The International Emblem : From Incunabula to the Internet Selected Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, 28th July-1st August, 2008, Winchester College [1 ed.] 9781443820066, 9781443819305

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The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet Selected Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, 28th July-1st August, 2008, Winchester College

Edited by

Simon McKeown

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet: Selected Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, 28th July-1st August, 2008, Winchester College, Edited by Simon McKeown This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by Simon McKeown and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1930-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1930-5

For Jean Michel Massing

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................. xiii Introduction ............................................................................................... xv Part I: The Formation of the Renaissance Emblem Chapter One................................................................................................. 2 Emblems and their Contexts: A Generic Overview John Manning Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Emblems and Reverses: The Back of the Medal in Sixteenth-Century Italy Philip Attwood Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 The Reverse of the As of Nîmes: An Emblematic Puzzle Rubem Amaral, Jr Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 69 Pre-Alciato Emblems?: Daniel Agricola’s Vita Beati from the Year 1511 Seraina Plotke Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 82 La Nef des Folles (The Ship of Female Fools) by Jehan Drouyn (Paris, c.1500) Yona Pinson Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97 Belles Lettres: Hieroglyphs, Emblems and the Philosophy of Images Pedro Germano Leal Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 112 Emblematic Tradition in Renaissance Printers’ Devices in Poland Justyna KiliaĔczyk-ZiĊba

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Part II: Emblems in Discourses of Politics, Power and Prestige Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 136 The Medal and its Reverse: Iconographic Models in the Conflicts of Early Modern Europe Cristina Fontcuberta i Famadas Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155 Gothic Reformation: Emblems and Scriptural Authority in SeventeenthCentury Sweden Simon McKeown Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 170 Celebration Time: The Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu and its Dutch Adaptation as Part of the Festivities of 1640 Commemorating the Jesuit Order’s Centenary Lien Roggen Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 201 More Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes – Same Title but very different Work Alison M. Saunders Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 235 “Non Manus Magis Quam Ingenia Exercere”: Imperial Propaganda on Emblematic Targets Elisabeth Klecker Part III: The Emblem Goes Global: The Migration of the Sign Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 264 The Reception of Dutch Emblems in Japan: Shiba Kôkan (1748-1818) and Jan and Caspar Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryff Hiroaki Ito Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 283 Privileges of the “Others”: The Coats of Arms granted to Indigenous Conquistadors Mária Castañeda de la Paz and Miguel Luque-Talaván

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 317 The Invention of Tradition and an Indigenous Coat of Arms Michel R. Oudijk Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 338 The Laughing Lion: From Silence, to the Gesture, to the Emblem Anna Maranini Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 350 Reviriscit Y’All: The South Carolina Legacy of a Renaissance Impresa Eirwen E.C. Nicholson Part IV: The Emblem in its Literary Contexts Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 374 “To Thee the Reed is as the Oak”: Fable, Emblem and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline Alvan Bregman Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 400 New Riddles from the Sphinx: A Dialogue of Emblems in Ben Jonson’s Court Masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611) Jennifer J. Craig Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 412 Emblem and Exemplum in Maurice Scève’s Délie: object de plus haulte vertu (1544) Michael J. Giordano Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 426 “In a Streight betweene Two”: The Fraught Position of Quarles’s Devotional Emblems Deanna Smid Chapter Twenty Two ............................................................................... 438 Body, Soul and Anatomy in Francis Quarles’s Emblems Johnathan H. Pope

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Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 464 Figuring Shandean Tales: Tristram Shandy Illustrations and the Rhetoric of Emblems Brigitte Friant-Kessler Chapter Twenty Four............................................................................... 483 Walter Crane’s Columbian Emblem Book James Tanis Part V: The Emblem Now Chapter Twenty Five ............................................................................... 500 Capricci by Laurent de Commines in the Scope of Emblematics of the Twenty-First Century OjƗrs SpƗrƯtis Chapter Twenty Six ................................................................................. 523 Emblem Studies: Achievements and Challenges Peter M. Daly Chapter Twenty Seven............................................................................. 533 Emblems on the Web: An Overview Bernard Deschamps Works Cited............................................................................................. 549 Contributors............................................................................................. 595 Index........................................................................................................ 603

Frontispiece: The Trusty Servant, with a View of Winchester College. Unknown artist, oil on canvas, c.1800. Courtesy of the Warden and Fellows of Winchester College.

FOREWORD FROM THE HEADMASTER OF WINCHESTER COLLEGE

A brief survey of the subject via Google reveals how lively is the contemporary interest in the study of emblems: National Emblems of Britain, Religious Emblems of Sikhism, Emblems and Symbols Protected as Intellectual Property, The Study and Digitisation of Italian Emblems, Resident Evil 5 Badge of Honour Achievement, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Moral Emblems, First Arctic Emblems. And there are hundreds more. There is a band of scholars worldwide whose commitment to this fascinating study of the nexus between concept and image, history and social values, communication and aesthetics, brings them together in an international conference. Emblem both unites and transcends their rich diversity; indeed, the conference itself is an emblem of a global family of scholars. The Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies took place at Winchester College in July 2008, the first ever in England. The College provided an ideal setting. Its ancient buildings dating from 1390, still in use for their original purpose of educating boys for service to Church and nation, are themselves an architectural emblem of an intellectual, moral and spiritual model for a civilised and robust society. The College’s distinctive emblem is the figure of The Trusty Servant, which (or who) appears on the frontispiece of this book. He presided over this gathering of scholars, themselves trusty servants of their various national and cultural inheritances through their study of pictorial representations of complex and durable ideals. It is a pleasure to commend this book as the fruit of that delightful and learned gathering. —Ralph Townsend Winchester College May 2009



INTRODUCTION

The substantial book in your hands stems from a succinct e-mail I received from Michael Bath in May 2005. In it, Professor Bath, then Chairman of the Society for Emblem Studies, asked whether I would be willing to organize and host the eighth triennial conference of the Society at King’s College School, my professional base at the time. With London’s many attractions, a conference at King’s carried obvious appeal. In 2005 Professor Bath was working closely with curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum on emblematic needlework fashioned by Mary Stuart. Discussions were afoot with the V & A concerning an exhibition on emblems in the applied arts, talks that did not ultimately come to fruition. But in those optimistic days when the idea appeared possible, it seemed sensible to seek a metropolitan venue for a related conference. Accordingly, Michael Bath opened his address book and ran his finger down to my name. That same finger typed the e-mail inviting me to consider hosting the next conference at KCS. Although flattered by the proposal, I felt it could not be done. The stumbling block was the dearth of affordable accommodation for delegates in Wimbledon, the locale of King’s, and one of the most expensive areas of London. But as a matter of courtesy, I forwarded the request to the then Head Master of King’s, Tony Evans. Mr Evans, an influential figure among Britain’s independent schools, offered an immediate solution. Why not, he suggested, propose an alternative venue for the conference within the public school family? One place in particular recommended itself: Winchester College. This historic institution offered obvious attractions, not least its beautiful assemblage of buildings, its romantic setting on the edge of King Alfred’s ancient capital, and its remarkable collections of manuscripts and early printed books, including emblemata. Furthermore, Mr Evans was a former member of Common Room at Winchester, and one of the twelve Fellows of the College. His suggestion that Winchester should offer its facilities for an emblem conference was met with enthusiastic assent by Sir Andrew Large, the College Warden. The conference was duly opened by Dr Ralph Townsend, Headmaster of Winchester College, on 28th July 2008 and ran for a week. During that time some 120 delegates from twenty-four countries enjoyed in excess of eighty papers and four plenary lectures across twenty-eight sessions. There



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were also two day-excursions to places of historic interest in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and receptions each evening, variously hosted by Winchester College, publishing houses, the Centre for Emblem Studies at Glasgow University, and the Chairman of Hampshire County Council - the latter in the extraordinary environment of Winchester Castle Great Hall with its fabled Round Table. But the real endeavour of the week occurred away from the pleasurable social peripheries. The point and purpose of our gathering was played out in the hard-working sessions, and this book is testimony to the intellectual achievements of the Winchester conference. As the title of these proceedings indicates, the book offers the reader a sense of the remarkable breadth of geographical and chronological coverage surveyed by delegates, and the increasingly international scope of the subject. That this volume embraces articles examining, among many other things, the influence of Dutch emblematics in Japan, the impact of European cultural symbols among the indigenous peoples of Mexico, and the turning of British propaganda against itself in Revolutionary America, reveals how far emblem studies has come from its initial preoccupations with questions of form and national traditions. Scholars have known for many years that the study of emblems in cultural or critical isolation is impossible. For Anglophone readers, Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes of 1586, generally considered to be the first printed book of English emblems, is diminished without knowledge of Andrea Alciato, Hadrianus Junius, Joannes Sambucus, Claude Paradin, and Georgette de Montenay, respectively representatives of Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, and French humanism. The way emblem books often transcended national and confessional boundaries is one of the fascinations of the subject, and the very porousness of the emblem as an artistic form made it a tool of intra- and international discourse in its centuries of cultural valency. This is a theme that emerges again and again in the pages that follow. The authors map the intricate webs of connection between visual and verbal ideas as they weave back and forth across Europe and out along the trade and missionary routes of the early modern world. We see notions nurtured in antiquity adopted by emerging national cultures and given new vitality in fresh terrain. The union of image and inscription on the coins of Ancient Rome is seen to be received with great cultural reverence by humanists of the Renaissance and emulated as a model of compressed utterance. An admiration for condensed, cryptic wisdom finds expression in the Renaissance medal, and in the collecting and coining of sententia and adagia. This renewed interest in the epigram, a form instinct with profundity, (if not always, as John Manning points out, pudicity), created



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an intellectual climate wherein the eminent lawyer Andrea Alciato might spend the Saturnalian days of 1522 composing a little book of epigrams he called “emblems”. But as some of the papers that follow testify, Alciato was not creating a hybrid form ex nihilo: the essential conjunction of word and image that became so ubiquitous in the centuries succeeding the publication of Emblematum liber in February 1531 took its cues from several pre-existing sources, not least other printed books, the reverse of the medal, and humanist epigrammatic culture. The flexibility and transferability of the emblem proved to be its strength. With its etymological roots in a Ciceronian word meaning something that can be detached and re-attached, the emblem proved sympathetic and serviceable to all kinds of cultural environments beyond the rarefied academic circles graced by its pater et princeps. Thus it is we find it taken up with relish and rigour by religious parties, not least the proselytizing Jesuits, but also by Lutherans, Anglicans, and even iconophobic Calvinists. As Alison Saunders attests here, emblems designed for the instruction and edification of one or other confessional group were appropriated, often with little adaptation, by their direct rivals - tacit admission of shared theological or devotional ground between ostensible enemies. The emblem could be used less constructively too, to articulate political aspiration, aggression, and antagonism. In another mode it could testify to social cohesion or collective identity. Love poets could deploy the emblem as a succinct but potent vehicle for their declarations and blandishments; moralists could turn the same form into the medium for denunciation and rebuke. And, of course, much of the material cast into the emblematic mould found voice in Latin, the boundary defying lingua franca of the Respublica literaria. That the form was framed within and flourished through a supra-national tongue contributed to the international reach of the emblem. Already in the Renaissance, abstruse theorists of the visual sign speculated that emblems had their true beginnings with the Lingua Adamica, traces of which survived through the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. These holy signs, relics of the words uttered between God and Adam in the Garden of Eden, had been uncorrupted by the Confusion of Tongues, and pointed to a pattern for inherently truthful, sinless communication. A pure language of sign promised transcendence beyond the compromised babble of human speech. In some limited senses, these esoteric theories were played out in everyday practice. As humanists in the Netherlands surveyed the sign systems of the Italian academies, or Swedish noblemen contemplated the emblems of Spanish diplomats, or



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English poets assimilated the ecstasies of Flemish pietists, understanding was reached across genuinely daunting confessional and political obstacles. It is maybe not to stretch the point too far to suggest that there is a pleasing resonance with our contemporary experience in the history of the emblem book, a form born out of the technological advances of the age of printing. Just as important publishers of the Renaissance tested the limits of their new technology in the complex bimedial form of the emblem book with letterpress and woodblock, so practitioners of our newest informatics technology, the world-wide web, an entity of word and image, find the emblem an important test case of the capabilities of their medium in the transmission of early printed culture. The Renaissance emblem cannot be said to represent an earlier form of world-wide web; but it did, at least, amount to a network—though often, admittedly, a tangle—of semiotic markers, signs, cognizances, devices, conceits and enigmas readable by some from Europe—including the Baltic margins—, the Mesoamerican world, and those close to the missionary outposts of Africa and Asia. It should thus be seen as part of an intricate epistemological nexus which accommodated assimilation and adaptation. What had begun with Alciato as a species of coterie epigram had so expanded and evolved that the Victorian emblematist G.S. Cautley felt it not implausible to claim that he could discern “Emblems Everywhere.” It is a pleasant task for me to thank many people for their invaluable help with the planning and running of the Winchester conference, and for the preparation of this book for the press. Instrumental in facilitating our efforts were Tony Evans, his colleagues among the Fellows of Winchester College, and their Headmaster, Ralph Townsend. Geoffrey Day, the Eccles Librarian at Winchester College, was a vital lynchpin between Winchester, Wimbledon and the wider world of emblem scholars, and his good advice, patient diplomacy, and unseen string-pulling were intrinsic to the success of the conference. He also curated a fine exhibition of Winchester’s emblem books that provided much stimulus for delegates. The Governing Body of King’s College School granted me sabbatical leave in the Spring of 2008 which gave me full freedom to work on the planning without anxiety; I am grateful to them and to the Head Master, Andrew Halls, for his graciousness. The intellectual direction of the conference took shape through discussions with Jean Michel Massing, Michael Bath, Arnoud Visser, and Alison Adams. Stephen Rawles managed the baffling bursarial side of the conference with admirable precision and patience. I am also indebted to Billy Grove, Mara R. Wade, Cristina Fontcuberta i Famadas, John Manning, Peter M. Daly, Alan Young, Philip Attwood, Kristen Lippincott, Charlotte Helgesson, Jacqueline



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Whitaker, George Woudhuysen, Sabine Mödersheim, and Wim van Dongen. I wish to thank my former colleagues at King’s for much good will and understanding, and my new colleagues at Marlborough College—not least the Master, Nicholas Sampson, and the English and History of Art departments—for their warmth of welcome. The contributors to this volume, both leading figures in the field and younger scholars at early stages of their careers, have been responsive and generous towards my editorial demands, and I thank them cordially for their punctuality and care in preparation of their texts. The editors at Cambridge Scholars Publishing have been accommodating and efficient, and I wish to commend in particular Carol Koulikourdi, Soucin Yip-Sou and Amanda Millar for their smooth and confident handling of a complicated volume. I wish to express special thanks to Sandra McKeown for accompanying me to Winchester on preparatory trips, and to Catherine McKeown—born during the planning stages of the conference—for her regular visits to the study to check up on her father’s progress. I thought it just and fitting to dedicate this collection of papers to Jean Michel Massing of King’s College, Cambridge. No scholar working in the field has uncovered more emblems in more countries, from Peru to Japan, Brazil to India, or Portugal to China, than Jean Michel. Nor has anyone found emblems in more unlikely places, from itinerant preachers’ flipcharts, to English inn-signs, to Edwardian gossip magazines, to American soap-powder advertisements. In sum, nobody has better claim to a book on the International Emblem than the man who has been as a life-force at conferences of the Society for Emblem Studies down through the years, and who has richly educated, entertained, and inspired us all by his depth of scholarship, appetite for knowledge, and life-affirming nonconformity. —Simon McKeown Marlborough College February 2010



PART I: THE FORMATION OF THE RENAISSANCE EMBLEM

CHAPTER ONE EMBLEMS AND THEIR CONTEXT: A GENERIC OVERVIEW JOHN MANNING

With a few courageous and honourable exceptions, such as Peter Webb, David O. Frantz, Lynn Hunt, Paula Findlen, and my former colleague at the University of Wales, Lampeter, Gordon Williams, modern literary, cultural, and art historians have extensively air-brushed the Renaissance. This air-brushing is by no means a recent phenomenon. Let us take, almost at random, a representative example of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi: the in-many-ways-excellent work by Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy. Antonio Panormita gets two mentions: the first concerns his difficult search for patronage, the second, his role as civil servant in Naples. Nowhere is mentioned his real claim to fame in his own day, and the reason he is chiefly remembered now: his authorship of the witty, learned, and obscene poem, the Hermaphroditus. There are eight references to Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius de Piccolomini [1405-1464]): all concern the pius and none the Aeneas. We are told nothing of the learned humanist author of countless, often obscene epigrams, nothing of the 2,000-line poem, Nymphiplexis, nothing of his often reprinted novella, Euryalus and Lucretia (first edition: Rome, 1475), nor is there any mention of his Epistola de amoris remedio and Amoris illiciti medela in effigiem Amoris. Burke mentions Poggio Bracciolini eight times, but there is nothing concerning the coarse and crude Facetiae (first edition: Rome, 1470), which made his name then and now. Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, Burke refers to once. Needless to say, this does not commemorate the irregularities of his ménage, nor the extraordinary copulation tournament that he organized as an entertainment.1 I could go on to detail other instances of suppressiones. My argument is that such a consistent omission of difficult facts amounts to suggestiones falsi, a misrepresentation of the culture under discussion.

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In Burke’s account, and those like it, it is the Savonarolas of the Renaissance that set the tone of the discussion, the censors, the editors, the burners of vanities. And such we find to be the case in emblem studies. If this did not begin with the Reverend Henry Green, then it found its most influential statement with him. Many scholars’ first introduction to Andrea Alciato’s books of emblems was through Henry Green’s bibliography. It was to him I first turned. All scholars in the field owe a debt to his labours, notwithstanding his manifest flaws and errors. And to one of his flaws and errors I now ungraciously wish to turn. Figure 1.1 presents what Green termed, Alciato’s “obscene” emblem.2 Let me quote Moffitt’s translation of Alciato’s epigram: It is quite shocking to relate, but even more is it a foul deed whenever anyone chooses to dump the burden of his bowels into a food bowl. This act stands for all offences exceeding the canonic measure of sacred law, just as when one is willingly defiled by sexual pollution, incest and adultery.3

One might quibble over some of this, but this translation makes evidently plain the issues involved. The nineteenth-century clergyman and bibliographer was indeed shocked, and he proclaimed this an “offensive device”. Alciato’s epigrams, as first conceived, were intended in a spirit of fun and festive mirth. But Alciato’s merry intent in this instance hit a raw nerve in the Reverend Green. Green declared, describing the posthumous edition of the Emblemata, published in Lyons by Rouillé and Bonhomme in 1550, that the publishers omitted this emblem, “because of its grossness”.4 He goes on to say that none of the following editions contained this emblem “until in 1621 Tozzius of Padua most inadvisedly restored the blot”. Nowhere, however, is it evident that Rouillé and Bonhomme had moral scruples, which would prevent them including this emblem. After all, they had published the emblem before, both in Alciato’s original Latin and in Aneau’s French translation, where it appears as “Contre les bougres”. Green omits any mention of these inconvenient facts. He also misleads the reader by stating that no following edition included this emblem until 1621. This is simply not true. In fact, it appears in many editions published before 1621. “Out damned blot,” would seem to be the Reverend’s cry, and he did his best to suppress it. The Reverend Green nowhere specified the nature of the objectionable “grossness” he detected and why he found the emblem so distasteful. We might guess: scatology? Homoeroticism? Sexuality (willing “sexual pollution, incest and adultery”, as the translation cited above puts it)?

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Chapter One

Perhaps all of the above? The graphic crudity of the illustration in both the Venice 1545 edition (sig. 26v) from the press of the Aldi’s and Thuilius’s 1621 edition (353) might possibly have offended him. Or the gross humour and verbal coarseness of the Latin (reminiscent, oh horror, of the licentious epigrams of Martial!) may have raised a blush to his modest cheek. But we simply do not know. His condemnation is so widesweeping and, therefore, consequently vague. What we know for certain is that Green’s complaints against this particular emblem made it more famous to later readers than it might otherwise have been. In this essay I hope to show that there may have been reasons why Green might have viewed this emblem as “offensive”, and they involve his nineteenth-century conception of what an “emblem” should be. Although the “offensive device” did cause embarrassment to some, but by no means all, of Alciato’s subsequent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators, it was far from being the only one that did. Illustrative crudity, gross humour, verbal coarseness and obscenities involving sexuality, scatology, and homoeroticism can all be found in other of Alciato’s emblems and in those of his immediate imitators and successors in the genre. As Heckscher and Manning have pointed out, editions of Alciato’s Emblemata in his own and later centuries found ways of including Adversum naturam peccantes in vernacular translations, in the original Latin, and with and without cuts. Nor should we necessarily infer that there was an act of censorship involved in presenting this particular emblem without an accompanying woodcut or engraving. It was not uncommon for particular emblems within an edition of the Emblemata to appear as emblemata nuda. Complete editions of the text would appear as part of Alciato’s Opera omnia without accompanying illustrations. Readers of this paper should refer to Heckscher and Manning for detailed instances and examples, but to summarize in broad outline the bookhistory of this emblem: editors sometimes worked the emblem into appendices, termed, somewhat disingenuously, Notae posteriores. We should not necessarily impute this to embarrassment. The publisher may only have wished to preserve the sequence of the Emblemata omnia that had been laid down previously in earlier editions. In support of this anticensorship argument I would point to the fact that, like every other book in the period, Alciato’s Emblemata had to appear “cum privilegio”, with the approval of the censor. The title page of the volume containing the first printing of the device and its accompanying woodcut proudly announces that Pope Paul III granted the privilegium and states that the book appeared with the approval of the State of Venice. Many subsequent

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editions that include the “offensive” emblem contain a statement that there is nothing contrary to religious doctrine within the volume. Sometimes this appeared on the very page facing the text of Alciato’s so-called “offensive emblem”. We have a quantity of bibliographical evidence in front of our modern eyes that contradicts the Reverend Green’s statement concerning the Rouillé/Bonhomme and Thuilius editions. Why, we have to ask, did Green get it so wrong? Or rather, why did he go to such lengths to misrepresent Alciato’s book of emblems and its publishing history? The question becomes more curious when we consider Green’s inconsistent stance towards this material. We have recorded above his misrepresentation of the bibliographical evidence in his description of the posthumous edition of the Emblemata. However, Green himself will reproduce in facsimile the “offensive device” in his Andreae Alciati Emblematum Fontes Quatuor. Nor could he reasonably do otherwise, given his scholarly decision to reprint the Aldine, Venice 1546 edition as one of the fontes of Alciato’s Emblemata. Adversum naturam peccantes is listed alphabetically in Green’s “The Mottoes and Titles in the whole of Alciati’s Emblems”, but it appears without an assigned number.5 He puts it in, and takes it out again. It is a simple case of “now you see it, now you don’t.” Green’s bibliographical conjuring trick is not uncommon in the impure arts of Victorian “bibliography”. We need only look at Jannet or “Pisanus Fraxi” (Henry Spencer Ashbee?) or the pseudonymous “Speculator Morum”: the Bibliotheca scatological, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; the Centuria Librorum Absconditorum, the Catena Librorum Tacendorum, the Bibliotheca Arcana. These were lists of books that were “prohibited” or which could “not be talked about”, “secretly printed. Prohibited by law, seized, anathematized, burned or Bowdlerized”. Green’s near contemporary practitioners in the bibliophilic art hid salacious material and revealed it at the same time. It, too, was a conjuring trick. These books were published in privately-printed, limited, and therefore expensive editions, behind the carapace of scholarship. A smattering of Latin served to hide a multitude of inky sins, “blot[s]” as Green so aptly might call them. In the nineteenth-century those who had not received the somewhat dubious benefits of a classical education, women, the lower classes, young children, had to be protected by recourse to a language they had never been taught and could not understand. The obscene publications act of 1867 prohibited the sale of works designed “to deprave and corrupt”. Those who could read Latin and Greek were probably already considered sufficiently corrupted and depraved for these tomes to be placed in their hands.

