaking "Liberty" figures, and then worn by Marianne and other 19th-century personifications, as the "cap of liberty".

Libertas had been important under the Roman Republic, and was somewhat uncomfortably co-opted by the empire; it was not seen as an innate right, but as granted to some under Roman law. Her attribute of the pileus appeared on the Ides of March coin of the assassins of Julius Caesar, defenders of the Roman republic, between two daggers with the inscription "EID MAR" (Eidibus Martiis – on the Ides of March).

The medieval republics, mostly in Italy, greatly valued their liberty, and often use the word, but produce very few direct personifications. One exception, showing just the cap of liberty between daggers, a copy of coins by the assassins of Julius Caesar, featured on a medal struck by Lorenzino de' Medici to commemorate his assassination of his cousin Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence in 1547. Liberty featured in emblem books, usually with her cap; the most popular, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, showed the cap held on a pole by the 1611 edition.

With the rise of nationalism and new states, many nationalist personifications included a strong element of liberty, perhaps culminating in the Statue of Liberty. The long poem Liberty by the Scottish James Thomson (1734), is a lengthy monologue spoken by the "Goddess of Liberty", "characterized as British Liberty", describing her travels through the ancient world, and then English and British history, before the resolution of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 confirms her position there. Thomson also wrote the lyrics for Rule Britannia, and the two personifications were often combined as a personified "British Liberty".

A large monument, originally called the "Column of British Liberty", now usually just the "Column to Liberty", was begun in the 1750s on his Gibside estate outside Newcastle-on-Tyne by the hugely wealthy Sir George Bowes, reflecting his Whig politics. Set at the top of a steep hillock, the monument itself is taller than Nelson's Column in London, and topped by a bronze female figure, originally gilded, carrying a cap of liberty on a pole. In other images, she took the seated form already very familiar from the British copper coinage, where Britannia had first appeared in 1672, with shield but carrying the cap on a rod as a liberty pole, rather than her usual trident.

In the run up to the American War of Independence, this conflated figure of Britannia/Liberty was attractive to American colonists agitating for the full set of British civil rights, and from 1770 some American newspapers adopted her for their masthead. When war broke out, the Britannia element quickly disappeared, but a classical-looking Liberty still appealed, and was now sometimes just labelled "America". In the 1790s Columbia, who had been sometimes present in literature for some decades, emerged as a common name for this figure. Her position was cemented by the popular song Hail, Columbia (1798).

By the time of the French Revolution the modern type of imagery was well-established, and the French figure acquired the name of Marianne from 1792. Unlike her predecessors, she normally wore the cap of Liberty on her head, rather than carrying it on a pole or lance. In 1793 the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral was turned into a "Temple of Reason" and, for a brief time, the Goddess of Liberty replaced the Virgin Mary on several altars.