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The tenets of modern psychoanalysis and literary theory, though, suggest that the Reverend Green’s problem with this particular emblem and his textual inconsistencies in dealing with it may stem from deepseated anxieties and difficulties, either in him or in his culture. It betrays an almost prurient titillation with its “grossness” amounting to a tittering, perverse pleasure. And because the pleasure is perverse, its source had to be suppressed and concealed. It is simply too simplistic to refer to received, conventional notions of “Victorian” repressive sensibilities regarding sexuality, much less to over-exaggerated modesty. In some ways, among the learned, classically educated, their attitudes towards such matters could be more robust than ours. Coming from a highly developed, classically-based Oxbridge education, Green could not have been unaware of the innuendoes in the Emblemata that modern scholars have often ignored. And his extreme reaction against this particular emblem may well have been coloured by such an informed awareness. To answer our original question, let us begin with Otto Vaenius. Figure 1.2 is an engraving from Q. Horati Flacci emblemata.6 On the left hand side of the opening, on the facing page (130), are some verses from Horace’s Satires concerning the use of riches. The engraving represents the miser, who, though living in a large, spacious house, nevertheless dresses in rags. His cellar is well stocked, his pantry full, but he feeds on a cabbage. The engraving seems at first sight no more than an illustration of Horace’s text. Where, then, we might ask, is the emblem? How is this emblematic? If we look closely, out of the window above the miser’s head there is a grazing ass. Perhaps this is no more than a naturalistic detail. But it is no coincidence that the grazing ass is an exact visual quotation from an Alciato emblem, “In avaros” (On misers), which depicts an ass grazing on thistles. Though it bears on its back all sorts of good things to eat, it feeds, in Moffitt’s translation, “upon brambles and tough reed grass”. 7 Alciato’s emblem, no less than Vaenius’ text, draws on Horace. But Vaenius foregrounds the classical text and miniaturizes Alciato’s emblem as an inset. However, to the discerning eye, there is an interplay between the illustration of a classical text and the framed interpretative emblem. The ass becomes an emblem rather than a naturalistic detail because of its position within a larger referential context. This is indeed an ass bearing the mysteries, an asinus portans mysteria in Erasmus’ phrase, not unknown to Alciato himself, who used it as the basis of his Emblem 7. What might we draw from Vaenius’ instructive example? Vaenius saw the emblem as only part of a bigger picture, an inset within a larger design. Emblems, thus, should be studied within a larger intellectual, cultural, historical, geographical framework. They cannot and should not be seen as

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a discrete form with no reference to a broader literary and cultural context. Seen in this way, the emblem can and did function, as it does in the Vaenius engraving, as an effective interpreter and commentator. We need go no further than to consider Jan Van der Noot, Georgette de Montenay and Geffrey Whitney to see that their historical context indicates how we should read their books of emblems. Van der Noot was a victim of religious persecution in the Low Countries. His emblems of worldly vanity and the transitory nature of all things offer him the dubious consolation that his trials, too, are transitory. Georgette de Montenay’s book should be seen in relation to the wars of religion in France. Her apocalyptic emblems indicate that the faithful are living in a time of tribulation. Whitney was a retainer of the Earl of Leicester in the latter’s campaign against the Spanish in the Low Countries and his Choice of Emblemes is nothing less than an aggressive apology for that campaign. If context is important for the emblem, let us turn to the context of Alciato’s emblems. Here we take a tiny step closer towards the answer to our original question relating to Henry Green’s misrepresentation of Alciato. Alciato alludes in the Emblemata to particular historical events and persons. I do not wish to pursue this line of inquiry here, or to review the scholarship on this matter. A representative example of a study of contemporary allusion might be Peter M. Daly’s article on the Spes proxima emblem.8 But what is more likely to prove helpful in solving our question regarding the Reverend Green and Alciato’s emblems is the generic context of the epigram. When Alciato conceived his epigrams during the Saturnalia, according to his oft-quoted letter to Calvo, what models, what precedents, what generic context of “Saturnalian emblems” did he have in mind?9 What ways of reading did he invoke? Would these be relevant to Green’s understanding of the emblematic epigram? Wolfgang Harms in his plenary address to the Society for Emblem Studies at the Fifth International Conference in Munich in 1999 related the rise of the emblem to the context of the Reformation, particularly to the habits of reading fostered by the new liberty given the readers to interpret scriptures for themselves. 10 Others have related Alciato’s emblems to Erasmus’ Adagia. It is evident that the emblems were conceived during the period of the erudite Medici Pope, Leo X and of Martin Luther. Given the scatological nature of Alciato’s “offensive device” it might well be borne in mind that the Reformation itself, in Luther’s own words, was conceived “in cloaca” (in the privy, or, more broadly, “in the shithouse”). Theological debate and diplomatic exchanges were liberally larded with excremental rhetoric. Luther’s Tischreden (Table-Talk) was, shall we say, robust in its expression. In that context, there is nothing abnormal or exceptional in

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Alciato’s use of obscene scatology. His emblems too were conceived at table, “in festivis horis”. But I would like to suggest that the culture of the epigram, as we find it in Alciato, began earlier in the quattrocento during the pontificate of Nicholas V, the period termed “the false Renaissance”. Many features of this period find echoes in the emblems of Alciato. Indeed, many of his emblems can only be rightly understood, if related to this ethos. The same context also informs Valeriano and Paolo Giovio, whose works, though not published till the 1550s, nevertheless relate to the quattrocento and the beginning of the cinquecento. Chamberlin characterized Nicholas V’s papacy in the following terms.11 What he says might equally be applied to the Medici Pope, Leo X. [S]cholars had time to spare to prospect in the great rubbish heap of the past. The search for manuscripts became an obsession … [B]y the middle of the fifteenth century, a great part of the body of Latin learning was again in circulation. It came as a revelation to men whose minds had been conditioned over centuries to accept Christian theology as the total horizon of learning. They accorded it an almost superstitious veneration, a reverence that hitherto had been reserved solely for the Scriptures.

As we know from his notebook, Antiquae inscriptiones veteraque monumenta patriae (facsimile edition; Cisalpino, 1973), Alciato himself fossicked in this rubbish heap. Alciato’s later emblems spring from his antiquarian interests, and invoke ancient tombs, statuary and monuments. They are a bricolage from the rubbish heap of antiquity. For example, take “In iuventutem”, which celebrates the altar on which effigies of Apollo and Bacchus stand. The invitation they offer is the Goliardic “Gaudeamus igitur, iuvesdum sumus”. Alciato’s emblem celebrates the virtues of Apollo and Bacchus, metonyms for wine, poetry, and medical science, which preserve the joys of youth. He celebrates in all senses what might be termed “the good life”. Chamberlin goes on to say, “There was a reverse side of this splendid new coin of the Renaissance. Earlier popes had looked dubiously at the frankly pagan aspect of this rebirth, the adulation of the great pagan poets at the expense of the fathers of the church.”12 This was a culture that began to extol human pleasure and sensuality, and the antiquarian energies were equally directed to what were termed “obscene frivolities”. Let us look more closely into this culture that Chamberlin has described. Lorenzo Valla had mastered the tools of the new philology, and deployed them in a masterly fashion. Alciato, as a jurist and scholar, would later deploy these same tools in making sense of Roman law. In

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Valla’s hands, however, the new philology called all in doubt. Described as “the Voltaire of the Renaissance”, his favourite literary topic, as Chamberlin describes it, was “pornography”. His De Voluptate (On Pleasure) was, in fact, an apology for libertinism. Cleverly, his use of the debate format allows him to review the contrary virtuous position, while reviewing all sorts of sensual possibilities on the opposing side. In its mixture of virtue and vice, it is indeed obscene, and its rhetorical brilliance might have been directed to higher things. Its wit, audacious cleverness, and style were designed to amuse and to attract attention. The work, however, is in prose, not verse. Let us turn to Valla’s near contemporary, a master practitioner in the art of epigram. Antonio Panormita, needed no introduction wherever he went among the circles of the learned, because his two books of epigrams, known as the Hermaphroditus, had already made him more than well-known. His epigrams, like Alciato’s, were written, he says, in an atmosphere of fun and laughter (“In risu et medio … joco”).13 Like Alciato’s, they were also unpolished and discordant (“inculta et dissona”). Contrary to the opinion of some modern scholars, such as Laurence O’Toole, pornography and obscenity in the Renaissance were simply used for political ends, “to satirise, criticize, to tilt at the Church, the State, the monarchy”. 14 This they certainly did. But obscene epigrams of the period were also designed to arouse. Panormita plainly states in his very first epigram that the aim of his Hermaphroditus is to excite sexual feelings.15 This little book “would excite the member of even an Hippolytus”, he boasts (“vel Hippolyto concitat inguen opus”). Hermaphroditus is a mock encomium to end (or begin) all mock encomia. It both praises and dispraises the greatest and the least of things: the prick and the cunt. In Book 1, Epigram 42 he explains to his patron: In binas partes diduxi, Cosme, libellum, Nam totidem partes Hermaphroditus habet. Haec pars prima fuit, sequitur quae deinde secunda est. Haec pro pene fuit, proxima pro cunnus erit. (Cosimo, I have divided my little book into two parts, since the Hermaphrodite also has two parts. This has been the first part, what follows next is the second. This has been the part concerning the penis, the next one will be about the cunt).16

But in dividing his work, Panormita wanted to have his pleasures both ways. “Call the book anything you like,” he says, “just so long as it is

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indecent.” As Alciato’s Saturnalian epigrams were composed at a time of respite from his legal labours, so were Panormita’s (Book 2, i, ll. 19-20): Cum vacat officio legali, ludicra condo, Dum bibo, quae nobis immeditata fluunt. (When the legal business is left behind, while drinking, I compose humorous trifles, which flow spontaneously.)

In Book 1, Epigram 38, addressed to the erotic poet, Pontano, he excuses his own unpolished and dissonant verses, because they are composed in an atmosphere of fun and laughter. Pontano’s two books of epigrams also celebrate the pleasures of convivial friendship, good wine, merry jests, old books, and fine poetry, topics also dear to Alciato. Alciato’s meters and versification have also been described as rough, and his emblems were conceived equally at a time of festive mirth, at the Saturnalia. Choice epithets and well-turned phrases of a lascivious and suggestive nature were repeated and savoured by both authors. Panormita’s “immanem … stomachum” concerns the penis (2, vi). It is one-eyed and blind. The vulva is voracious (2, viii) and smells. Epigram 10 likens woman to the pains of hell. Obscenities and ribald mirth are used to arouse laughter at the expense of effeminate men, critics, pedants and dullards. There is again an obvious similarity with Alciato, whose emblems deal with such topics. Panormita gives blunt, sententious advice: “clam paedico clamve fututor agas” (buggering and fucking should be done in secret) (2, xiv, 10). Alciato, too, gives blunt advice, but none as explicit as this.17 “Advice to Princes” literature came in various formats, but from Panormita and Alciato it was probably more than any Renaissance prince would care to receive. Alciato begins with a dedicatory emblem to the Duke of Milan, which deals with one of Jove’s many amours in transformed shape. Giulio Romano was to illustrate this in the erotic designs of the Palazzo del Te. Epigram 1 of the Hermaphroditus was dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici. While it acknowledges that cares of state will preoccupy him for much of his time, it recommends he take leisure to peruse the author’s book of mirth-provoking, obscene epigrams. By doing so, he will set himself apart from the uncouth mob. The author follows the practice of the ancient poets, whose notebooks were full of obscenities. Their authority, not that of the Christian Church, is invoked. The ignorant will criticize his jests, but the learned will commend him. Alciato’s emblematic epigrams were designed for just such an audience.

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In Book 2, Epigram 11 Panormita proclaims his intention to compose frivolous verses in the manner of the Ovids and Virgils of this world. Ovid was famed for his lascivious verses, and Virgil was thought to be the author of the Priapeia. As in Alciato, there are many echoes of the tone and phrases of Martial. In Epigram 41 of Book 1, Panormita begs for a loan of the manuscript of the exceedingly hard-to-come-by epigrams (“perrara epigrammata Marci”), which he is keen to reread. They were not printed till 1471. He also implores his friend Galeaz in Epigram 23 of Book 2 for a copy of Catullus, his mistress’s favourite poet. And he also knows his Tibullus. Alciato alludes in the course of his emblems to all of these authors. Panormita’s obscenity reveals some of the most valued preoccupations of the age, and there was none more cherished in the Renaissance heart and mind than that of the dignity of man. Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate is an outstanding treatment of the topic. But the paradox of man’s existence is played up in Panormita’s Epigram 40, Book 1, as it is in Alciato’s scatological epigram Adversus naturam peccantes. Panormita describes how, while settled in a delightful rural setting, he had begun writing a poem in honour of Crispo’s rare merits. He tells us what a great writer Crispo is, how his civic virtues are pre-eminent, and how most certainly his moral goodness will deserve a reward. In full muse-inspired poetic flight, he is suddenly interrupted by a peasant, who arrives on the scene and relieves himself by a mighty evacuation. The epigram turns from high praise to low, comical scatology, as the peasant’s squatting exertions are described. Finally, he defecates (inde cacat). Tunc ex vocali ventosa tonitura culo Dissiliunt, strepitu tunditur omnis ager. (Then, windy claps of thunder escape from his noisy arse and the whole countryside reverberates with the din.)

The poet’s senses thus assailed, he drops his pen and the muse flees. He curses the filthy rustic in low terms. The poem brings into sharp juxtaposition the highest values of humanist culture (the virtues of Crispo) and the lowest bodily common denominator of humanity (the bowel movements of the peasant). This is the paradox of what it is to be human. Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes man as “the quintessence of dust”, but the emblematist Daniel Cramer would refer to him in his thirty-second emblem as the quintessence of filth, “limus fimus” (shit, excrement). This preoccupation with seeing human nature as a whole is mirrored in the structure of Panormita’s book. We also see it in the view of human nature offered in Alciato’s emblems.

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In Book 2, Epigram 11 Panormita himself refers to the criticism of Hodus, who while praising the poet’s wit, decries his morals.18 Panormita resorts to the classical defence of the obscene writer. The life and the writings are two different things: while his page is wanton, his soul his spotless (“mea charta procax, mens sine labe mea est”). This echoes Martial’s “lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba” (My page is wanton, but my life is virtuous) (Epigrams 1, iv, 8).19 In the final epigrams Panormita invokes the classical formula, where the author sends his book into the world, and trusts his intellectual offspring will find a good reception: “Go little book ….” But the directions he gives his manuscript are to a Florentine whorehouse. The directions are both clear and precise. The author had obviously been there before and knew (in the Biblical sense, we presume) those who dwelt therein. In so doing, he firmly and formally classifies his book as a species of pornography. Much of his Book 2 is concerned with writing about whores. In Book 1 we had his story; in Book 2 her story and the whore story. The relevance to Alciato will be seen later. Poggio, first Panormita’s friend and then his enemy, concludes his Facetia erotica, on a melancholy note: “Today, my friends are gone … the custom of amusing oneself with jest and anecdote has completely disappeared”. 20 Fortunately, this was not to be the case. In Alciato’s period, the scholars Erasmus and More were both authors of what can only be described as obscene epigrams. And Alciato’s almost exact contemporary was the Renaissance’s most renowned pornographer, Aretino. There is no time to consider the Ragionimenti, but the Sonetti lussoriosi are most immediately and contemporaneously relevant to Alciato. The format of their publication resembles that of Alciato’s emblems as they appeared in print: lemma, pictura, subscriptio. “Aretine’s Postures” might possibly be described without exaggeration as the most “obscene” piece of erotica in history. Giulio Romano had produced drawings depicting sixteen variations on the postures of coition. Marcantonio Raimondi engraved them and Pietro Aretino wrote the corresponding Sonetti Lussoriosi to accompany each one. These had a notoriety, of which Alciato could not have failed to be aware. Valeriano had already related Panormita to the emblematic tradition when he referred in Book 18 of the Hieroglyphica to the witty verses on the Hermaphrodite leading to higher knowledge. But how do Alciato’s emblems relate to the cultural context outlined above? Like Panormita and Aretino, Alciato, too, has his whore stories. Several of the emblems are literally pornographic (i.e. writings about whores). We do not get far into Alciato’s volume before we encounter the

Emblems and their Context: A Generic Overview

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“meretrix pulcherrima”, the Whore of Babylon on her seven-headed beast. As we progress further, we find blatantly advertised instances of pornography: Emblem 74, Tumulus meretricis; Emblem 75, In amatores meretricum; Emblem 66, Cauendum à meretricibus; and Emblem 67, Amuletum Veneris. The lemma states that these epigrams are about whores. To justify their inclusion in the volume, we might invoke the Jacobean pun: these were “merry tricks”, a species of fun, and a subject of mirth. But we should not stop there. Emblem 116, Sirenes states its moral in its bottom line: “est doctis cum meretrice nihil” (learned men should have nothing to do with a prostitute). The following emblem, however, gives an account of an ancient learned man, who did. Sophocles had to do with Archippe, a prostitute: “ad sua vota trahit,/Allicit et pretio” (then he seduced her to his own desires with money). We should also include Emblem 13, Nec quæstioni quidem cedendum (Do not yield even to torture). The tongueless lioness commemorates the courage of Leaena, the famous courtesan. Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae Book 13 (editio princeps Aldus, 1524) praises her bravery in resisting torture as well as her inventiveness in finding new postures of coition. I am certain Alciato would have known this text, appearing as it did from the Aldus press, but it is probably a mere coincidence that Alciato’s emblem should also appear numbered as 13. But, if we take a further guide from Athenaeus’ Dialogue 13, we might be forced to conclude that all emblems, written as they are under the aegis of the Sphinx, are pornographic: He says, “All pornai can be labelled Theban Sphinx; nothing they babble is straightforward, but it’s all in riddles …” (Athenaeus 13. 558d). Nor do the obscene trifles of Alciato’s emblems end here. In Chapter 7 of The Emblem, I have written about his mirthful priapic preoccupations. I do not wish to cite my own work or to repeat what I have discussed elsewhere. I refer the reader to that chapter in The Emblem for particular examples, which amply support the present point. Sufficient to say, that the Emblemata are a freewheeling discourse that deals with rape, bastardry, drunkenness, prostitution, vice, and the last obscenities of all: age, death, and mortality. Emblem 74, Tumulus meretricis shows Alciato’s witty and daring catachresis (with a little help from the Planudean Anthology) in presenting the ultimate, obscene pornography of the tomb, the private place, where none no longer embrace. This is an asexual promiscuity, a reminder of the end to which all must come. The pun is intended. This reflection is profoundly disturbing to any grand notions of human dignity. Alciato’s meaning cannot be reduced to a simple reductive formulation, such as “Prostitution leads to death”, though his Emblem 198, Nupta contagioso, indicates his concerns over venereal disease. Death is

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not the prostitute here. Rather, he seems to indicate that Life is a series of little deaths, the loss of one’s looks, the renunciation of the mirror, that lead to the grand climax of total extinction. Emblem 51 Maledicentia (Evil speaking) honours the ancient poet, Archilochus (fl. c. 650 BC). His reputation among the ancient Greeks and Romans was second only to Homer’s. His licentious, scurrilous and satiric iambic lampoons were regarded with something approaching awe. Words could be wielded with lethal force and had the power over life and death. Lycambes and his daughters were reputed to have hanged themselves after the poet’s coarse, vulgar, vituperative verbal attacks against them. Obscenities were here used for the purpose of vengeance, and the vengeance was exacted in the form of satiric exposure of vicious manners. In including an emblem commemorating this ancient poet, Alciato may well have wished to claim a poetic kinship in the use of the coarse and vulgar in the interests of procuring moral reform. But Alciato’s references to his Emblemata in his correspondence indicate that he had no highminded intentions for them. They were meant to be fun, designed to amuse and to recreate by their learned wit and cleverness, and their flirtations with the boundaries of propriety. Who else has looked at this epigrammatic tradition and how was it regarded? Thomas Nashe, from his superior, late sixteenth-century English, Protestant perspective, looked back on this period and could only disparage it. But disparaging was what he did for a living. Underneath it all, he probably envied the licentious freedom of these “cornugraphers”, the authors of iniquitous horn books: The posterior Italian and Germane cornugraphers sticke not to applaude and cannonize vnnaturall sodomitrie, the strumpet errant, the goute, the ague, the dropsie, the sciatica, follie, drunkennesse, and slovenry.21

In other words, pornography, scatology and unnatural vices were their stock in trade. The themes of folly, vice, the pleasures of Bacchus and Venus can be readily observed in many of Alciato’s emblems, gathered as they are by his later editors under loci communes (commonplace headings). Little wonder, then, that Geffrey Whitney could state in his introduction to the manuscript dedicated to the Earl of Leicester, before the latter embarked into the Low Countries: “Emblem is not proper in the English tongue”! There may well have been a change in perception of the Emblemata towards the middle and the end of the sixteenth century. We find the commentators adding comments such as “verebor” (I blush) or “me displicet” (It displeases me). This may have something to do, at least for Catholic

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Europe, when Pope Paul IV in 1559 drew up his Index of Forbidden Books, a title which the disingenuous “Pisanus Fraxi” would later borrow. The Council of Trent’s Canons and Decrees (1563) laid down the official policy: Books which professedly deal with, narrate or teach things lascivious or obscene are absolutely prohibited, since not only the matter of faith but also that of morals which are usually easily corrupted through the reading of such books … and those who possess them are to be severely punished …. Ancient books written by the heathens may by reason of their elegance and quality of style be permitted, but by no means read to children.22

To show the difference the Tridentine decree produced, we might contrast Alciato’s emblems with Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. In 1593 Ripa wrote a symbolic encyclopedia of personified abstractions, in which human emotions, ideals, and passions, were represented by the human body, which, clothed or naked, carried various kinds of symbolical clutter appropriate to the state of mind under discussion. Not provided with representative illustrative cuts till 1603, it was frequently reprinted in subsequent centuries. But the lower physical organs, the genitals, the anus, their functions and properties scarcely figure at all in Ripa’s book. Unlike the emblem tradition, it is rigorously high-minded. Yet emblems continued to rejoice in their own iconology, where the lower body parts, the genitalia, the anus and their products, the mouth and its copia springing from an infinitely various verbal thesaurus, deserve recognition. While the woodcuts in many editions of Ripa’s book are rather lumpen paste-board figures, the body in the emblemata is physiologically and sexually functional. In this symbology there is no one-to-one correspondence between a single body part and an allegorical translation. The obscene body parts and language may express anger, frustration, disdain, contempt, hatred, joy, pleasure - indeed, a whole range of emotions: but any precise denotation can only be deciphered in the context of the individual text. This personal symbology, though commonly blatant in its terms of reference, may prove circuitously indirect when applied to any particular situation. The coding pattern is arbitrary, shifting, and in the hands of the adept the symbols are manipulated with uninhibited freedom and surprising dexterity. Has anyone viewed Alciato’s emblems in this context? Although it was also common for the emblemata to be anthologized in reference works of moral wisdom (Langius/Mirabellius), there was also an anthology, a product of German scholarship that placed emblemata firmly within the tradition of the obscene humanist frivolities of Calcagnini, Pontano and others. Here among poems in praise of the fart, the cunt, and the louse,

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many of Alciato’s emblems found a natural home. The work, Gaspar Dornau’s (Dornavius) Amphitheatrum sapientiae, was dedicated to James I of England shortly after the Palatine marriage. The 1,200-page volume must have taken some time to prepare, but this serio-comic collection was very much designed for the crude taste of the most erudite monarch England ever had. It also indicated one direction the emblem would take in the seventeenth century. When we look again at Alciato’s Adversum naturam peccantes, it is important to remember that bodily functions were viewed as essentially comic in the ancient world. With the discovery of ancient learning, it is perhaps not surprising that the new learning sought to share the ancient joke. Thus we find emblems depicting defecation, spitting, urination and vomiting, not only in Theodore de Bèze, but in other emblems. Again I refer the reader to The Emblem for pertinent examples. In such a light, we would do well to refer to the “body” of an impresa. Having established that Alciato’s Adversum naturam peccantes emblem was not abnormal in its cultural context, it is time to return to our question: why did Henry Green misrepresent the bibliographical evidence? To mark a further step along the path that separated Alciato’s Renaissance text from Green’s nineteenth-century cultural ethos, we might look at LaMotte. Here we see the split between the cinquecento and the later early modern era. LaMotte states: “towards the beginning of the sixteenth Century, there was a kind of Contest…between the two Sister-Arts, which should exceed each other in Obscenity and Lewdness”. 23 He further inveighs against the “Liberty which painters and Poets have too often taken, … of Sullying their Pieces with Lewdness and Obscenity … None but profligate and abandoned Wretches, that have lost all Sense of Shame and Modesty, can patronize and justify such sinful Liberties.” He roundly condemns “those Artists, whether Painters or Poets, that go about thus to corrupt and to debauch Mankind”.24 Although he to some extent excuses the poets of antiquity, who could not be counted upon to know better, he reserves his particular condemnation for the poets and artists of the early modern period, who mingled the sacred with the profane, the moral with scurrilous jests. LaMotte consistently associates the “obscene” with “lewdness”. Green, on the other hand, sees it as a species of “grossness”. We return to the matter of context. By the Reverend’s time, the emblem had become associated with morality and with instruction. Most titles of the emblem books included the word “Moral”. And Henry Green recontextualized Alciato and saw him as his contemporary: as nothing more than an author of morally instructive emblems.

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Here for example, is Aunt Ann’s Gift: Or, Moral Emblems in Prose and Verse. An ephemeral work of popular piety, which has escaped notice, it is typical (except for its coloured engravings) of many emblem books of this period (Fig. 1.3). Its title page boasts that the following text is “embellished with numerous coloured Engravings”. But before we get over-excited about this promised profusion of coloured embellishments, we should bear in mind the emblematic motto, Nequid nimis (Nothing too much). There are but five. Given the prevailing late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century context, that emblems should be “Moral”, it is no wonder the Reverend Green should have thought Alciato’s Adversum naturam peccantes emblem a “blot”. We cannot tell whether he was overly concerned about the recently passed legislation concerning obscene publications. But, however he might wish to reform his author, the context in which Alciato moved and had his being was far other than Green’s. Alciato was not the teacher of a Sundayschool morality that Green would have wished. His emblems were experiments in fun, but the joke fell sourly on the Reverend’s ears.

Fig. 1.1. “Aduersus naturam peccantes”, Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Padua, 1621). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 1.2. “Avarvs qvaesitis frvi non avdet”, Otto Vaenius, Quinti Horati Flacci Emblemata (Antwerp, 1607). Private collection.

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Fig. 1.3. “The Orphan, - an Example of Resignation”, Aunt Ann’s Gift (London, nd), steel engraving. Private collection.

Notes 1

For details, see Chamberlin 2003,198. Alciato 1621, 353. 3 See Alciato 2004, 244. 4 Green 1872, 22. 5 Ibid, 318-325. 6 Vaenius 1607, 131. 7 Alciato 2004, 104. 8 See Daly 1995. 9 See Barni 1953, 46. 10 See Harms 2002, 3-8. 11 Chamberlin 2003, 163. 12 Ibid., 163-165. 13 Panormita 1908, 56. 14 O’Toole 1998, 1. 15 Panormita 1908, 2. 2

20

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Ibid., 62. But see Emblem 11, In Silentium! 18 Panormita 1908, 86. 19 See also Ovid 1924, 353-354 for a similar sentiment. 20 Poggio 1930, 164. 21 Nashe 1966, Vol. 3,177. 22 Cited in Findlen 1996, 55. 23 LaMotte 1730, 189. 24 Ibid., 184-185. 17

CHAPTER TWO EMBLEMS AND REVERSES: THE BACK OF THE MEDAL IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY PHILIP ATTWOOD

What follows is a general overview of the relationship between medals and emblems in Italy in the sixteenth century. The primary focus is on medals portraying individuals who wrote books on imprese and emblems, along with medals bearing reverses devised by those authors, examining what they thought was appropriate as medallic imagery and assessing just how engaged they were in rendering their interest in emblems into a physical three-dimensional form. This is followed by a brief survey of the medals of Philip II of Spain–all by Italian artists–and a consideration of the emblematic aspects of their reverses and any implications that these may have for an understanding of the relationship between the medal and the emblem in the sixteenth century. Little analytical research has been done on the social circles of men (and it was almost always men) who commissioned and appeared on medals in sixteenth-century Italy, or on the factors that led to greatly varying quantities of medal production from location to location. Personal friendships and word of mouth will have been important factors, and shared views on such topics as commemoration and the self will also have played a part; but in themselves these do not go far enough in explaining the very different rates of medal production that appear to have existed among circles whose taste for medals one might have expected to be similar. However, it is clear from the surviving medals and documentary sources that most of the private individuals associated with medals were connected to the church or law, and many were antiquaries and patrons of other branches of the arts. The artists who made the medals–and who, out of friendship or in the hope of attracting further patronage, sometimes initiated them–might also be scholars and collectors of antiquities

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themselves. Those who engaged with medals tended, then, to belong to a learned milieu similar to that of those writers who produced the earliest emblem books. Given the evident formal connections between emblems and medals, one might, then, expect emblem enthusiasts to have taken an active interest in medals, and in the middle years of the sixteenth century this was indeed the case. A brief consideration of two portrait medals of a writer, most of whose life was spent before the emblem book was invented, provides an interesting starting point. When the writer and collector Pietro Bembo was born in 1470, medals had been part of the artistic landscape of Italy for around thirty years, but it was not until he was over sixty that Alciato’s book of emblems was published in 1531. Bembo was already giving advice on medal reverses by 1503, but he did not appear on a medal himself until some time after this. According to Vasari, he was one of the famous men portrayed by Alfonso Lombardi in a wax or stucco medal, probably around 1515-1520,1 but it was only in 1532, the year after Alciato’s book, that he is known to have first appeared on a medal made in metal (Fig. 2.1).2 Executed by Valerio Belli, this has a reverse showing Bembo in meditative mood, reclining by a stream. Two letters that he wrote to the artist show that Bembo was closely involved in this design.3 The possibilities of self-presentation in medallic form evidently ignited an interest in Bembo, not least because he appears to have been unhappy with Belli’s portrait, and three years later he commissioned another medal of himself, this time from none other than Benvenuto Cellini. For this piece Bembo evidently stipulated the reverse design that he desired, for Cellini wrote to Luca Martini that he wished to please Bembo and would do as he requested but–characteristically–that he also wished to make a reverse of his own, which would include what he calls “some motto worthy of the virtue of so great a man”.4 Various delays and postponements then followed until 1537, when Cellini began his medal. In his autobiography the artist makes it clear that Bembo wanted an image of Pegasus surrounded by a wreath of myrtle for his reverse and that Cellini followed his wishes.5 This description has led many to believe that an extant medal with a reverse of Pegasus and the spring of Hippocrene is the work of that artist, but for various reasons this cannot be the case; rather, it is probably the work of the sculptor Danese Cattaneo and is to be dated around the time of Bembo’s death in 1547 (Fig. 2.2).6 Surveying what is known about Bembo’s requirements for his medals, the choices that he made suggest that he was not particularly concerned to maximise the potential of the medal through the inclusion of a reverse inscription. Cellini implies in his letter to Martini that Bembo’s initial

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request was for a reverse without a legend, and in the artist’s autobiography no mention is made of any inscription for the Pegasus reverse that he eventually did make. Moreover, of the two known Bembo medal reverses, by Belli and Cattaneo, neither is provided with a legend. This is unusual for the time, and one can only conclude that Bembo lacked interest in the possibilities offered by the combination of image and text. Taken sequentially, the reverses may be said to indicate a progression towards more emblematic imagery, for, although laden with allusions to the classical world, Belli’s reverse of 1532 is in a sense representational, as the reclining figure is clearly a portrait of Bembo, whereas the devices modelled by Cellini in 1537 and later by Cattaneo are purely symbolic. Significantly, it was this Pegasus and spring reverse that was taken up by Lodovico Dolce and Giovanni Battista Pittoni for the entry on Bembo in their book of imprese published in Venice in 1568 (Fig. 2.3).7 It is also notable that Dolce and Pittoni provided it with a legend: a hand, emerging from a cloud above Pegasus, holds a palm branch, a laurel branch and a banderole inscribed with the well-known phrase from The Aeneid, “Si Te Fata Vocant” (Thus the fates call you). By the addition of the text, the design has been brought into a closer conformity with the requirements of the emblem as it had come to be formulated in contemporary thinking. At more or less exactly the same time as Bembo was having his medal made by Belli, Andrea Alciato was also being portrayed in this form, not by an Italian artist, but by the Flemish poet and occasional medallist Jean Second (Fig. 2.4).8 As a lawyer and a classicist, Alciato fits well into the potential medal subjects mentioned above. The medal must belong to just one or two years after his Emblemata was first published, when Second was one of his students in Bourges. It is clear that the artist was an admirer of his teacher, for he not only made this medal but also dedicated one of his poetical works to him. The medal’s reverse shows the winged hat and caduceus of Mercury between two cornucopiae, a device used on ancient Roman coins of Tiberius and Vespasian and chosen by Alciato because of that god’s association with eloquence and learning and the rewards to be derived from them. The Greek legend, “The fruit of the righteous man is not wasted”, derives from Menander. Although not mentioning its personal significance to himself, Alciato had included the device in his Emblemata, where it appears (in rectangular form) as an emblem of “Virtuti fortuna comes” (Good fortune, companion of virtue), with the explanation that, “it shows that a great abundance of things blesses men who are strong of mind and skilled in speaking”9 – a definition not dissimilar from the Greek legend of the medal. The emblem was also to feature on Alciato’s tomb in Pavia. Undoubtedly, it was at the suggestion

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of the sitter that it appears on the medal, for Second, although an able portraitist, generally omitted to provide his medals with reverses. Alciato’s emblem and medal demonstrate the fairly self-evident point that the combination of image and text into a single entity is one of the principal characteristics that unite medals and emblems. However, Second’s medal appears to be the only indication of Alciato’s direct involvement with the medium. In the dedicatory poem to Konrad Peutinger that appears at the beginning of Emblemata, he refers to “pretiosa nomismata”, which has sometimes been translated as “precious medals”, but in fact refers to ancient coins.10 The Greek and Latin word “nomisma”, like its Italian equivalent “medaglia”, was in the sixteenth century used indiscriminately for both coins and medals (as indeed the English word “medal” was to be used for both types of object in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), but in his poem Alciato is pairing “precious [ancient] coins” with “veterum eximias” (the choicest antiquities) as gifts from the classical world with which to while away the hours, contrasting them with his own gift of paper emblems. The “parmae” that he mentions in the same poem as being attached to caps are the badges that it was then the fashion to wear, but these, although modern, were very distinctive from contemporary medals in both their form and purpose. The emblems with which Alciato filled his book have a very different function from the reverses of medals. Didactic and moralising, the emblems were also intended to entertain, and certainly the many that touch upon misconduct are far distant from the celebrations of exemplary behaviour that appeared at this time on Italian medals. Alciato’s direct references to sexual activity, for example, could find no place in medallic art. Giovanni da Cavino’s medal of the Paduan philosopher Marcantonio Passeri showing on its reverse a nude male and female figure fused together is a reference to Plato’s androgyne11 and Alfonso Ruspagiari’s medallic self-portrait with female breasts is equally high-minded.12 Only in northern Europe, where satirical and moralising medals were made from the mid sixteenth century, would baseness become at all acceptable in medals. There is no sixteenth-century Italian medallic equivalent of the defecating figure that appears already in the Venetian edition of Alciato’s book of 1546.13 However, that there existed in Alciato’s thinking a significant overlap between the emblem and the medal is made clear by his use of the caduceus and cornucopiae motif in both contexts. It is hardly surprising to find a more significant concurrence between medals and emblems in the mind of Paolo Giovio. Giovio’s celebrated Dialogo dell’imprese, published posthumously in 1555, was the first of a long line of books by many authors, which John Manning has aptly

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described as portrait galleries of souls, a parallel development to such published galleries of faces as Marco Mantova Benavides’ Illustrium imagines of 1559.14 As personal emblems attached to illustrious individuals, a closer connection with portrait medals might be expected than we find in Alciato’s book, and indeed this is the case. One of the emblems mentioned by Giovio is that of Alciato.15 Giovio refers to him as recently deceased, “novellamente passato a miglior vita”, and goes on to explain the symbolism of the impresa, ending his summary with a lament that “questa bella impresa” lacks an “anima” or inscription. Evidently, he was unaware of Second’s medal, with its inscription taken from Menander. A large and chunky medal showing Giovio himself is the work of the sculptor Francesco da Sangallo, who also made the writer’s monument in the church of S. Lorenzo, Florence.16 The medal bears the date 1552, the year in which Giovio died, so could well be posthumous. However, it is clear that the reverse does not commemorate his death, for it is very obviously Giovio who is helping a figure out of the tomb, with the legend “Now at last you will live”. This suggests that the reference is to his work as an historian, through which he brings the dead back to life. It is even possible, therefore, that Giovio himself had a hand in devising the imagery, in spite of the fact that–like Bembo’s first medal–it breaks one of his famous requirements of the perfect impresa, which stipulated that there should be no human figures.17 The breaking of this stipulation on a medal with which it is certain that Giovio was involved shows beyond doubt that he could make a very clear distinction between an impresa and a medal reverse (Fig. 2.5).18 This work, by the Florentine artist Domenico Poggini, belongs to the early 1550s and bears on its obverse a portrait of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. In the essay he wrote for his 1556 edition of Giovio’s Dialogo, Lodovico Domenichi confirms: “Giovio had made for the reverse of this very fine medal a wolf, representing, as you know, the city of Siena, which was in front of a young man dressed in the ancient style, with a lily above his head, standing for the Most Christian King; this young man placed with his hand on an iron collar, of the sort used by those who keep mastiffs for their defence, around the neck of a wolf, to preserve it from the biting of dogs. He wished, as I believe it, to mean that his most Christian majesty, having placed in Siena so prudent and just a government, had secured it against the faithlessness of his enemies.”19 Giovio and Poggini appear to have worked closely together on this medal of a principal supporter of the French king Henri II in his alliance with Siena. In another medal on which the two collaborated, Giovio brought his ideas on the perfect impresa more closely to bear (Fig. 2.6).20 This medal

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is of Eleonora da Toledo, wife of Cosimo de’ Medici and Duchess of Florence, and is reliably attributed to Poggini. Giovio’s involvement with the reverse is well attested, as he mentions it in a letter to the duchess of 9th August 1551 and also cites it in his Dialogo dell’ imprese.21 The peahen sheltering its young has an obvious application to the duchess, and the legend, “Joyful fecundity with modesty”, is a graceful compliment. In his letter to Eleonora he mentions the peacock’s appearance on coins of the Empress Faustina II and refers to the bird’s association with Juno, queen of the heavens; the pea-hen, he also noted, was a bird of great beauty. He then goes on to point out that the impresa, although initially destined for a medal, could also be coloured, and therefore be used in paintings and other media. Clearly, it was well received, for there is a carved marble version, also attributed to Poggini. It was also popular with later compilers of emblem books: Joachim Camerarius includes it in his Symbola et emblemata and Typotius gives it as an emblem of Margaret of Austria, Eleonora’s predecessor as duchess of Florence, in his Symbola divina et humana.22 Giovio intended that this reverse and others like it should be modern versions of the imprese that he found in the classical world, identifying them in both written sources and ancient artefacts. These classical prototypes were not always quite what he believed, and, for example, the famous dolphin and anchor motif that appears on coins of the Roman emperor Titus, and that Giovio therefore identified as the emperor’s personal emblem signifying “Hasten slowly”, was more probably intended as a dedication to the marine gods Neptune and Oceanus, the dolphin representing the former and the anchor the latter, the coins being issued as a tribute to the imperial fleet.23 Giovio’s disciple Lodovico Domenichi also engaged directly with medals. One bearing his portrait dates to around the same time as those associated with Giovio.24 In the essay quoted above Domenichi discusses this work, explaining, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, that it was initiated by Poggini and that he could hardly have declined the compliment, even though he believed that medals should portray only great men, among whose number he could hardly count himself.25 As Graham Pollard has noted, the impresa was clearly devised by Domenichi himself, who explains that the vase struck by lightning represents human life and that the flowers are the virtues bestowed by heaven, which are not destroyed by misfortune.26 He goes on to write that the legend, “It is sent and it does not burn”, was in Greek, “because I wanted it to be understood by some, and not by all. For, as you must know, the words of imprese must be made in a different language from that in which we speak.” This is, of course, another of Giovio’s requirements. One might have thought

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that Latin would have been sufficient in this respect, but Domenichi may have been anxious that this made the impresa too easily interpreted and thereby broke another of Giovio’s rules. Domenichi was not the only one who took these rules seriously. In his Le imprese illustri, published initially in Venice in 1566, Girolamo Ruscelli discusses a medal of Cornelio Musso, Bishop of Bitonto in southern Italy, made probably around 1560, perhaps by an artist from the Veneto (Fig. 2.7).27 According to Ruscelli, the medal was commissioned by a friend of Musso’s, Bernardo Tomitano, as a compliment to the bishop: the swan on the reverse was intended to symbolise his purity and integrity, with the legend, “Vt Candidvs Olor”, translating as “As a white swan”.28 Even the use of the poetic word “olor”, rather than the more usual “cycnus” or “Cygnus”, did not prevent Tomitano suffering anxious moments once the medal had been made. His problem was that the legend mentions the swan, and Giovio had stipulated that the inscription of an impresa should not refer directly to anything represented in it. Tomitano therefore felt obliged to commission a second medal to correct his blunder. The new reverse had a similar image, but the legend, as described by Ruscelli, was now “Divinvm Sibi canit et Orbi” (He sings the divine to himself and to the world). Yet another variant has “Divinvm Concinit Orbi” (He sings the divine to the world).29 This change introduced a vagueness (“vaghezza”), wrote Ruscelli, that freed Musso from any charge of immodesty or arrogance. The poet and writer Annibal Caro prided himself as an inventor of imprese, as well as, on a very different scale, iconographical programmes for architectural interiors, and the medal reverses with which he is associated are as diverse as those of Giovio. His instructions for a reverse for Giovanni Guidiccioni, a member of a noble family of Lucca and Bishop of Fossombrone, were given in a letter of 5th February 1540 addressed to the medallist Alessandro Cesati: “the scene is the one from Virgil, when Juno, through the agency of Aeolus, king of the winds, creates a tempest against the Trojans, and Neptune calms it.”30 He then continued, “and, to come to the details…”, and went on to give lengthy and precise instructions as to exactly how the scene was to be depicted, extending even to the details of Juno’s dress. At one point he mentions his concern that the composition risks appearing confused because of everything that he is trying to include, and indeed in the surviving drawing produced subsequently by Perino del Vaga a good number of simplifications are evident. It was, however, still far too complex a composition to be rendered fully on a medal that was to measure just four centimetres in diameter, and Cesati made further changes when he came to engrave it,

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simplifying the design further and making it more suitable for the low relief necessary in a struck medal. In his letter Caro indicated that this is what he expected: “I wanted to set this all down as it came into my head, not to lay down rules for you, or to make you do exactly as I say, but so that you may have by you my idea and the subject … You may take and add as much as will be necessary to follow the story.” In his chapter on “The Aims and Limits of Iconology” in Symbolic Images, Gombrich commented on the complexity of Caro’s allegories, making the point that some of his instructions for the painted decorations at Caprarola left the painter Taddeo Zuccaro with nigh insurmountable challenges; Gombrich also noted that the programme would be indecipherable without Caro’s verbal description.31 Both points are equally applicable to the medal. Caro’s idea for Guidiccioni included no less than four figures in human form. A less complex impresa that he devised twenty-two years later, in 1562, for Margaret of France, daughter of François I and wife of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, had just one.32 The medal on which this appears is again by Cesati, who was then in Piedmont and to whom Caro sent his instructions from Rome (Fig. 2.8). A figure of Pallas Athena holds a spear and a shield on which is depicted a figure of Fortune standing on a globe, and the legend is “Nata Iovis Vertice” (Born from the head of Jupiter), an allusion to Margaret’s royal birth. The duchess’s pedigree, her patronage of the arts, her wisdom and her good fortune are all brought together in this reverse. Another of Caro’s imprese–one of the many he devised for the Farnese family–was for the young Alessandro Farnese, the future Duke of Parma, at the request of his mother Margaret of Austria.33 Devised in 1557 and described by Caro in a letter written that year, it appeared on a medal in 1559, when the prince was thirteen years old.34 This medal is attributed to Gianpaolo Poggini, a Florentine medallist (and brother of Domenico), who worked for Philip II of Spain, in whose court the young Alessandro was brought up (Fig. 2.9). The impresa shows a young untamed horse gazing up at two wings, with which, as Caro expressed it, he seemed to wish to clothe himself; above is a royal crown representing the Spanish king. Caro mentions a torch and other attributes of Love, for which Poggini has supplied flowers arranged in a sort of slipstream, placing the whole within a landscape. The impresa worked on various levels, as Caro pointed out. The name Philip means “lover of horses”, and Pegasus was highly appropriate as a symbol of the fame sought by the young Alessandro. Moreover, the winged horse was already the impresa of the boy’s namesake, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (for whom Caro acted as artistic adviser), whilst the juxtaposition of Alessandro and Philip II, Caro

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claimed, evoked a parallel with the relationship between Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon. His suggested motto was HIC ALAE (Here are the wings), but on the medal, perhaps because of Giovio’s precept that objects named should not be portrayed, this has been changed to “Hvivs Avra” (By whose wind), referring to Philip and, in turn, to the Almighty – a divine presence is hinted at by the cloud above the crown. For his own medal Caro was more abstruse, employing imagery with a significance almost impossible to grasp without an explanation.35 A letter he wrote to Girolamo Ruscelli on 9th April 1564 contains a description of his intentions: “[It is] a bee which, assailed by the wind and far from the swarm, so as not to be blown back by its force, stabilises itself with a small stone that it carries with its legs … with which I want to infer that I myself, by toiling, strive to endure and overcome difficulties and troubles.”36 On the medal the bee struggles against the wind, which is represented as a flying figure holding a sash. The inscription, “Pondere Firmior” (Stronger with a weight), gets to the essence of the impresa, but its success depends on the visibility of the stone carried by the bee. Two potential problems of converting an impresa into a medal are evidenced here: the absence of any accompanying text that might serve to elucidate the meaning and the difficulties imposed by the change in scale. This latter challenge was particularly felt in struck medals such as this, which were necessarily smaller than cast medals. Writers concerned with other sorts of emblems also appeared on medals around this time. The Bolognese historian, poet and teacher Achille Bocchi is portrayed on a medal with a reverse signifying “Timely speed”, its composition based on Roman coin reverses very different in their form from the emblematic examples cited by Giovio (Fig. 2.10).37 A figure of Moderation, holding both a bridle and a spur, stands before an enthroned prince holding a sceptre, whilst in the background an old man and boy carrying a cornucopia together evoke wisdom and slowness alongside vitality and speed. Bocchi’s pride in this reverse is evident from his reference to it in his Symbolicae quaestiones, the book on emblems that he published in 1555, which only occasionally includes family devices and is not generally given to naming individuals. He comments: “This symbol, Make haste slowly, is on the medals of Bocchi”.38 Whether this reverse image was created at the same time as the portrait on the medal’s obverse is open to doubt. That it may have been added later is suggested by the arrangement of the inscriptions and the degree of crispness in the modelling, which are both very different on the two sides. Certainly, the reverse was not an original composition, but was copied from an altogether more accomplished medal made some two decades earlier in

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1530-1531. Portraying Altobello Averoldi, governor of Bologna at that time, this medal is attributed to Antonio Vicentino. Its reverse is identical to Bocchi’s, but of more vigorous workmanship and much more successfully integrated into the medal as a whole. 39 Elizabeth See Watson has written that there is no evidence that Bocchi was interested in the visual arts as a young man, and his medal suggests that, for the mature Bocchi, self-memorialisation and emblematic ingenuity were the motivating forces rather than any interest in medals as objects in their own right.40 Although he commissioned two other medals, these were without reverses: a second larger medal of himself, which he had set in the leather cover of a manuscript, and a medal of his daughter by Gian Antonio Signoretti inscribed “Constantia Bocchi, virgin, daughter of Achille, 1560”.41 However, he was sufficiently interested to devise at least one more emblem that found its way onto a medal. Probably belonging to around 1560, this medal was executed by the artist Giambattista Cambi, known as Bombarda, and portrays Giovanni Battista Pigna, a doctor and poet in the service of the Este family.42 The reverse shows Pitys being transformed into a pine-tree to escape the attentions of Pan, with the Latin legend, “Si Devs Pro Me”. The pine-tree alludes to Pigna’s name, which means “pine-cone”; the inscription to his piety. It is discussed by Bocchi in his Symbolicae quaestiones, where he gives a fuller inscription in Greek, translating it as, “If God be with me, who will be against me?”43 Like Bocchi, the interests of the antiquary and writer Pierio Valeriano Bolzani lay in emblems rather than personal imprese, but he too appears on a medal.44 Created by a Paduan artist around the late 1550s, this work again has a caduceus on its reverse, on this occasion held by Mercury, who gestures towards a broken obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphics (Fig. 2.11). The reference is to Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica, which, after a lifetime’s study, was published in 1556, with a dedication to Cosimo de’ Medici. The broken obelisk recalls the more customary symbolic broken column and suggests that the medal may have been made after Valeriano’s death in 1558. Its stylistic similarities to a medal of his uncle Urbano Bolzani, the Franciscan friar and renowned Greek scholar who first introduced him to the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics, raise the possibility that the two medals were perhaps commissioned as a pair by a follower of the two men. One candidate as commissioner would be Florio Maresio, who acted as Valeriano’s secretary and married his niece, and to whom a chapter of the Hieroglyphica was addressed.45 That Maresio had an interest in medals is suggested by a medal that would seem to date to about the same time as the two Valeriano pieces (Fig. 2.12).46 For his reverse, Maresio turned to the Hieroglyphica,

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requiring his artist to squeeze one of the rectangular woodcuts into the circular format of the medal.47 This shows a horse being pecked by a bird named by Valeriano as the “florus”, which acts as a pun on Maresio’s first name. Valeriano describes how this bird nips the backs of horses, causing them to flee from the pastures on which it wishes to feed; it can therefore be seen as emblematic of the superiority of intelligence over brute force, and this meaning is picked up in the medal’s legend, “Ferox A Mansveto Svperatvs” (The wild conquered by the gentle), which is also taken from the Hieroglyphica. The books on imprese and emblems of the 1550s by men such as Giovio, Domenichi, Bocchi and Valeriano were paralleled by a growing scholarly interest in the reverses of ancient coins following the publication in 1548 of the first book on the subject, Enea Vico’s Le imagini con tutti i riversi trovati et le vite de gli imperatori tratte dalle medaglie…. As noted above, Giovio found precedents for his imprese in the emblematic coin reverses of antiquity, but other Roman coins offered the commissioners of medals with alternative sorts of imagery. Primary among these were reverses purporting to illustrate an actual scene, as in the so-called adlocutio types, in which an emperor addresses his men, and the many that showed a single symbolic figure such as Fides or Felicitas. Although these models went against Giovio’s definition of the perfect impresa, it was understood that they too were appropriate prototypes for medallic reverses, and, as also noted above, medals associated with Giovio and his circle employed such figural reverses. Considered in a literary context, these reverses were closer to the narrative tradition of illustrated editions of classical texts than to the growing number of publications on emblems. The differing requirements of an impresa and a medal reverse were articulated by the antiquary, historian and Medici artistic adviser Vincenzo Borghini, who had studied both Giovio’s book on imprese and ancient coins.48 Borghini was obliged to consider the matter in depth when he was planning a series of medals celebrating the achievements of Cosimo de’ Medici, which were engraved by Pietro Paolo Galeotti and struck around 1567. The designs that formed the reverses of these medals had appeared earlier in the form of painted medallions decorating the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio for the marriage in 1565 of Joanna of Austria, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I, and Francesco de’ Medici, Cosimo’s son and heir. Borghini was instrumental in determining the imagery for both the courtyard and the medal project. Most of the designs were based very directly on Roman coins, but one in particular was more closely aligned with Giovio’s notion of the impresa. Commemorating Cosimo’s delegation of many ducal duties to Francesco in 1564 and at the same time noting the

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impossibility of his retiring completely, the image of two hands attempting to untie a knot is accompanied by the legend “Explicando Implicatvr” (In unravelling it, he becomes entangled).49 Cosimo himself supplied the design. Borghini’s distinction between the impresa and the reverse was widely repeated in the decades that followed.50 Whereas the former were widely viewed as immutable, an individual might employ various reverses on his medals, for whilst imprese indicated what the subject of the medal was (or claimed to be), reverses generally pointed to something he or she had done – and a person’s achievements could be many. When someone was presented in a uniform series of medals, as was Cosimo in Borghini’s series (and more famously Louis XIV towards the end of the succeeding century), illustrative reverse design became particularly attractive to iconographers, for in these cases the subject was represented by a number of images that constituted a totality only when gathered together. But such reverses were also increasingly popular in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century in the cases of medals conceived and produced individually. This development should be viewed in the context of a general change in emphasis then affecting medals. Imprese may often have been produced initially for specific events but they generally had a universal application to the individual, and this is also true of the earliest medals of the fifteenth century, most of which celebrated individuals through a timeless message alluding to their virtue. In the sixteenth century medals increasingly celebrated events, or–more accurately– celebrated individuals through events, as exemplified by the many medals with architectural reverses commemorating the construction of churches and other buildings. This marking of moments in time is reflected particularly in those medals concerned with the passing of the years themselves: medals celebrating the papal jubilees were an invention of the sixteenth century,51 as were the so-called “annual medals”, produced for distribution by the pope every 29th June on the festival day of Saints Peter and Paul.52 It cannot, however, be claimed that medals with a thoroughly emblematic content ceased to appear. Cosimo’s hands and knot are a case in point, but such emblems can appear even on the medals of the Medici of the late sixteenth century. For example, a medal of Ferdinando de’ Medici by Michele Mazzafirri of 1588 has a reverse devised by Scipione Bargagli that would have been found perfectly acceptable as an impresa by Giovio.53 This shows a swarm of bees emerging from a hive below, with the queen (or king as it was then thought to be) at the centre. The legend, taken from Pliny, infers that it is “Through majesty alone” (Maiestate

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Tantvm) that the king rules, not through its sting. This device was also used by Ferdinando as a coin reverse, and is found on the bronze plaque attached to the plinth of Giambologna’s statue of Ferdinando set up in his memory in Florence’s Piazza SS. Annunziata in the 1640s; Typotius illustrates it as Ferdinando’s impresa.54 It is, however, unusual among Ferdinando’s medals, which otherwise tend to be illustrative, as, for example, Mazzafirri’s medal of 1590 showing the fortress of Livorno then under construction.55 The close connection between medals and emblems in the mid sixteenth century can also be observed in a very different context. An examination of the medals of Philip II of Spain by Italian artists shows the 1550s to have been a decade when the two met in decisive fashion. The earliest medal of Philip was executed by Leone Leoni at a time when, having worked principally as a goldsmith and coin-engraver, he was eager to make his name as a sculptor.56 In the winter of 1548-1549 the young prince, on his way from Spain to the Netherlands, stopped in Milan, the city in which Leoni was working. The artist’s correspondence shows that the medal was made for presentation to Charles V at the suggestion of Ferrante Gonzaga, the imperial governor of Milan. The artist must therefore have been working on it during the three weeks that Philip remained in the city and perhaps also during the journey to Brussels, for three examples were ready for presentation to the emperor and his sisters on Leoni’s arrival at the imperial court in March 1549. The reverse represents the choice of Hercules between Virtue and Vice, both of whom are clearly labelled “Virtvs” and “Volvptas”, whilst the legend reads “Colit Ardva Virtvs” (Virtue cultivates that which is difficult). Like the imagery of the medal of Alessandro Farnese referred to above, this has an obvious application to a young prince. Virtue had been a theme of the temporary structures that had greeted Philip on his entry to Genoa on his way to Milan.57 On one, built to resemble a triumphal arch, there was painted a likeness of Philip, with Virtue in a chariot and the inscription, “Virtue, where are you going without me?” Another featured a line spoken by Aeneas to Ascanius in The Aeneid–“Learn from me virtue and true labour”–indicating that Philip would find virtue by emulating his father. Whether or not it was such usages that suggested the theme of the medal, Leoni’s work would appear to have been influential, when Philip went on to make his tours of the Netherlands in the summer and autumn of 1549. Triumphal arches in both Lille and Malines were adorned with representations of the Choice of Hercules (one painted, one sculpted), each being accompanied by an identical inscription and some explanatory text. The inscription, “Colit Ardva Virtvs”, was also used alongside the royal

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arms in decorations in Lille, Arras and Malines, and this combination of arms and inscription featured on the reverses of the gold and silver coins of Philip that were thrown to the crowd in Ghent.58 However, these themes appear not to have been applied to Philip after this time, presumably because the legend centring on the young Hercules was felt to be inappropriate as Philip gained in age and maturity. This is in marked contrast to the long afterlife of a medal of just six years later (Fig. 2.13).59 Signed and dated 1555, it is the work of Jacopo da Trezzo, a goldsmith and medallist from Lombardy, who served Philip in the Netherlands, England, and later Spain, where he grew rich working on a variety of royal projects including the Escorial. The medal’s reverse, very probably based on an ancient gem, shows a god in a chariot pulled by four rearing horses. This reference to Apollo continued an iconographical association between Philip and the sun first made in the late 1540s. However, the legend, “Iam Illvstrabit Omnia” (Now he will illuminate all things), was novel and alluded to the expectations surrounding Philip at the time of Charles’s abdication in October 1555. However, despite this very time-specific origin and the future tense of the verb “Illvstrabit”, the image came to be used as the king’s personal device in various contexts, and it appears as such in the books of Ruscelli, Dolce, Ripa and Typotius, with the former explaining its universal application by reference to Philip’s intention of illuminating the entire world with the light of God.60 Some forty years after the medal was made, the Spanish arch, one of the structures that welcomed the Archduke Ernst into Antwerp in 1594, celebrated Philip with the same image and inscription in what the official account calls an “elogium aenigmaticum”, while on the nearby Portuguese arch a seated woman setting fire to arms with the inscription “Timidis Qvies Visvs Caecis” (Rest for the faint-hearted, sight for the blind) reproduced the image and text first used by Jacopo da Trezzo for the reverse of a medal of Mary Tudor, commissioned by Philip at the time of their wedding in 1554.61 Philip’s device again featured on a triumphal arch erected in Genoa in 1598 for the visit of Margaret of Austria, wife of Philip III, and Archduke Albrecht.62 So closely was it identified with Philip that Spenser used it as the basis for his description of Souldan in his Faerie Queene.63 This continuing use of Philip’s impresa proceeded despite the invention of other more recent medal reverses, which could have been employed with similar effectiveness. One of several created by Gianpaolo Poggini belongs to 1560 and focuses on world domination.64 The theme is introduced on the obverse, where Philip is described as “King of Spain and of the New World in the west”, whilst on the reverse a figure carrying a

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globe leads a group of people from the New World and a llama laden with silver bars towards a fleet of Spanish ships. Poggini indicates in a letter of 1562 that the legend “Reliqvam Datvra” (She will provide the rest) was composed by Gonzalo Pérez, the Spanish secretary of state, and the imagery was refined by Pérez from an original idea supplied by the artist, adding that the two men did not see completely eye to eye on the identity of the principal figure, for Pérez saw her as India whereas for him, Poggini, she was Fortune or Providence.65 The clear lesson here is that varying interpretations were as possible for medal reverses as they were for emblems.66 Essentially the same message, but conveyed in a very different way, appears on another medal twenty years later.67 It appears from the rather odd signature (IAC. TRICI. F.) that this medal is a later work of Jacopo da Trezzo, and the 270 examples placed in the tabernacle of S. Lorenzo in the Escorial also provide a link with Jacopo, as well as indicating that the medal had official approval. A pair of hands attaches the globe to a Spanish yoke, and the legend declares, “Thus it was decreed by the fates”. Although thoroughly emblematic, this image, like Poggini’s, appears not to have been taken up in the manner of Jacopo’s earlier sun god image of 1555.68 It is clear that the relationship between emblems and medals in sixteenth-century Italy was a shifting one. The development of the impresa and the emblem as areas for literary discourse was one factor in this movement, and changing ideas concerning the nature and function of medals was another. The medals associated with writers on imprese and emblems show a general progression that in part can be seen as a reaction to the new interests. Pietro Bembo may have been unusual in his penchant for anepigraphic medal reverses, but it is impossible to imagine someone of his background pursuing such a line in the 1550s or 1560s, once imprese and emblems were being discussed so widely. As noted above, Lodovico Dolce “corrected” Bembo’s omission. Alciato was fortunate in having among his pupils an artist who made medals, but the real interest in medals among emblem enthusiasts came in the years immediately after Alciato’s death, in the 1550s. Some, such as Achille Bocchi, engaged with medals in a somewhat feeble fashion, but others were on friendly terms with such artists as Domenico Poggini, and the medals associated with Giovio and Domenichi are of an accordingly high standard. Some of those who commissioned medals, such as Bernardo Tomitano, strove to get their medals into line with “correct” thinking, and the results could be highly successful from an aesthetic point of view as well as intellectually satisfying. Even those whose main interests were quite removed from personal emblems, such as Valeriano and Florio Maresio, were portrayed

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in medals. The same cannot be said of iconographers such as Vincenzo Borghini, who worked for Cosimo de’ Medici, or Scipione Bargagli, the deviser of Ferdinando’s impresa. Nor are there surviving medals of those writers whose publications on emblems appeared later in the century, such as Lodovico Dolce, Luca Contile, Giovanni Palazzi, Francesco Caburacci and Cesare Ripa. Interestingly and perhaps not coincidentally, it was a medal of Philip II of 1555 that provided the most significant emblematic imagery of his long reign. One factor that may have contributed to the loosening of this close link between medals and emblems may have been the general decrease in the popularity of personal medals in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Having reached a peak in the 1550s, the production of new medals of private individuals declined considerably in Italy, becoming almost a mere trickle in the 1580s and 1590s.69 Slightly paradoxically, this phenomenon may be linked to the complaint that began to be expressed around the middle years of the century that everyone was now having himself portrayed on medals in a regrettable process of democratisation.70 It should be said that the surviving medals do not back up this claim, although this may be accounted for, at least in part, by the possibility that the less well-off had their medals made in less durable materials or that the survival rate has been lower for medals of lesser-known individuals compared to those of widely celebrated figures, as the former were more readily discarded. Nevertheless, it is clear that this was a relatively widespread perception, and it is possible that a growing equation between medals and a broader public played a part in discouraging intellectuals from involvement with the medium. Ideas about the core functions of medals were also changing. So long as medals were aimed at relatively small groups of friends and intellectual equals, ambiguity was acceptable, and even desirable, as their true meaning could be arrived at through discussions that gave scope for displays of erudition and intellectual gymnastics; as a means of conveying information, allegory was elegant and reduced the possibility of banality, and its employment was as desirable in medals as it was in emblems.71 But in the sixteenth century medals were increasingly produced in larger numbers, often by striking rather than casting, for a wider and sometimes less learned audience, and a clearer message became essential.72 An antiquary or historian might recognise a classical allusion in a medal reverse, but this was decreasingly a primary concern among those commissioning medals. As medals took on a more overtly political function, it often became more desirable to convey as unambiguous a message as possible. Unlike emblems, medals could not rely on the

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possibility the printed form gave for accompanying explanatory texts. As objects to be held in the hand, they had to stand alone. The “reverse” increased in usefulness at the expense of the impresa. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend. As noted above, emblematic medals were produced in the late sixteenth century, just as examples of time-specific medals appear as early as the fifteenth century. Nor did a straightforward linear progression continue over the centuries that followed, for wholly emblematic medals have continued to be made, with particular resurgences in popularity at different places and times.73 However, it appears that in sixteenth-century Italy the direct links between the production of medals and the creation of emblems that existed in the 1550s diminished as the second half of the century progressed. Those individuals with an interest in medals as physical objects and those for whom emblems were a literary pursuit were increasingly not the same people.

Fig. 2.1. “Pietro Bembo”, Valerio Belli, struck bronze, 1532, 37mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 2.2. “Pietro Bembo”, attributed to Danese Cattaneo, cast bronze, c.1547, 56mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.3. Device of Pietro Bembo, Ludovico Dolce and Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Imprese di diversi principi, duchi, signori e d’altri personaggi et huomini letterati et illustri (Venice, 1568). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 2.4. “Andrea Alciato”, Jean Second, cast bronze, 1532/3, 39mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.5. “Ippolito d’Este” (reverse), Domenico Poggini, cast bronze, c.1552, 48mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 2.6. “Eleonora da Toledo” (reverse), Domenico Poggini, cast bronze, 1551, 44mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.7. “Cornelio Musso” (reverse), unidentified artist, cast bronze, c.1560, 61mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 2.8. “Margaret of France” (reverse), Alessandro Cesati, cast lead, 1562, 38mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.9. “Alessandro Farnese” (reverse), Gianpaolo Poggini, cast lead, 1559, 38mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 2.10. “Achille Bocchi”, unidentified artist, cast bronze, c.1555, 43mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.11. “Pierio Valeriano Bolzani”, unidentified artist, cast bronze, c. 1558, 60mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 2.12. “Florio Maresio”, unidentified artist, cast bronze, c.1558, 60mm. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 2.13. “Philip II of Spain”, Jacopo da Trezzo, cast lead, 1555, 70mm. Courtesy of the Deparment of Coins and Medals, the British Museum.

Notes 1

Vasari 1878-1885, 5, 84, 85-89; 7, 440. Attwood 2003, 210-211. nos 324, 325; Pollard 2007, 1, 450, no. 441. 3 Dated 28th February and 12th March 152: Bembo 1987-1993, 3, 315, letter 1334 (28/2/1552); 320, letter 1339. 4 Quoted in Attwood 2003, 168. 5 Cellini 1901, 225-226. 6 Attwood 2003, 168, no. 217; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 565, no. 562. Yet another medal of Bembo, by a Roman artist who signs himself with the letters TP, dates to 2

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around 1539 and does not have a reverse, but, as this artist’s medals are generally uniface, this can hardly be used as evidence regarding Bembo’s wishes; Attwood 2003, 378, no. 934. 7 Dolce and Pittoni 1568, 5. 8 Smolderen 1986, 73. 9 Alciato 1531, B1r. 10 Alciato 1531, A2r. For the translation, see Daly 1989, 19. 11 Attwood 2003, 194, no. 289. 12 Attwood 2003, 280, no. 642; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 522, no. 517. 13 Alciato 1546, 26v. For indecent imagery on medals, see Attwood and Powell 2009, where sixteenth-century examples are cited on 11, 15, 40-41. 14 Manning 2002, 127. 15 Giovio 1555, 136. 16 Attwood 2003, 333, no. 795. 17 Giovio 1555, 8-9. 18 Attwood 2003, 341, no. 806. 19 Domenichi 1556, 138; (272-273 in 1574 ed). 20 Attwood 2003, 340, no. 801; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 401, no. 387. 21 Giovio 1555, 132-133. 22 Camerarius 1590-1596, Vol. 3, 21, Emblem 21. Typotius 1601-1603, Vol. 3, 4142. 23 Giovio 1555, 5. This interpretation of the motif on ancient coins is suggested by two altars associated with the Roman bridge over the river Tyne at Newcastle, one of which shows a dolphin and trident with the inscription NEPTVNO whilst the other bears an anchor and the inscription OCIANO; see Collingwood and Wright 1965, Vol. 1, 436-437, nos 1319-1320. I am grateful to Sam Moorhead for this observation and reference. For a recent overview of the dolphin and anchor, see Avery 2009, 114-119. The motif’s use as both impresa and emblem is noted in Manning 2002, 77-78. More information is given in Stahl, 5-7. 24 Attwood 2003, 341, no. 804. 25 Domenichi 1556, 90-91. 26 Pollard 1984-1985, Vol. 2, 728, no. 381. 27 Attwood 2003, 237, no. 439. 28 Ruscelli 1566, 3; (222-222v in 1572 ed). 29 Attwood 2003, 237, no. 440. 30 For a fuller account of Caro’s instructions and the making of this medal, see Attwood 2003, 38-41. 31 Gombrich 1972, 11. 32 Attwood 2003, 386, no. 951. 33 Caro discusses this aspect of his career in a letter to Vittoria Farnese of 15th January 1563; Caro 1957-1963, 3, 143-147, letter 680. 34 Attwood 2003, p. 434, no. 1080. For the letter, dated 20th October 1557, written in Parma and addressed to Giuliano Ardinghelli, see Caro 1957-1961, 2, 250-252, letter 490. 35 Attwood 2003, 423, no. 1045.

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36 “Questa è d’un’ape, che assalita dal vento, lontano da gli sciami, per non esser ributtata da l’impeto d’esso, si stabilisce con un sassetto che si reca in su le zampe … con che voglio inferire, che non affaticarmi, io medesimo mi sforzo di tollerare, e di superar la fatica e gli affanni”: Caro 1957-1961, 193-194, letter 727 (9/4/1564). 37 Attwood 2003, 468, no. 1186. 38 “Hoc Bocchiani symbolum es [sic] numismatis Matura Festinatio”: Bocchi 1555, Emblem 80, 168-169. 39 Attwood 2003, 226, no. 397; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 542, no. 540. 40 Watson 1993, 18. 41 For the medal of himself, see Watson 1993, 109. This is sometimes found with an anepigraphic reverse that would seem to be a worked-up cast taken from Vicentino’s reverse. For the medal of his daughter, see Watson 1993, 71, 109; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 524, no. 520. 42 Attwood 2003, 290, nos 668, 669. 43 “A me deus si est, ecquis adversum me erit?”: Bocchi 1555, 5, Emblem 150, 344-345. See Watson 1993, 75. 44 Attwood 2003, 198, no. 300; Pollard 2007, 1, 578, no. 579. 45 Bolzani 1556, 38-45. 46 Attwood 2003, 198, no. 301. 47 Bolzani 1556, 182v. 48 See Scorza 1988 for a detailed study of this aspect of Borghini’s career. 49 Scorza 1988, 26; Attwood 2003, 357, no. 865. 50 A late example of this line of thought is provided by the chapter entitled “Of reverses of medals and the difference between them and devises” that appears in Thomas Blount’s The Art of Making Devises of 1646, translated from the French of Henri Estienne. 51 Giulio Berni, Le medaglie degli anni santi (Barcelona, 1950). 52 See Bartolotti 1967; and Modesti 2007. 53 Attwood 2003, 361, no. 878. 54 Typotius 1601-1603, 3, 53-54. 55 Attwood 2003, 362, no. 880. 56 Attwood 2003, 99, no. 22. 57 Calvete de Estrella 1552, 1, 11v, 12, 17; Mulryne et al. 2004, 282-285, 292-293. 58 Calvete de Estrella 1552, Vol. 3, 110, 145v, 163v, 216; Babelon 1922, 190. An alternative scenario to the above is that Leoni’s original medal was uniface and that he added the reverse later in 1549 when he was in Brussels after the use of the device in Philip’s Netherlands tour had been decided; see Pérez de Tudela Gabaldón 1998, 243. 59 Attwood 2003, 120, no. 85. 60 Ruscelli 1556, 232-237; Dolce and Pittoni 1568, Emblem 16; Typotius 16011603, Vol. 1, 31, Emblem 27. The emblem is mentioned without reference to Philip in Ripa 1611, 59. For Philip’s “special relationship with heaven”, see Parker 2002, 174.

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Mulryne 2004, 512-513, 520-521. For the medal, see Attwood 2003, 119, no. 80; Pollard 2007, 1, 506, no. 504. 62 Mulryne 2004, 320-321. 63 See Graziani 1964. Graziani appears to have been unaware of the origin of the impresa in Jacopo da Trezzo’s dated medal, dating it only to “some time before 1566”, but this lapse does not affect his argument. 64 Attwood 2003, 435, no. 1083. Other medals of Philip by Poggini dating to 15561571 are given in Attwood 2003, 433-437; Pollard 2007, Vol. 1, 397. 65 See Kubler 1964. 66 One is reminded of Gombrich’s statement that “‘meaning’ is a slippery term, especially when applied to images”; Gombrich 1972, 2. 67 Attwood 2003, 124, no. 95. 68 A medal of 1588 may be an exception, although it has been suggested that this is a satirical medal provoked by the failure of Philip’s Armada. 69 For an attempt to quantify this, see Attwood 2003, 27, n. 70. 70 Attwood 2003, 24. 71 This has been much discussed. The Renaissance medal was “an important vehicle for the communication of esoteric pictographs”; Wittkower 1977, 120. In the context of emblems, John Manning quotes the preface to Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica–“things too well known … fall into contempt”–and goes on to observe that the main purpose of allegory was “to avoid the bald statement of what was, at bottom, trite and obvious”; Daly and Manning 1999, xvii-xviii. 72 Scorza 1988 underlines the distinction between the ambiguity of the impresa and the clarity that could be required of a sixteenth-century medal reverse. 73 Particularly notable later Italian examples are those produced by Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi and his followers, for which see Vannel and Toderi 1987.

CHAPTER THREE THE REVERSE OF THE AS OF NÎMES: AN EMBLEMATIC PUZZLE RUBEM AMARAL, JR.

In the study of the relations between emblematics and numismatics, it is common to focus on the influence of the former upon the latter; that is, the reproduction of emblem picturae and devices on modern medals. Nevertheless, it is also possible to identify cases where images from ancient coins and medals, especially Roman, taken directly from examples or from repertories, were used in more or less faithful form to illustrate emblems, imprese or devices.1 These influences are not always perceptible at first sight, nor are they expressly revealed in the subscriptio.2 In this last case, it may be disputable whether the source lies elsewhere, unless strong evidence points to the contrary. As an example of the latter circumstance, I present some emblems from Joannes Sambucus’ Emblemata of 1564. The image of Jupiter mounted on his eagle with sceptre in one hand and thunderbolt in the other in the emblem “Conscientia integra, laurus” was certainly inspired by coins of Licinius I with the legend “Iovi Conservatori” or “Iovi Conservatori Avg”. The emblem “Quae prosunt non temeranda” with the figure of Ceres holding wheatears in her right hand while a cornucopia leans against her left, has all the signs of having been copied from a Roman coin. The emblem of Mercury with the inscription “Insignia Mercurii quid?” appears in very similar form on coins of Herennius Etruscus and Numerianus.3 In none of these examples is the source given, but the author’s interest in numismatics is well known. Sambucus possessed an impressive collection of ancient coins and both published and contributed to the publication of numismatic works; he illustrated the frontispiece of his emblem book with reproductions of images of the nine muses copied from denarii of Quintus Pomponius Musa, whose figures he gathered in the emblem “Musarum, ex antiquis numis” around an Apollo Musagetes who, in turn, seems to have been copied from a coin of

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Octavian. He also included an appendix to his emblem book which reproduced a good number of rare coins from his collection.4 Therefore, there may be little doubt concerning the sources of inspiration of the aforementioned emblems. The figure of the imperial triumph in the emblem “Memor utriusque fortunae” might have had as its model the coins of Trajan, Macrinus, Heliogabalus, Postumus, or of Domitian, such as the one reproduced in Sambucus’ appendix.5 Because they belong to the first book of the genre, the earliest examples of emblems inspired by coins are found in the pages of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber. Alciato’s Emblem 18 “Prudentes” shows a Janus bifrons which appears on countless Roman coins, specially of the republican period.6 Emblem 118, “Virtuti fortuna comes”, in whose pictura we see a winged caduceus between two cornucopiae, is an image found on coins of Mark Anthony, Augustus, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Clodius Albinus, and in a coin for Septimius Severus’ wife Julia Domna.7 Emblem 143, “Princeps subditorum incolumitatem procurans” with the symbol of the dolphin and anchor, was seen on coins of Augustus, Titus and Domitian.8 Emblem 149, “Salus publica” showing Aesculapius in the form of a snake before an altar, was undoubtedly inspired by the reverse of a fourth-century contorniate medallion with the effigy of Nero on the obverse.9 Additionally, Emblem 150, “Republica liberata”, imitates a coin minted by L. Plaetorius Caestianus to celebrate the victory of liberty through the assassination of Caesar; on its obverse we find the likeness of Marcus Junius Brutus, but the inscription in the exergue is an addition by the emblematist.10 Emblem 157, “Terminus”, may have been copied from a coin of Octavian.11 And Emblem 162, “Gratiae”, appeared in a very similar form on coins of Commodus, Julia Domna, Maximinus I, and Gordian III, this last also for his wife Tranquillina.12 In the subscriptio to Emblem 1, Alciato mentions a coin of the king of Pella, Macedonia (Alexander the Great) with the same image as that of the coat of arms of the Duchy of Milan, namely, a coiled snake vomiting up a newborn baby. I have been unable to find an example of such a coin.13 Claude Paradin, in the first systematic collection of devices published in 1551 without explanatory texts, and then, in 1557, with them, includes several images copied from Roman coins. In some cases he acknowledges the numismatic origin of the device; in others he omits mention of it, as if he had collected them from different sources. According to Paradin, Augustus ordered the coinage with the sign of Capricorn which is seen in the device “Imperium sine fine dedi”, either alone or with the addition of the cornucopia, the globe and the rudder;14 the ensign of the hand of the

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device “Fiducia concors”15 and that of the flame of the device “Lux publica Principis ignes” might be seen on many coins.16 The symbol of the thunderbolt with the motto “Sic terras turbine perflat” figured on coins of Augustus-Nerva and Antoninus Pius, and that of the eagle and thunderbolt with the motto “Coelo imperium Iovis extulit ales” appeared on republican coins of Plaetorius and Caestianus and imperial coins of Augustus, Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Commodus, and Septimius Severus.17 The lone palm with the motto “Ipsa suae testis victoria cladis” originated from coins of Vespasian, but it figures also on pieces of Domitian and Nerva.18 And as for the sphinx with the device “Inextricabilis error”, Paradin refers to its use by Augustus in seals for the authentication of documents, but it was used also on coins issued by that emperor and on republican coins of Titus Carisius. In turn, the laurel wreath with the device “Me pompae provexit apex” and the oak-leaf crown with the device “Servati gratia civis” may be seen in numerous ancient coins, where they appear with different legends or busts in their centre.19 Gabriel Simeoni, in his book of imprese published for the first time in 1559, also included, with the motto “Festina lente”, the device of the dolphin and the anchor and that of the butterfly and the crab taken from a piece issued by M. Durmius, one of the trevir monetalis under Augustus.20 Cosimo de’ Medici’s impresa of the Capricorn included in Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose21 was inspired by coins of Augustus; it was later reproduced by Jacobus Typotius in his Symbola divina et humana in a form yet more faithful to its ancient numismatic models.22 The alleged coin of Caesar that illustrates Emblem 2:6 of Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Emblemas morales with the motto “Et quae sunt Dei Deo” seems to be quite imaginary.23 And that of Constantine in Emblem 81 of Juan de Solórzano’s Emblemata centum, regio-politica,24 reproduced in Document 42 of Andrés Mendo’s Príncipe perfecto, with the figure of a kneeling man (identified by Mendo as the emperor himself) and the legend “Monetae probitas et veneratio” was based on information from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine. As such, it constitutes a rather biased interpretation of what was really said by that historian, in that the coin he describes shows on its obverse only the head in profile of Constantine “with his eyes turned up, as in the attitude of praying to God” without the legend later emblematists attached to it.25 As it has already been suggested elsewhere, the rostral column of Diego Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresa 30, “Fulcitur experientiis”, might well have been inspired by coins of Augustus, Vespasian or Titus, although it does not carry the statue that used to surmount it; and Hercules’ attributes, the skin of the Nemean lion and the club seen in Empresa 97, “Fortior spoliis”, appear on republican coins of Q. Sincinius and C. Coponius.26

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The cornucopia of Emblem 1:13, “Intus et extra”, of Juan Francisco de Villava’s Empresas espirituales y morales may have been copied from coins of Mark Anthony by M. Mussidius Longus and of Vespasian for Domitian. In turn, Francisco Gómez de la Reguera declares having been inspired by a coin of Antoninus Pius’ wife Faustina the Elder for the figure of the peacock in his Empresa 18, “Vanitas”.27 With the same motif there are coins of Valerian I’s wife Mariniana, and of Maximian I’s wife Paulina. These are only the most obvious examples of numismatically inspired emblems taken from some of the better known and more accessible emblem books. Other examples may certainly be pointed out in those same works and in others I have been unable to examine.28 Reverses of Roman imperial coins inspired also, either directly or indirectly, the emblematic marks of some famous printers of the Renaissance. Suffice it to cite those of Aldus Manutius29 and his successors, of André and Chrétien Wechel,30 of Jean Frellon and of Guillaume Rouille, who was also a numismatist. The case I consider the most interesting of all, because of the repercussions it maintains down to our times, and because of the controversies it has generated, is that of the device “Colligavit nemo” found in Paradin’s book (Fig. 3.1). As the English translation says: There is vsed to this day certaine brasen money with the image of Augustus Caesar on it, vpon the one side whereof is the portraiture of a Crocodile chained fast to a palme tree, with this inscription: Col. Nem. which is, No man hath euer bound me before. By which signe Caesar would signifie that none before him did euer subdue Egypt, and triumphed ouer it. For the Crocodile representeth Egipt, which is to be found onely in the riuer Nilus, by the commodie whereof all Egypt is made fruitfull. Besides the Crocodile is fastened to the Palme tree, that thereby the beholders might be admonished that the godly Prince Augustus triumphed ouer all Egypt, by getting of which victorie and peace, he was recreated and refreshed, as a drie and thirstie ground is with a showre or raine. Finally, this simbole signifieth that Augustus got the victorie, and preuailed against Antonius and Cleopatra of famous memorie.31

Paradin does not give the source from which he took his development of the abbreviated motto.32 In the seventeenth century, Christian Matthias, in his Theatrum historicum theoretico-practicum, referred to the same coin and made two erroneous statements without giving sources for his claims. His first claim was that the coin was minted in gold; secondly, he asserted that it bore the inscription Colligavit nemo. On the other hand, this author, describing the triumph celebrated in Rome in honour of Augustus upon his return from the conquest of Egypt, writes that on the third day of the

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triumph the image of a crocodile was paraded before the victor’s chariot. The crocodile was attached to a palm by a gold chain, and bore the inscription “Ante me, colligavit nemo”.33 In an anonymous article in an English magazine of the nineteenth century I found this story repeated in almost the same words; here again, there was no attempt to identify the source. One significant difference was that the comma in the motto had migrated, so the inscription now read “Ante, me colligavit nemo”.34 About this coin, Sebastiano Erizzo, who was perhaps the first to describe it from a historical-numismatical viewpoint, declares that: it has on the reverse a crocodile chained to a palm, with the letters COL. NEM. And from that palm hangs a triumphal crown. [...] It was struck outside Rome by some colony for the glory and honour of Octavian Augustus after the victory at Actium against Mark Anthony [...]. Anthony, being in Egypt, all involved in his loves with Cleopatra, fought in a naval battle near Actium against Augustus, Marcus Agrippa being the captain of the fleet, and Anthony was defeated by him. [...] Augustus, after the victory [...], went to Egypt and, having besieged Alexandria, whereto Anthony had fled together with Cleopatra, in a short time subdued it. This induced Anthony to commit suicide and [...] Cleopatra to die from the bites of an asp. The two heads seen at one side of this medal are Augustus’ and Agrippa’s with the rostral crown [...]. The crocodile seen on the reverse represents Egypt, and the wreath hung from the palm demonstrates that victory. [...] Wherefrom we must believe that also in memory of that event this medal was coined in one of the colonies taken for Italy by Augustus.35 [My translation].

The coin I am talking about is the one traditionally known by the name of the “As of Nîmes”, minted in the Roman colony of Nemausus, which circulated widely in Western Europe until possibly Nero’s reign; it is considered by numismatists to be the most strange and popular, and one of the most beautiful and enigmatic coins ever to be minted in Gaul (Fig. 3.2).36 It also constitutes one of the chief marks of identity of the city of Nîmes. There is an extensive bibliography about it and, at present, two sites on the internet are exclusively dedicated to it, one of which is symptomatically titled “As de Nîmes rime avec énigme”.37 There is no aspect of this coin which has not been the subject of several differing theories and opinions.38 Notwithstanding its indisputable emblematic significance, until now it has been studied almost exclusively by archaeologists, numismatists, and local or regional historians. From a technical perspective, in spite of the current denomination still very much employed, it is generally accepted that it is rather a dupondius than an as, there being even those who think that in the second issue of

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this coin three monetary values were struck: dupondius (two asses), as, and semis (half as).39 The confusion arises from the variety of weights, sizes and alloys in surviving examples. Although some historians have ventured other identifications for the personages whose likenesses appear on the obverse, the dominant view has long been that they portray on all issues Octavian Augustus and his lieutenant Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the latter always girt by the rostral crown, that is to say, a crown in the form of a ship’s prow, indicating that the image represents a glorification of the victors of the naval battle of Actium of 31 BC. But it seems that in the Renaissance the precise meaning of some of the components on the reverse had been forgotten. In most specimens, the reverse shows a threatening open-mouthed crocodile facing right, with the end of its tail raised upwards, and tied by a strong chain and wide collar to a plant variously described as a palm tree–in spite of not possessing an apparent trunk–or as a leaf of palm, from whose base two shoots sprout, one at each side–and occasionally two smaller ones put on top of those–above which the animal remains aloft; next to the top, on the left of the palm and seemingly not hanging from it, a small oak or laurel crown may be seen, but there are those who see instead on some specimens a sun, representing Apollo; on the right side, there are two floating lemnisci, or ribbons, which on certain coins look like snakes.40 On each side of the palm appear, respectively, the letters COL and NEM. It is probable that the illustrator of Paradin’s book did not have to hand the coin the author refers to in the subscriptio, because his pictura differs from the original in many respects. The plant there is a strong palm tree, the crocodile’s tail is turned downwards, and the crown, ribbons and letters do not appear at all.41 With the passing of time, and given the fact that pieces of this type were repeatedly minted over many years from approximately 28-27 BC until the end of the age of Augustus, or even until the beginning of that of his successor Tiberius, the figures on the obverse suffered alterations which saw them reflect the most significant events of the Augustan reign. These alterations can be classified into three or four basic types. So, on the most primitive models, Octavian appears bareheaded; thereafter he is crowned with oak (the civic crown), and finally with laurel (the triumphal crown). On the first coins, the abbreviations IMP and DIVI F were seen above and below the busts, to which were added on later coins the letter P beside each head. These changes have suggested approximate dates for the beginning and end of issue of each type, a very controversial matter. The interpretation of those letters has not been universally agreed upon either.

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The image on the reverse also suffered gradual modifications. The small crown does not appear on the first type, just a bow or ring, some floating bands on either or on both sides of the palm which itself appears upright or bent towards the right; furthermore, the crocodile’s chain is either absent or barely visible on some variants. Let us focus on the interpretation of the abbreviation “COL NEM” and of the image on the reverse.42 As we have seen, in the mid sixteenth century Paradin—and later other authors—translated them as “Colligavit nemo”, and although they recognized that the coins had been minted in some colony of Rome, they did not make a link with the city of Nîmes. In a later edition of his book, Erizzo, who at first gave neither an explanation of the letters, nor a precise indication of the place of coinage, thought they should be read “Colonia Nemausum” or “Nemausensium”, which was the Roman colony that struck the medal.43 Assuming that the crocodile chained to the palm represents the subjugation of Egypt, certain historians have considered with good reason that the idea that this country had never been conquered before Augustus had no historical grounds. Egypt had, of course, been conquered by Cambyses, King of Persia, and by Alexander the Great. Nonetheless, in Nîmes the relationship between the abbreviation and the ancient Roman settlement was sufficiently well established that in 1535, following François I’s visit to the city in 1533, its consuls received royal permission to adopt the symbol of the crocodile chained to a palm tree as the new blazon of the city. Thus, in their representation to the king of their claim, the abbreviated text was expanded erroneously into “Coluber Nemausensis”, not because, as some have supposed, the crocodile was mistaken for a snake, but because the French word couleuvre, (from the Latin coluber), was then a generic term applied to all saurians. The royal letters patent refer to a four-footed and wingless snake. However, there were also those who believed to read in those letters “Collegium nemausense” or “nemausensium”. The choice of a specimen so strange to the local fauna for the symbol of Nîmes has sometimes been rather implausibly ascribed to the city being settled by Egyptians in historical times, or that a true crocodile, either alive or dead, was brought there by a veteran, merchant or voyager, and that the mummified animal or its skeleton might have been hung in the temple for the sake of public curiosity or superstitious veneration. More unlikely still is the assumption that the crocodile was chosen because in the Phoenician language this animal was called nemosh, a word that recalls the name of the god Nemausus, one of the Heraclidae and legendary founder of the city. As for the letters of the motto, at least since the eighteenth century there has been general agreement that they mean

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“Colonia Nemausus”, or “Nemausum”, or “Nemausensis”. In the absence of documentary records, historians point to evidence of minting in the colony in the large quantity of coins found in archeological excavations of the area, and the reasons the colony might have for glorifying its founder Augustus as a Roman colony through the supposed introduction of a deductio of veterans of Alexandria under Roman law.44 In apology for Paradin, it needs to be acknowledged that a device with the title “Colonia Nemausus” would make no sense at all in his book. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the archaeologist Gaston Amardel ventured a new interpretation.45 While accepting that the reptile referred to the conquest of Egypt, he argued that the coin was too complex to offer anything more than a vague allusion to those events, and that there remained too many particularized details which needed further interpretation. He adduced the existence of coins of Augustus which recall that victory and which show simply a crocodile with the legend AEGVPTO CAPTA without any other accessory elements, while later on, in the time of Vespasian and Titus when the conquest of Jerusalem and Judaea was commemorated, the inscription IVDEA CAPTA was accompanied by a palm under which one or two seated or standing captives were placed with hands tied behind their backs or fastened to the tree. Amardel went on to point out that secret meanings often stood beside a coin’s official and openly admitted one, a satire addressed to the defeated or praise of the victor, disguised under the veil of allegory, by which reason he thought it evident that there was something of the kind in the piece under consideration. And he asked, why is this huge crocodile with its menacing jaws attached to so frail and small a tree? Why especially is that thick chain used to tie the reptile to such a slim and flexible stem? In his opinion, the visual element which used to be called a palm tree was no more than a mere shoot of date palm which does not look like the true palm tree shown in the Nîmes’ arms.46 It would be impossible to tie firmly such a frightening beast to so weak a shrub; moreover, the chain is the second-most conspicuous element in the composition. On the other side, the shoot of palm is always decorated with ribbons which bend gracefully over the crocodile and most often end in a crown that seems to float above the animal. Amardel also questioned why the crocodile was shown to be so threatening. Egypt had never attempted to devour Rome, nor had caused the empire serious danger. And why also did this terrible beast have a caricatural aspect? Its bones, size and open maxillae had, in his opinion, the appearance of a caricature, to the point that, in certain variants of the coin, the large teeth with which the upper jaw is armed are outside the mouth, above the jaw instead of in its interior. It would seem that the

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engravers of Nîmes had relished their task. In certain coins the upper jaw ends in a kind of scale of an excessive height, a sort of horn curved backwards in the form of a lituus, or of a question mark. All this, according to Amardel, would lead us to believe that we were in the presence of a joke. However, this crocodile could not represent anything other than the Nile and conquered Egypt. But why turn the defeated Egypt into the object of mockery in this way? Why tie the symbol of Egypt to a frail palm? Was it possible to see a symbol of victory in that palm from which a crown hangs? Supposing that there had been a wish to symbolize the triumph in Egypt, the idea never would have arisen of tying the reptile to it. In such cases, the success would have been represented by a trophy. The palm and the crown would have been placed in the centre of the coin’s field, or rather would have been held by a personified Victory. Therefore, for Amardel, this whole image had a special meaning, although the reptile could only represent the person defeated by Augustus and Agrippa. The coin was dedicated to the glory of Agrippa and Augustus. However, the defeated enemy was not Egypt, but rather Mark Anthony, who might have been the only plausible competitor of Octavian had he not gone and chained himself to Egypt through his scandalous union with Cleopatra. Augustus and Agrippa’s great victory had not been the conquest of Egypt, but the Battle of Actium which preceded it. This triumph was the one that ought to have been celebrated in Nîmes as the mightiest feat of the victors. Consequently, it was to this that the reverse must allude. Anthony, as defeated contender, might be understood as the caricatured crocodile. The rest of the satirical allegory might thereby be interpreted thus: the palm leaf decorated with ribbons and a crown bending gracefully over the reptile could stand for the Queen of Egypt; the strong chain may represent the tie that united them. May not this be the true image of the situation in which Anthony found himself? Was he not Cleopatra’s captive? Amardel added other details, such as the two shoots springing from the palm’s foot might allude to Alexander and Ptolemy, the two sons whom Cleopatra bore Mark Anthony; and the phenomenal horn in the form of a lituus, the augur staff, which is seen only on some exemplars at the end of the crocodile’s upper jaw, might serve to recall either that Anthony had been part of the college of augurs, or the gold sceptre he reputedly bore.47 It is unnecessary to repeat his justification of why it had been possible to use such a serious and sacred object as an official coin for satirizing and humiliating the memory of the vanquished and dead enemy, especially in

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Anthony’s case. After advancing complicated arguments that in many aspects could be applied to all three types, Amardel finishes by restricting the idea of the secret meaning only to certain specimens of the initial issue, due to the supposed disappearance of the caricatural aspects and thanks to the better quality of the subsequent exemplars. Another long time passed without fresh ideas on the subject. In 1981, Danièle Roman published an article interpreting the tree of the as of Nîmes. The new notion put forward was that the tree was the rough representation of a palm expressing the victory at Actium, but also a tree dedicated to Apollo who had assisted Octavian in his triumph.48 The suggestion received little acceptance; however, it came to be the basis on which, in 1998, Alain Veyrac developed his complex theory that comprises the whole symbology of both sides of the coin in the light of Augustan ideology, with support of historical events, archaeological finds, iconography, religious beliefs, myths and superstitions, some of oriental origin. Underpinning this theory was the assumption that the famous coin seems to be situated in the hinge of Greek and Egyptian cultures and that Nîmes probably maintained privileged links with Egypt, more precisely with Alexandria, a suggestion until now based exclusively on the assumption of the settlement of Eastern Greek contingents in that colony. Without adopting Amardel’s conclusions, some of which he considered erroneous, Veyrac agrees with the truly caricatural aspect of the crocodile in comparison with its representation on the aforementioned coins struck in the East. Especially shocking for him was the saurian’s attitude, which, contrary to its homologues represented on those coins, raises its tail fiercely in a far from submissive attitude. Other traits would equally suggest its ferocity and repulsive aspect: the excessively fat body, the exorbitant eye, the strong and thick claws, the open mandibles sometimes strangely endowed with teeth on its exterior. Regarding such details, Veyrac recalled that Hubert Zehnacker had identified this anomaly as the crocodile’s scales which the engraver thought extended over the whole animal.49 According to Veyrac, a coin issued by Mark Anthony in 31 BC, the denarius of the legionary, offers a useful parallel. On it, we see a battleship with an outline apparently resembling a crocodile. This might mean that the image on the reverse of the as of Nîmes could be an animalized ship (Fig. 3.3). Each element of a warship could correspond to a part of the saurian. The ship’s rostrum could be mapped onto the jaws, both areas being the chief areas of threat; the aplustre, a set of wooden parts ornamenting the stern, could very fittingly match the crocodile’s tail. Its high position does not correspond to reality, but had been given to

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integrate it perfectly into the symbolic image and not, as it had been previously supposed, to suit the roundness of the coin’s field. To finish the comparison, the position of the palm, chain and ribbons might represent the vessel’s rigging of mast, cordage and pennons. In the best specimens, the range of small dots above the monster’s muzzle, which had been misunderstood by the engravers, correspond to those sometimes seen above the ship’s prow. Veyrac proceeds to develop a prolix argument concerning the comprehensive interpretation of the coin on both its faces, which returns to the idea of the association between the images of Augustus and Apollo. Due to its extensive nature, I can only present it here very concisely and, because of its extreme complexity and multitude of veiled meanings it is hardly comprehendible without the help of an expert. Veyrac’s final reflection posits that among all instruments of propaganda which Augustus had at his disposal, he employed with much ingenuity and imagination the imagery of his coins. The dupondius of the crocodile was, to his mind, one of the best propaganda pieces. Unlike other more elitist forms of expression, such as literature, architecture and applied art, coins were exchanged everywhere and on all occasions, constituting the ideal and doubly totalitarian means for spreading ideology, circulating slogans and commands. Veyrac’s argument sees the double effigies on the obverse as a rejuvenation of the theme of the double-faced Janus, the legendary first king of Latium, who figured on the oldest coins of the Roman Republic and were associated with the myth of the twins Dioscuri Castor and Pollux, saviours of Rome on different occasions. According to this argument, Janus would be an apt figure to convey political and religious messages, since he was one of the oldest and most prestigious deities of the Roman pantheon. Additionally, his cult celebrated his relationship with water; Janus was supposed to have initiated the use of ships, bringing the idea from Thessaly to Italy. This might account for the presence of a ship’s bow on the reverses of coins showing his effigy; equally, it could be that his image on the Nîmes’s coin could allude to him as commander of the Actium fleet. In spite of the great importance that this part of Veyrac’s study bears on the overall development of the nature of the Augustan ideology, I will not dwell on it, because it is not essential for the purpose of this paper. If, at least for myself, the riddle seems difficult to solve, and the argumentation yet more obscure, Veyrac claimed it would have been transparent to an ancient Roman. It seeks to identify the figure of the crocodile and the palm with the myth of Apollo Sauroctone, of immemorial Egyptian roots. This related to the fight between the world of

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light and dark, to the revenge of Horus, the rising Sun, whose father, Osiris, the setting Sun, had been defeated by the god of darkness, Seth. Horus pursued Seth who flees without resistance; having reached him, Horus killed him with the blow of a spear. One of the forms that Seth assumes is a crocodile which appears very small in comparison with the huge Horus. In its Greek version, represented in some sculptures attributed to Praxiteles, Horus is replaced by Apollo in the shape of a naked youth leaning nonchalantly against a tree trunk; the crocodile, a creature unknown to Greeks, is reduced to the proportions of a lizard who climbs up the trunk; the spear turns into an arrow, because the Hellenic Apollo was not armed with a spear, but a bow. This theme of Eastern origin spread through Greek culture and afterwards into Roman myth. Finally, he questions the deep meaning of a moral which enjoyed such success, whose adaptation to different cultures seems to have arisen spontaneously among the cults of the Mediterranean basin. Its universal value would be one of the fundamental principles of the religion which summons every faithful man to distinguish between good and evil, expressed through antagonistic concepts such as life and death, heavenly light and subterranean darkness, the victor and vanquished, and so forth. Linked to this first idea, the author thinks that the reverse represents the theme of the Sauroniké, an allegory of the Sauroctone with strong Hellenistic connotations. From a philosophical point of view, the general meaning of the coin’s message could be that since good is superior to evil, the palm of the gentle god restrains the brutal creature of the Nile. Besides, under political, military and religious ideas, it would be possible to decode at least three other messages from it. From a political perspective, Rome subdues Alexandria, achieved through Augustus, protector of the West, and subsequently subduing the Lagid dynasty, Eastern menace to the Empire. From a military perspective, Octavian defeats Mark Anthony’s fleet at Actium, bringing to an end the civil war. From a religious standpoint, the Roman deities are superior to those of the Egyptians, because Apollo of Actium, whose beneficial action can remove from the mortals the evils which threaten them, retains by a chain Sobek, the insidious and malefic crocodile-god on the Nile’s banks. If the larger palm was deemed to personify Augustus-Agrippa, then Veyrac believes that the smaller ones which accompany it represent Claudius Drusus and Tiberius Nero, Augustus’ stepsons, and/or Lucius and Caius Caesar, Agrippa’s sons and Augustus’ grandsons. I would not dare to affirm that Veyrac’s ideas are unfounded or overstretched; yet, without neglecting its efficacy as a propaganda tool, and taking for granted that all its symbolic load was, at least in an

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unconscious way, in the mind of the designers of the coin, I doubt very much that the common citizen would be able to perceive in it so many subtle associations. To conclude, I believe it is worth referring to some other facts that bear relation to this symbol.50 Silvestre, in his catalogue of French booksellers’ and printers’ marks, includes one with the crocodile facing right, hung from the top of a thick palm by two strong chains linked to two collars, one on the neck and the other on the rear, and a laurel crown hanging from a leaf on the left. This engraving is found on the title page of Academiae nemausensis leges, published in Nîmes in 1580 without an indication of the printer.51 In my opinion, it is not the printer’s mark, but rather the city’s coat of arms, suggesting the frontispiece is of a book published by some official entity. With a pictura presenting the same characteristics as this, except lacking the letters and the crown, and the crocodile is hung by ropes instead of chains, and includes a reference to Augustus’ coin in its commentary, Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias included an emblem in his book of 1589 with the inscriptio “Gloria Cocodrilus” and the following subscriptio: El Cocodrilo de la palma asido que vn tiempo demostraua la victoria del vencedor de Egypto no vencido oy nos le da la natural historia en propiedad conforme y parecido a la que el mundo vano llama gloria que huye sin parar del que le sigue, y a quien le teme busca y le persigue.52 (The Crocodile tied to the palm, who in the past represented the victory of the conqueror of unconquered Egypt, today is given us by natural history properly in conformity and similar to what the vain world calls glory who flees ceaselessly from him who follows it, and seeks and chases who fears it.)53

The symbol of Nîmes was used by the local Huguenot community on one face of certain metal tokens (méreaux) which the faithful Protestant, who wished to be communicant, received from the elder of his quarter in order to prove that he had not been the object of any serious reprimand on the part of the consistory, had been present at the sessions of catechism, and had contributed to the expenses of the Church. These tokens were

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delivered to the elder in the service at the Holy Table at the moment of receiving the bread and wine (Fig. 3.4).54 The lead seals used by the tradesmen of Nîmes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for fastening bags of merchandise carried on one face different versions of the city’s symbol, in one of which the crocodile stands before the palm but is not chained to it, but appears to walk freely (Fig. 3.5). An octagonal metal piece of an undetermined date with the city’s symbol engraved on one face seems to be an official weight.55 In 1791, the Jacobins of Nîmes adorned some paper money of necessity in different values with the theme of the crocodile chained to the palm; this was issued by the Caisse d’échange for reimbursement in assignats. In the nineteenth century, a medal was struck in France denouncing the repression and “transportation”–an euphemism for deportation–to Algeria of the insurgents of the revolution of June 1848. It shows on the obverse an imitation of the reverse of the as of Nîmes, with the abbreviations replaced by “COL/ONIA TRANS/PORTATA” and, on the reverse, “VAE VICTIS/JUILLET/1848” (Fig. 3.6). The official blazon of Nîmes was redrawn in 1986 in stylish form by Philippe Starck. It is interesting to notice that the posture of the animal in this new image is very similar to that of the device “Nullas recipit tua gloria metas”, which is found only in the first edition of Paradin’s book.56 The crocodile, though retaining the broad collar, is not visibly chained, but simply at the tree’s foot and encircling the trunk with its tail. My purpose in this work has been solely to expound, in the context of emblem studies, the present state of the question concerning the symbology of the reverse of the dupondius of Nîmes. I have intended neither to exhaust the subject nor to offer a new interpretation. I agree with those who think that this challenging coin is far from having revealed its complete allegorical mysteries.57 Long ago, somebody pondered that those who believed that “COL NEM” meant “Colligavit nemo” passed for wise people.58

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Fig. 3.1. “Colligauit nemo”, Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques (1557). Collection of the author.

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Fig. 3.2. Examples of the As of Nîmes. Collection of Jean-Pierre Terrien.

Fig. 3.3. Coin of Mark Anthony, 31 BC. Collection of Jean-Pierre Terrien.

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Fig. 3.4. Huguenot communion tokens. Collection of Jean-Pierre Terrien.

Fig. 3.5. Nîmes trade seals, eighteenth century. Collection of Jean-Pierre Terrien.

Fig. 3.6. Drawing of a French polemical medal of 1848. Collection of Jean-Pierre Terrien.

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Notes 1

Manning 2002, 115, points out that “In explicating the imprese of the Accademia d’Urbino, Giovanni Andrea Palazzi would need to draw on the ancient and modern medallic devices of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Julius Caesar, Claudius, Darius, Faustina, Germanicus, Caesar Augustus, Titus and Vespasian.” 2 In general, theorists of emblematics touch the subject just in passing and in very summary form. Among the few works specifically dedicated to this theme one must needs mention Lamarca Ruiz de Eguílaz 1996, but some of his findings seem unconvincing to me. For example, Emblem 1:9, “Ditat servata fides” of Reusner’s Emblemata 1581, derives from Alciato’s emblem “Fidei symbolum”, not from a coin of Plautilla as he states on page 536, to which Alciato owes nothing either. See the concordance in Michael Schilling’s concluding remarks in Reusner 1990, 6. 3 Sambucus 1564, 12, 14 and 111. Some numismatists identify the emperor in the figure on the eagle, which does not combine with the legend. The same motif was used by Junius in Emblem 48, “Princeps ne cui aures servas praebeat”, by Solórzano in Emblem 8, “Optimus, ut Maximus” (González de Zárate 1987, 76) and by Peacham in emblem “ȂȪșȠȢ De Aquila et struthione” (Peacham 1976, 11v). On the coins with the god Mercury some attributes are lacking (the rooster, the goat, the scorpion and the fly), which all appear on an engraved chalcedony reproduced by Du Choul 1556, 156, from which Sambucus might have copied it. Other figures of emblems of mythological themes by Sambucus may be more remotely related to coins, such as the double-faced Janus of the dedication to Maximilian II (see below the comment on Alciato’s emblem “Prudentes”) and the allegories of Virtue and Honour of emblem “Virtutem honor sequitur”, which occur in coins of Vespasian (Sambucus 1565, 7 and 156). According to Manning, loc. cit., the fact that Sambucus devoted several pages of his Emblemata to numismatics suggests that he considered ancient medals an important source for emblems, and that there was a generic relationship between them. 4 On the circumstances of the elaboration of this emblem cf. Waterschoot 1992, 45-52, especially 51-52. 5 See Visser 2005, xxvii, 16 and 44-45, and Sambucus 1565, 11, 103, 217 and 243. 6 Alciato 1985, 50. 7 Alciato 1985, 196; Harms et al 1999, numbers 55-57, 46-47. According to Green 1872, v and 4, it was erroneously considered as Alciato’s own device by Giovio and Simeoni and was sculptured on his tomb in the University of Pavia, but it had been supposedly made by Alciato in 1522 in honour of his old master Jason Maine, without disregarding the hypothesis that, in his youth, his companions in an academy or literary club of Italy had assigned it to Alciato himself as the insignia of his membership. 8 The model may have been rather the mark of the printer Aldus Manutius, which considerably predates Alciato’s book. See Ventayol 2002, 581-588. See note 29. 9 Alciato 1985, 191; Haverkamp 1722, number 12. Vico 1554, 59, number 12, included it among the coins issued by Nero. Du Choul 1556 (105), who also

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mistakes it for a bronze of Nero, illustrates with this medal the notice about the cult of Aesculapius in Rome. Sabatier 1860, 87 and pl. 13, number 15, also relates it to Aesculapius. I am grateful to M. Dominique Hollard, responsible for the Roman coins at the Cabinet des Medailles of the National Library of France, for the data on the nature of this piece. The examples pointed out in this work refer to the editions indicated. Different editions may bring different picturae, without relationship with the coins or medals, as it occurs precisely with this emblem. 10 Alciato, 1985, 192. Cf. Hess 2002, especially 461-462. 11 Alciato, 1985, 199. 12 Alciato 1985, 205. The image appears also in emblem “Simulachrum trium Gratiarum” of Cousteau 1555, 282, and in Empresa 22, “Has habet et superat”, of Gómez de la Reguera 1990, 181, but it constitutes a classical subject so widespread in Antiquity and the Renaissance that it is adventurous to link the emblems directly to the said coins. Although Alciato does not declare his source, for Manning 2002, 103-105, his starting-point was the ekphrastic description of a piece of ancient marble art work, preserved in texts of Pausanias and Seneca. 13 Alciato 1985, 28. 14 The Capricorn figures also on coins of Tiberius for his mother Livia, of Vespasian, of Antoninus Pius, of Heliogabalus for his wife Julia Paula, of Gallienus and of Carausius. 15 It figured, e.g., among other insignia, on coins of Trajan, Philip the Arab, Constantine the Great, Postumus, and Maximinus II. 16 For example, on republican coins of P. Clodius and imperial coins of Claudius for Antonia. 17 In reality, these two symbols used to figure already on much more ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Roman republican coins. Jupiter’s lightning was also used in the imprese of Jerónimo Adorno and Cardinal Alessandro Farnesio reproduced by Giovio 1978, 92−where he expressly speaks of its use on old medals—and 127; in the emblem on 45 [Number 44], “Procul” of Borja 1680, 89; in Emblem 2:1, “Primus in orbe Deos fecit” of Covarrubias Orozco (1610); and in Gómez de la Reguera’s Empresa 34, “Nondum erumpit”, 251. 18 The palm tree, especifically the date palm, was used by Junius 1565 in Emblem 23, “Divina scrutari, temerarium”. 19 Paradin 1557, 32, 34, 75, 130, 189, 194, 205, 248 and 251. Borja 1680, 157 also illustrated with a wreath of foliage the impresa “Victi non victores”. 20 Simeoni 1559. See W. Deonne 1954. Some of the symbols mentioned in the present study were resumed by later emblemists in collections of a derivative nature, such as Emblem 121 of Whitney 1586, emblems 18, 60, 76 and 89 of the Centuria 1; 4 and 86 of the Centuria secundus of Rollenhagen 1611-1613; emblems 18 of Book 1; 10, 26 and 39 of Book 2, and 4 of Book 3 of Wither 1634; documents 3 and 42 of Mendo 1662; and yet in manuscript books, such as emblems 25 and 66 of Palmer 1565. The picture of Whitney’s emblem “Orphei Musica” (186) is an exact copy of the reverse of certain Roman provincial coins of Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Geta. 21 Giovio 1978, 71-72.

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Typotius 1601, cited Bolzoni 2004, 62. Covarrubias Orozco 1610, 106. 24 González de Zárate 1987, 131. 25 Mendo 1662, 13-14. Eusebius of Caesarea, Book 4, Chap. 15. 26 Saavedra Fajardo 1999, 425 and 1002; see Lamarca Ruiz de Eguílaz 1996, 546547. 26 Villava 1613, f. 39r. 27 Gómez de la Reguera 1990, 157-159. To this coin refers equally Paulo Giovio in a letter to Cosimo I as the model of the reverse of another one dedicated to the Duchess of Florence. Cf. Sonia Maffei 2007, especially 56-57. 28 In some cases of alleged influence, the relationship between coin and emblem is either so indirect or remote that they have not seemed to me worth mentioning, or I did not find a coin sufficiently alike to be pointed out as its specific source. In this article I have not taken into consideration the encyclopedias of symbols or repertories of images of the kind of Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica, Cesare Ripa’s Iconology, Nicolas Caussin’s Símbolos selectos, and Philippo Picinelli’s Mundus Symbolicus. About the important presence of ancient coins in Valeriano’s book, see Rolet 2007. 29 Maurice Sabbé, a former Curator of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, believed that Aldus’ mark came directly from Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, printed by Aldus himself in 1499 (Cf. Sabbé 1932, 44-45), but Roberts 1893, 219 and 221, states categorically that, having been adopted by that printer since 1502, it had been suggested by the reverse of a silver medal of Vespasian which had been given him by Cardinal Bembo. Aldus mentioned the symbol in a letter of 14th October 1499 to Alberto Pio da Carpi, practically simultaneous with the appearance of Colonna’s book (Cf. Alciato 1985, 185). See Ventayol 2002, 585, where she says that the coin was Trajan’s. Others say it was Titus Vespasian’s. 30 The Wechels’ mark with the cornucopias and the caduceus, adopted since 1535, may have been influenced by Alciato’s Emblem 118. 31 Paradin 1591, 81-82. 32 The historian Ménard (1875, 162, number 2), of Nîmes, cites other authors who seemingly followed the same opinion, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Pierre de S. Romuald, Marc Vulson de la Colombière, and Pierre Andoque, but they postdate Paradin. 33 Matthias 1668, 445 and 448. 34 Anonymous 1834, 599. Several historians and classical poets make reference to these celebrations. The most detailed description I found was that by Cassius Dio, but without any mention of the figure of the crocodile. 35 Erizzo 1559, 123-124. 36 I am grateful to M. Jean-Pierre Terrien for permission to reproduce some coins from his website. 37 and “Dupondius de Nîmes”, . 38 Veyrac 1998, contains an excellent abstract of all theories about this theme and represents the most complete and updated source of information on the subject, in 23

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addition to developing his own complex and comprehensive interpretation of the entire symbology of the coin, which will be summarized here. However, it does not touch on its relationship with emblemátics. Cf. review by Lévêque 2000. 39 Cf. Froehner 1872; O. Hirschfeld 1883; Rolland 1931; Grant 1946, 70-79; Vigier 1970; Vigier 1990; Vian 1970; Amandry 1987; Besombes and Barrandon, 2001; Bar 2005. 40 Veyrac, op. cit., 22 and note 62, clarifies that this was one of the forms usually given to the ends of the crown’s ribbons, with balls or pommels. 41 Paradin 1591, 81; Paradin 1614. In these editions the figure is reversed. 42 Valeriano 1575, 207v. mistakenly cites them as COL. AEG., that is, “Colonia Aegyptus”. 43 Erizzo 1571, 107. Ferro 1623, 230, quotes the difference of opinions between Paradin and Erizzo. Picinelli 1681, 6.105 (originally published in Italian in Milan in 1653), follows Paradin. 44 The letters NEM COL figure also on Gaulish coins of the Arecomic Volques of the region of Nîmes much prior to the dupondius of the crocodile. 45 Amardel 1908; Amardel 1909, 466-484; Amardel 1910. 46 Subsequently he called it a palm. For Froehner 1996, 12, what figures on the coin is just the top of the palm. If it were so, the situation of the crocodile would appear much stranger. 47 Two years after the first presentation of these opinions, Amardel revealed that he had afterwards come upon the manuscript of an anonymous archaeologist of the region of Aude, dated 1709, in which the crocodile of the coin of Nîmes was already concisely assimilated with Anthony. 48 Roman 1981, quoted by Veyrac 1998, 11. Octavius, being sick, had watched the battle from a promontory near a small temple consecrated to Apollo, to whom he dedicated the victory, lending great brightness to the ancient cult of Apollo of Actium. 49 Zehnacker 1984, quoted by Veyrac 1998, 12 and 19. 50 I will briefly mention here, just for the record, the so-called “as of Nîmes with pig’s leg”, about which some authors, especially Veyrac 1998, (12-16 and 34-47), have written at length. Besides being of no interest to emblematics, the nebulous circumstances of its first appearance point out to the possibility that even the supposedly genuine thirteen specimens in existence, most of them held by museums, constitute eighteenth-century archeological forgeries. They keep being reproduced to this day. 51 Silvestre 1867, no. 1272. 52 Horozco y Covarrubias 1589, 3:46. 53 A free translation by the author. 54 Delormeau 1983. 55 Another official weight of the city of Nîmes from the collection of C.G.B. (Compagnie Générale de Bourse, of Paris), can be seen on the following site: http://www.cgb.fr/monnaies/vso/v18/fr/monnaies20f7.html?depart=1785&nbfic=2 582. 56 Paradin 1551, 124.

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Emblem 96, “Strength to wisdome gives place,” in Palmer 1988, 103, mentions a “coyne of kinge Antiochus,/yprinted might you see,/A lyon grovellinge on the grounde,/and all astounde was he./An Owle eke syttinge on his necke/as thoughe she feard him not”. The editor’s note on page 262 informs that it is based on Valeriano, fol. 15r, “Vires cedere sapientiae”, which the epigram follows fairly closely, and that Antiochus was a King of Syria. Nevertheless, Valeriano himself does not identify precisely this Antiochus. As I have been unable to trace a coin with such image, I am inclined to consider that Valeriano’s description constitutes a mistaken interpretation of the reverse of a possibly corroded coin of Athens with the head of Athena on the obverse, minted by the magistrates Antiochus, Karichos and Skymnos, in which an owl is standing on a fallen amphora with a long neck which might be erroneously perceived to be a lying beast. Valeriano’s mention to the lion’s “humi protumbentem” posture leaves the possibility of such a confusion. Besides, the owl was a characteristic symbol of Athenian coins. 58 Anonymous, 1858.

CHAPTER FOUR PRE-ALCIATO EMBLEMS?: DANIEL AGRICOLA’S VITA BEATI FROM THE YEAR 1511* SERAINA PLOTKE

The birth year of emblematics is generally considered to be 1531, the year woodcut illustrations were added in the printing of the Latin ecphrastic epigrams of the Milan legal scholar Andrea Alciato.1 Printed in Augsburg and entitled Emblematum liber, the book was immediately well received and in the following years often reprinted, adapted, and translated. Its arrangement of superscript, image, and epigram, expanded in the 1534 Paris edition to the full-page layout that from then on would be typical, set a trend, providing a model for the veritable flood of emblem books published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 At the same time, the title of the collection provided a name for the new genre. As important as Alciato’s Emblematum liber was for the genre, the addition of woodcut illustrations to a work printed in 1531 was not at all unusual. Just as we have especially beautiful illustrated manuscripts in particular from the fifteenth century, likewise the first hundred years of printing brought forth a rich array of book illustrations. Books on the most various subjects and in a great many genres were illustrated.3 Among the thematic areas where the art of book illustration experienced its most prolific development were fool’s narratives and edifying literature. These had in common a moral-didactic intention. The most famous early example of a printed book with illustrations is Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), which within a few years of its editio princeps in 1494 was reprinted and translated several times. With regard to edifying literature, collections of prayers and sermons (Postillen) and books on the gospels (Evangelienbücher) were exceedingly popular. Although this is not the place for further examination of the many illustrated books published in the early decades of printing culture, these

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works give us some indication of what an important role both book illustration and bimediality, the conjunction of text and image to create a new whole, played for book printing in the late fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century. Questions in each instance concerning the relationship between text and image and the function of bimediality cannot be answered in a general way, but need to be examined using a concrete example. The life story of St Beatus is such an example; it was written by the Basel Minorite Daniel Agricola, and a Latin version was printed in Basel in 1511 by Adam Petri. Soon thereafter—probably in the same print shop—an Early New High German version followed. The Vita of St Beatus can be summarized as follows: Suetonius, as the saint was originally named, lived in England in the first century AD. After his conversion by Barnabus and baptism as Beatus, the young man left for Rome, where he became a follower of Peter and passed through the various degrees of consecration to the priesthood. Sent on a mission by the Pope, Beatus, with his companion Achates, crossed the Alps into the territory of the Helvetians, where he preached the Gospels. After some preliminary resistance, he persuaded the people to abjure their heathen gods and submit to baptism. To make a living, Beatus wove baskets, and in this way obtained food not only for himself, but for others in need. As his path led him through many cities and regions, he entered the vicinity of Interlaken. There he heard of a dragon that was ravaging the area. Beatus, with his companion Achates, took a boat across the lake, found the dragon’s cave, and drove it out with God’s help. Thereafter, the saint lived out his life in the cave in the greatest abstinence and piety. At the age of 90 he fell ill and—as Agricola records—died in the year 112 AD. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried near the dragon’s cave, and from then on, as a sign of his holiness, the sick were liberated from their sufferings at the grave of Beatus. Later Achates was buried at his side. For our discussion here, more important than the legend’s content is the book’s layout. After an introductory letter and a short poem in honour of Beatus, the legend is recounted, divided into fifteen prose chapters. Each of these fifteen chapters occupies two facing pages. On the verso page there is a woodcut by Urs Graf containing the chapter title and an epigram of two distichs. On the recto page there is an abbreviated title and the chapter’s prose text (Fig. 4.1). This design of the Latin printing corresponds almost completely to the Early New High German edition - with one notable exception obviously related to an alteration in text function.4 The introductory sections are

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taken over with the greatest exactitude, and the graphic distribution of prose chapters and woodcuts with their respective titles is maintained. But missing in the Early New High German printing are the epigrams beneath the woodcuts (Fig. 4.2). We can show the significance of these epigrams in the Latin edition by looking at a few examples. Chapter 5 of the Latin Vita has as its title “De fructuosa fidelium regeneratione” (Fig. 4.3). The print graphics clearly mark it as the title for the woodcut and epigram: above the prose text there is only an abbreviated variant. In its use of the word regeneratione it establishes a connection to the Vulgate and also to Augustine, where attainment of the kingdom of God is discussed.5 This word appears only in a Christian context and is used at the same time as a terminus technicus. In addition to meaning “rebirth” it also means “salvation of the soul” and “baptism”. The attributive adjective fructuosus strengthens the connection with the New Testament. After all, Matthew 7, 16 states, “You will know them by their fruits.” The epigram that appears to comment on the scene represented in the woodcut says: “Drive out deluded sin by the doctrine of virtue, that blessed hearts may understand the true faith. No one conveys the true faith in Christ with sin. Jesus himself called these false heralds of salvation.” As long as the legend’s prose text is the referent of the picture, the bearded man in the woodcut is identified with Beatus, who baptizes the heathens. But in its relationship with the epigram, the scene represented in the woodcut is given a general character, representing any preacher of Christianity who fights against disbelief. Strictly speaking, the motto-like superscript referring to the New Testament also contributes to a generalization of the depicted scene, something that becomes even clearer when contrasted with the corresponding chapter title in the Early New High German version, for there it says: “Zu dem funften: Wie sant Bat die abgöttery zerstört/vnd das volck wyrd von im getoufft” (To the fifth: How St Beatus destroys idolatry and the people are baptized by him.) In the Latin version, superscript and epigram lead to another interpretation of the represented scene. The reader is called upon not only to uphold the Christian doctrines for himself, but actually to preach, which only becomes possible when one has freed oneself from sin. As the superscript makes clear, this is the way that entry into the kingdom of God is guaranteed. Thus the combination of superscript, woodcut, and epigram in the Latin edition can be interpreted independently as a meaningful whole, which in connection with the saint’s vita can, but need not be, augmented with additional layers of meaning.

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This generalizing structure is evident in almost all fifteen chapters of the Latin version, including in places where the connection to the saint’s legend is even greater, and clear content connections seem to exist between the woodcut image and the legend’s text, as we can show using Chapters 9 and 10 as examples. The title of the ninth chapter is “De Draconis inventione cautelosa” (Fig. 4.4). Its epigram can be translated as follows: “A horrendous dragon covered with scales urges you to sin. The dragon himself creates its havoc in concealment, but the lion does so openly. Be deaf to the lion’s roars, and tear the throat of the dragon, which deceives the pitiful ones with his artfulness.” Chapter 10 is entitled: “De draconis expulsione animosa” (Fig. 4.5). Here the epigram asserts: “Whatever we aspire to in heartfelt prayer will come to pass, when the soul’s salvation is at stake, and when you ask for it with reason. Humble pleas rise up to sublime heaven, the virtues of the rich one subdue all that is wild and dull-witted.” According to the Apocalypse of John (Revelation 20, 2), the dragon is to be equated with the Devil; he is Satan and the Antichrist. This imagetype of a winged, slithering, scaly reptile with head and front claws of a wolf-like predator that stands for everything evil and inimical, for all kinds of plagues and tribulations, had already been developed by the early Middle Ages. In the allegorical dictionaries that were so popular in both the Middle Ages and the early modern period, one finds not only this interpretation, but the comparison between the dragon working in concealment and the lion which fights in the open.6 Although, given the prose texts on the facing pages, the woodcuts of Chapters 9 and 10 seem inseparably connected to the saint’s life, since Beatus does find and expel the dragon terrorizing the region, this connection can also be left out completely and a meaningful whole will still remain. If the superscript, woodcut, and epigram are taken alone, both of the text-image configurations can be read as behavioural instructions for the recipient, who is supposed to detect the threat from the ever-lurking Devil and, with the help of prayer and Christian faith, render him powerless in order to reach salvation. In this case, then, the saint’s vita is only an occasion to communicate certain general Christian behavioural maxims, which are mediated via interpreting the representation of a res significans. In view of these characteristic text-image connections in the Vita Beati as we have described them here, the question arises whether these compositions belong to emblematics - that is, whether we are dealing with emblems - avant la lettre, so to speak. If so, one could call the Latin version of Daniel’s legend an emblem book and at the same time a

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prefiguration of the religious emblem books that became so popular afterwards, particularly in the seventeenth century. The discussion surrounding the genre question in emblematics turns out to be complicated. In emblem studies, a variety of relevant answers have been given to the question: what is it that makes an emblem an emblem? The early definitions of Mario Praz and Albrecht Schöne were especially penetrating.7 However, more recent studies make it clear that their efforts to define the emblem do not do justice to the many ways this genre confronts us in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that, at best, they only circumscribe parts of the emblematic corpus. The problems surrounding possible genre definitions of the emblem in the most recent studies can be seen in their opposing tendencies: either to regard more and more of what was published conjoining text and image media in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as emblems, or to completely deny genre status to emblematics because such great variation exists among the individual instances. In view of this difficult contradiction, Bernhard F. Scholz recently suggested viewing the emblem “as a kind of text seen as a normal form”, as it is revealed “in the sense of a statistical average.”8 Scholz characterizes this normal emblem form as follows: The emblem that is normal in this sense is a tripartite plane figure arranged vertically; it has a complete picture; it occupies an entire page; the language segment of the whole three-part text that is found above the picture consists of a single line in the great majority of cases; the section below the picture is just a few lines; and finally, the whole text, consisting of word and image, “contains” an explicit or implicit general lesson or an explicit or implicit maxim intended as a guide to behaviour.9

With this definition, Scholz adopts essential aspects of Schöne’s discussion, but without attributing preferential value to the triad of motto, pictura, and subscriptio. If one holds up the Latin text-image configurations in Daniel Agricola’s Vita Beati to this definition of the emblem, it becomes clear that they agree in every respect with the normal form he suggests. Especially when compared with the Early New High German version of the legend, one can see how very much the text-image combination in the Latin printing corresponds to the characteristics expected of an emblem. As it turns out, it is not the fact that the epigrams are omitted in the vernacular edition that makes the decisive difference with regard to emblematics, but rather the fact that the generalizing trait is completely absent in the superscripts. Whereas the superscripts of the chapters or woodcut images in the Early New High German version refer

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clearly and concretely to the saint and his experiences, in the Latin printing this connection is only mediated through the prose text on the right-hand page. But if individual epigrams, woodcuts, and superscripts are taken together, then each text-image composition engages the recipient with a maxim for action or behaviour. This component is completely absent from the Early New High German version. Even Schöne’s determination (not mentioned by Scholz in his brief characterization) that the “double function of depiction and interpretation, representation and explication”, is the essential constituent of the textimage composition is realized in the Latin printing.10 Whereas in the Early New High German version, on the basis of the picture’s superscript, the scene represented in each woodcut is clearly and directly related to Beatus and his activities, the same scene in the Latin version, together with its superscript and epigram, suggests an allegorical interpretation from which guidance for action or behaviour can be derived. These obvious differences between the Latin and Early New High German versions seem rooted in differing text functions. On the one hand, the Latin version of the Vita Beati offers the life story of the saint, but on the other hand, based on the text-image configuration on the left facing page, it also becomes an edifying book with paraenetic character. The textimage compositions serve in themselves for meditative reflection and practice in Christian doctrine; they help additionally to imprint better their behaviour maxims in the memory. The vernacular version, in contrast, appears only to be concerned with making St Beatus’ life story known to a wider public. Considering the fact that veneration for Beatus was thriving in the early sixteenth century near the Beatus caves on Lake Thun, and the faithful were making pilgrimages to the area, the Early New High German version could also be seen as a kind of advertisement.11 All things considered, the text-image compositions in the Latin edition of the Vita Beati can undoubtedly be called emblems, as long as we ignore the circumstance that emblematics supposedly did not yet exist in 1511, the year of the book’s printing. Formulating the fundamental question in a pointed way, we ask: is there an emblematics before emblematics? Is it legitimate to consign a text–image configuration to the emblem genre when at the time of its appearance no corresponding awareness of the genre could have existed? Modern emblem studies were not the first to style Alciato as the emblematum pater et princeps.12 The Milan jurist was already mentioned in the sixteenth century in introductions to emblem books and poetological tracts as the author of emblemata. The problematic genre discussion thus culminates here in the question: to what extent, in the case of emblematics, can or must the histories of genre, influence, and

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reception be equated? And what importance should be attributed to today’s point of view of Alciato’s Emblematum liber, which is often called an archetype and the source of the genre’s name? It is a fact acknowledged by modern emblem studies that there are many influences at work in the origin and development of emblematics. The important role played by not only Renaissance hieroglyphics, but heraldry, medieval allegory, the ars memorativa, and even individual works such as the Physiologus is well known. As far as the understanding of genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is concerned, however, the “opposition between the genre’s establishment on the one hand and its precursors on the other” does not correspond to “the way Alciato’s role in relation to emblematics was seen at the time.”13 The poetics and praefationes of emblem books mention not only Alciato, but the Egyptian hieroglyphs when discussing the origins of emblems. As a rule Alciato is regarded there as the forerunner of those who were producing emblems in early modern times. The rich array of book illustrations brought forth during the first hundred years of printing makes it clear that Alciato’s Emblematum liber with its text-image compositions was nothing unusual in the context of early book printing, but should be placed in the context of the numerous illustrated books produced in the first decades of printing. In view of this fact it seems inappropriate to exalt it as the actual origin of emblematics. Instead, we should see the origin in the context of that era’s book culture as a whole—where the Emblematum liber was a typical product—a book culture that recognized and used the advantages that printing offered, not only for the reproduction of texts, but for text illustration—the woodcut as printed image. As a practical consequence, this means that just as we need to look carefully at books combining texts and pictures that were published after 1531 in order to determine whether or not they should be categorized as emblematics, we also need to examine those that appeared before 1531 with the same careful attention. Obviously, just as not every illustrated book from this era should be considered part of emblematics, likewise— against the trend of recent research—not every illustrated broadside produced in the seventeenth century is part of that genre. But our comparison of the Latin Vita Beati with its Early New High German translation has shown how fluid the boundaries already were in the early period of illustrated printing.

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Fig. 4.1. Page from Daniel Agricola, Almi confessoris et anachorete Beati (Basel, 1511).

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Fig. 4.2. Opening from Daniel Agricola, Das leben des heiligen bychtigers vnd einsidlers sant batten/des erste Apostel des oberlands Heluetica geheissen (Basel, 1511).

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Fig. 4.3. Woodcut title for Chapter 5 of Daniel Agricola, Almi confessoris et anachorete Beati, Urs Graf (Basel, 1511).

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Fig. 4.4. Woodcut title for Chapter 9 of Daniel Agricola, Almi confessoris et anachorete Beati, Urs Graf (Basel, 1511).

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Fig. 4.5. Woodcut title for Chapter 10 of Daniel Agricola, Almi confessoris et anachorete Beati, Urs Graf (Basel, 1511).

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Notes * The English translation of this article is by Hope Hague of Madison, Wisconsin. 1 There is no decisive answer to the question whether the illustrations were commissioned by Alciato himself or by the Augsburg printer Heinrich Steiner (see for example Miedema 1968; Leeman 1984). 2 See Praz 1964; Landwehr 1972; Landwehr 1976; Landwehr 1988. 3 See, for example, Hieronymus 1972; Hieronymus 1984. 4 See below. 5 See Vulgate, Gospel of Matthew 19, 28; Vulgate. Epistle to Titus 3, 5; Augustine, De civitate dei, 15, 16, 3; 20, 5, 2. 6 See, for example, Lauretus 1971, 365. 7 See Praz 1964, 18; Schöne 1993, 21-45. 8 Scholz 2002, 88; 290 (translation H.H.). 9 Scholz 2002, 290 (translation H.H.). 10 “Doppelfunktion des Abbildens und Auslegens, Darstellens und Deutens” (Schöne 1993, 21; translation H.H.). 11 See von Känel 2005. 12 See Scholz 2002, 169. 13 Ibid., 170 (translation H.H.).

CHAPTER FIVE LA NEF DES FOLLES (THE SHIP OF FEMALE-FOOLS) BY JEHAN DROUYN (PARIS, C.1500) YONA PINSON

The Flemish humanist Jodicus Badius Ascensius (Josse Bade van Asche), composed an additional text in Latin to Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools in 1497, addressed to an elite audience.1 Bade’s friend and publisher, Angelbert de Marnef intended to test the appeal of the didactic “supplement” by addressing first the larger bourgeois public through a French vernacular adaptation. Jehan Drouyn’s La Grant Nef des Folles selon les cinq cens […]. Avec plusieurs additions nouvellement adjuostées par le translateur (The Large Ship of Female-Fools and the Fives Senses […] with many new additions supplemented by the translator [Paris, c.1498]), should be considered, in many respects, an almost autonomous and independent work. 2 Intended for a broader readership, it contains thirteen additional chapters and woodcut illustrations in which Drouyn elaborates upon Bade’s imagery, reshaping the refined treatise and strongly emphasizing the didactic and sermonizing tone. Furthermore, in Drouyn’s vernacular edition, directed first and foremost to women readers (“affin que les femmes le lisent à leur aise”), the misogynist approach and moralized tone are markedly pronounced.3 The illustrations in these early printed books, while clearly related to the text, were also conceived as visualized texts for those who, as Sebastian Brant had noted in the Prologue to his Ship of Fools, were “with reading not afflicted”. 4 Addressing the wider urban public that was not necessarily lettered, notably women, these illustrations were intended firstly as didactic tools. The anonymous painter-engravers accordingly provided the readers/viewers with rather simple and easily decipherable visual images. The response to the woodcut illustrations was thus explicitly directed, and the moralized lesson plainly conveyed. In some of

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the more elaborate visualizations, wider ranging interpretative skills would have been required, and the strategies of presentation the artists adopted called upon their audiences’ knowledge of and association with established traditional iconographical patterns, verbal/oral sources, and even hermeneutical traditions. Women, who were often less accomplished in reading the written word, might also have “read” these woodcut illustrations separate from the text, creating an independent sub-text. Following Brant’s example, Bade and Drouyn adopt an analogical type of emblematical structure for their books, and further develop the idea of perilous navigation by adding additional ships that sail under signs of carnal temptations towards the paradisiacal realm of Venus, a leitmotif deliberately elaborated in Drouyn’s vernacular adaptation.5 As the passengers are imagined as male-fools, it is not surprising that the fleet is led by Eve, mother of senses and of all sins engendering folly and death (Fig. 5.1). In Drouyn’s homiletic adaptation, at the end of the voyage the reader/viewer is presented with two alternatives through two additional emblematical ships: the Ship of Death (Fig. 5.6) leading its passengers toward perdition, and the Ship of Faith leading the penitent toward salvation. In Bade’s perception, woman incarnates danger and he conceives of her as a powerful temptress and huntress. From the beginning of human history (from Adam to Solomon) states Bade, women have deceived men, catching them in their nets, determining their fate. 6 This hostile tone becomes even more disturbing and provocative in Drouyn’s vernacular version intended for the larger urban audience.7 Bade entitled his treatise The Ship of Female-Fools, a Supplement to the Five Foolish Virgins; as in Matthew 25, 1-13. By defining his work as the “missing ship” in Brant’s fleet, Bade reveals his own point of departure. In alluding to the Parable of the Five Foolish Virgins, he may have been referring to Chapter 106, “Refraining from Good Works,” in the Ship of Fools, where Brant, addressing the whole of human society, pleads with his readers to prepare themselves for the Hour of Judgement (Fig. 5.2). Interestingly, not once in this sermon does Brant mention the foolish women, nor does he cite the Parable of the Five Wise and Five Foolish Virgins. However, in medieval imagery the foolish virgins symbolized the damned that knocked in vain on the shut gates of the kingdom of heaven. This idea resonates in Brant’s homily, as we learn from the motto that reads, “Who lights his lamps here, warm and bright/And lets the oil give cheering light/Shall ever have delight.”8 Bade’s adoption of the metaphor of the five foolish virgins as a key image for his own work appears more likely to have been stimulated by

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the woodcut than by the verses accompanying Chapter 106 in which the painter-engraver’s powerful visual interpretation vigorously sums up Brant’s lesson. The anonymous artist, who depicts the five foolish virgins wearing fools’ caps knocking in vain on the shut gate of salvation, follows a long-established visual tradition where damned fools are imagined through the metaphor of the doomed virgins. His inventive interpretation is further expressed through the addition of a male fool, a sinner engulfed in the Leviathan’s flaming jaws, echoing Brant’s warning to his audience that the fool’s unwise choice will lead him to hell. 9 Following the Glossa ordinaria, Bade further elaborates upon the association between the foolish virgins and vices, typifying the foolish virgins as the five forms of the lusts of the flesh and senses that lead the soul toward perdition. 10 In patristic literature the five senses were generally associated with vices, especially lust.11 During the Middle Ages, the senses had been personified by male figures, perhaps given that the Latin words for the senses are in the masculine gender; but from the late fifteenth century onwards a radical change occurred and female personifications of the senses began to appear. Once conceived as vices, it became conventional to represent the senses through female personification. 12 In associating the five senses with the mortal carnal vices, vanity and transience, Bade refers to and paraphrases the wellknown proverb, Et mundus transi et concupiscentia eius […] vanitas vanitum (The First Epistle of John 2, 16-17), foretelling the fate of the foolish voyage. 13 The allusion of a perilous voyage is more explicitly pronounced in Drouyn’s adaptation where a “Ship of Death” (Fig. 5.6) is added.14 The influence of Bade’s supplement is echoed in later sixteenthcentury French moralizing treatises and emblem books, where the five foolish virgins are further associated with the five senses, the deadly sins, and the forces of evil and darkness.15 Eve, mother of all follies, senses and sins, is imagined as the captain of the fleet of five skiffs of follies, senses sailing toward the land of Venus. At each harbour an infinite number of fools, all Adam’s offspring, eagerly get on board. Tempted through their senses to lust, enslaved through their vain desires, they are trapped by the destructive feminine power. In the exegetical literature, the Fall of Man was interpreted as a parable of the seduction and defeat of reason (Adam) through the senses.16 Eve, wicked temptress and Devil’s accomplice, became the prototype of fatal and powerful women whose sexual charms were irresistible to men. According to Augustinian theology, Eve, the incarnation of dangerous, seductive feminine beauty, had tempted Adam through sight. Augustine condemns the sense of sight as the most dangerous vehicle of lust, since

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looking at a seductive woman stimulates sexual desire that leads to lust.17 In accordance with the traditional hierarchical representation of the senses, the Ship of Sight opens the series following the Ship of Eve (Fig. 5.3). Its captain, an elegantly dressed courtesan, is conceived by the painter– engraver as Eve metamorphosed into a contemporary bourgeois seductress (Fig. 5.4). Sight’s pose is in many ways similar to that of her commander, Eve. She holds a mirror in one hand, the traditional attribute of sight, and a comb in the other, alluding to both the vices of Luxuria and Superbia.18 The flag fluttering above the prow is decorated with a peacock, the emblem of Pride. Careful observation of this figure of Eve/Sight/Lust reveals that she does not study her reflection in the mirror, but rather turns the glass toward the beholder. In so doing, the painter–engraver has deliberately created a new strand of meaning whereby the mirror now reflects Everywoman, the true receiver of this didactic treatise; the mirror thus functions as the traditional edifying Speculum. In Drouyn’s prologue, however, the author defines his work as an inverted mirror, reflecting precisely what one should avoid.19 In Drouyn’s vernacular version, the metaphorical image of the mirror plays an important role in the symbolic visual weave of the added ships of Pride and VoluptƗs, which share the same illustration (Fig. 5.5).20 On the ship’s mast flutters a banner with the emblematic mirror reflecting its captain’s head, the female–fool, designating vice. Among the female-fools and sinners on shore is a courtesan at her toilette, the personification of vice, who, echoing Sight’s performance turns her mirror toward the reader–viewer (Fig. 5.4). In his rhymed commentary on Sight, Drouyn closely relates the personification of Sight to Venus; it is precisely she who voices Venus’ alluring call to join the voyage toward the fields of Venus, a land of sweet songs, odours, and eternal spring where charming virgins await the fols d’amour. However, this proves ultimately to be a false dream which soon turns into a nightmare since an obscure death awaits the tempted fools of love. 21 Returning to Eve’s ship (Fig. 5.1), we note that the painter–engraver has marked the central axis of the composition with the ship’s mast, which he has ingeniously integrated with the tree of evil and death (arbor mala). In Berthold Furtmeyer’s 1481 miniature, The Tree of Life and Death, Eve, mother of all evil, is confronted with Mary/Ecclesia, the incarnation of salvation. 22 On the viewer’s right, the naked sensual Venus-like Eve, offers the forbidden fruit to a cortège of men in a false paradise. Behind her is Death carrying a scroll that reads, mors est mal’ vita bonis, opposing the tree of death with that of salvation. The fruit atop the Tree of Knowledge, to the left of Eve, is in the form of a death’s head. Eve is thus,

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literally and figuratively, framed by images of death. Furtmeyer clearly conveys the conventional notion that all beautiful women from Eve to Venus or Frau Minne bring death and damnation upon men made vulnerable through their desires. A feeble Adam is attributed a passive role as he lies beneath the tree and grasps indifferently the fruit of evil. The painter-engraver also presents Adam’s passivity and even innocence, and deliberately stresses Eve’s active role as corrupt temptress. Adam is depicted at the moment of his embarkation onto the ship; the stern-castle at once separates him from Eve and conceals his genitals. His posture, facial expression, and gestures on the one hand seem to betray his obedience and submission to the powerful and sensual woman, making him appear rather weak, passive, and almost apathetic. On the other hand, his gesture of raised hands also seems to denote his innocence. According to the Speculum humanae salvationis, still very influential at the end of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the coming of Eve to the world marks the beginning of human corruption, while Adam is seemingly acquitted of all sin.23 The painter-engraver’s visualization seems to reflect this well-established tradition. The artist has, on the other hand, deliberately highlighted the biblical narrative of Eve’s temptation (Genesis 3, 1-6) by depicting her about to seize the mortal fruit being handed to her by a maiden-like serpent, (whose features, we may note, bear a strong resemblance to Eve’s own).24 Eve’s pose and gesture at the same time denote her submission to the Devil and her perilous sensuality. The painter-engraver has pointedly depicted Eve covering her genitals with her hand, thus drawing attention to her sexuality. In so doing, the illustrator may have been purposefully addressing the male viewer of this image who, while contemplating the edifying message, might also have been aroused by Eve’s nakedness and thus could have fallen prey to her dangerous and corrupt nature. In depicting Eve’s ship under the spell of Satan, the painter–engraver presents a visualized commentary of an apparently well-established gloss.25 Two horned demon–fools with grotesque features and bestial paws are in charge of rowing the ship toward perdition. The banner fluttering above the vessel’s prow bears the image of a basilisk-like dragon, the Devil’s armorial sign. In late medieval thought as well as in contemporary moralistic manuals like Brant’s Ship of Fools, 26 followed by Thomas Murner’s Narrenbeschwörung (The Fools’ Exorcism, Strasbourg, 1512), fool-sinners are related to the forces of evil and might be defined as the incarnation of the Devil himself.27 In his inventive depiction of the first skiff that leads the rest of the fleet toward perdition, the artist of the Nef des Folles appends a multi-layered

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visual commentary to the text by creating a newmetaphorical thread that permits the viewer to “read” what is not explicitly written in the text. Bade has designated Eve as the first insipientia.28 Tempted by the serpent, she has ignored God’s command by obeying Satan. Hence, Eve is related to the fool–denier of the Lord (insipiens), and in analogy with the fool that disobeys the Lord’s commands, she may also be seen as allied with the Prince of Evil.29 Already in early patristic literature Eve was portrayed as the archetype of the wicked woman. She was defined as the Devil’s gateway, blamed for having corrupted Adam, for causing the death of his offspring, and for destroying mankind. In his commentary on Genesis 3, Tertullian forges the image of Eve as Everywoman, an idea adopted and further elaborated by both Bade and Drouyn. 30 Eve, the perpetual perilous temptress, was conceived not merely as a betrayer of the law of the Lord, but as Satan’s agent. This kind of misogynist approach encouraged the representation of women as insidious temptresses who aimed to seduce men and deliver them into Satan’s grip. Drouyn imagined a fleet of boats steering its passengers through sensual temptations to the paradisiacal realm of Venus, led by Eve, the first temptress, as the captain of the nautical convoy. This new dream landscape, replacing the Brantian Schluraffen, 31 imagined as a land of eternal spring and earthly delights, of roses, sweet songs, and love, is also met with in the courtly dream of the garden of love in the late medieval Roman de la Rose.32 Of particular influence, I believe, were later urban versions disseminated in prints, which transformed the exclusively aristocratic expressions into more popular forms toward the late fifteenth century.33 Yet, Drouyn draws a deceptive picture of the voyage where the sweet, enticing song of the nightingales conceals the lulling but perilous chant of the Sirens that menace the fleet. In his version, it is the boat of carnal love (nef damours)34 that leads its passengers toward the fields of Venus, la Sainct Deese (Venus, the Saint–Goddess). 35 Assisted by Cupid, her “villain son,” and accompanied by Bacchus, Venus is awaiting her vassals, promising them a rousing reception, where the fools will be greeted with “sweet kisses” by pretty, gracious virgins (pucelles).36 Following Brant’s edifying model, Bade too alludes to the results of the fools’ journey, with Drouyn, further elaborating and emphasizing the sombre picture of the hazardous voyage, where only death and perdition await the rejoicing male–fools sailing toward Venus’ false paradise. In the Roman de la Rose and Ovide moralisé, popular examples of late medieval

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moralistic literature, Venus was regarded as the embodiment of lust, personifying the destructive and even deadly powers of the femme fatale.37 Drouyn warns his audience of the perils of the fatal temptress Venus, by evoking the inevitable, dreadful doom awaiting her fool–lovers who become trapped in her nets and are eventually struck down by an obscure death (Fig. 5.6). Elaborating upon the theme of penitence, Drouyn ingeniously adds an eighth skiff of Death to the fleet, which he uses to voice his own commentary on both the Brantian ship and Bade’s convoy. Drouyn confronts Bade (clearly identified in the woodcut illustration through the inscription that reads Mestre Joce Bade) with the female–fools in the skiff bearing a banner with a hideous and terrifying death mask. Bade, (allotted the role of preacher by his follower and translator Drouyn), addresses the insane mortals and ill fools, warning that death will be followed by infernal torments, the true doomed end of this seemingly enchanted journey. The painter-engraver depicts the timid orator in a polemical debate with the grotesque folles. In fact, the rather simple and static visualization stands in sharp contrast to Drouyn’s colourful and pictorial text. Drouyn’s verses draw a terrifying picture of the rotting corpses of beauties past, now aggressively attacked by devils and consumed by worms. In picturing the horrible fate awaiting female sensual beauty, Drouyn reflects ideas that were current already in late medieval moralistic and poetic texts and resounded in sermons as well. In late medieval and early modern thought the sensual female body was related to dangerous appetites and ephemeral earthly seductions. Thus, feminine sensual beauty connoted peril and death. The specifically gendered topos of memento mori elaborated upon in Drouyn’s Ship of Death is indicative of the way women were viewed at the dawn of early modern Europe, where especially in didactic urban imagery their beauty and sexuality were conceived as ephemeral and false and inexorably related with death.38 However, Drouyn traces a slight hope in his concluding homily, Exortation des folz et folles pour venir a la nef deuine (fols. LXXVI, v – LXXXIIII, v), demonstrating that the convoy may still turn away from perdition and redirect its course toward the port of salvation. Elaborating upon the theme of penitence, Drouyn addresses his audience with his own plea, imploring his readers to abandon the perilous ship of follies for the sake of the Divine Ship that will ferry its passengers toward the harbour of salvation. The diabolical mast of the leading ship of Eve is now replaced with the Crucifix. The perilous vessel leading toward death and perdition is converted into the emblematic navis carrying its true believers to the safe shore of salvation. The illustrator follows already established imagery, in which a ship manned by ecclesiastical dignitaries, prelates,

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and clergy progresses toward the port of heaven. An archbishop and a pope now replace the two diabolical fools–oarsmen of the first ship, who were steering their vessel toward the gates of hell. Attributed the role of a preacher, the author takes his place among the ecclesiastics on board: Jehan Drouyn is easily identified by his name on the inscription. In the guise of a preacher, the author addresses his audience of female–fools, pleading with them to repent so they too may join the blessed voyage toward redemption.

Fig. 5.1. Eve in the Ship of Fools, Jehan Drouyn, La Grant Nef des Folles (Paris, c.1500).

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Fig. 5.2. The Five Foolish Virgins, Josse Bade, Stultifere naues sensus animosqß trahentes Mortis in exitium (Paris, 1500).

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Fig. 5.3. The Ship of Sight, Jehan Drouyn, La Grant Nef des Folles (Paris, c.1500).

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Fig. 5.4 Detail of the figure of Sight, Jehan Drouyn, La Grant Nef des Folles (Paris, c.1500).

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Fig. 5.5. Detail of the figure of Eve, Jehan Drouyn, La Grant Nef des Folles (Paris, c.1500).

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Fig. 5.6. The Ship of Death, Jehan Drouyn, La Grant Nef des Folles (Paris, c.1500).

Notes 1

Josse Bade van Assche, one of the most important editors in both Lyons and Paris, was an influential figure in humanist circles, incarnating the new type of northern humanist who was still rooted in late medieval culture. Like Desiderius Erasmus, he too was a disciple of the Devotio Moderna. A native of Ghent (1462), he studied at the Jeromist Institute, related to the Fraternity of Common Life. He later edited and published treatises related to the Devotio Moderna, but was also inspired by Italian Renaissance circles during his stay in Italy. After 1492 he also published The Terrance, extracts of Virgil, Horace, and Aristotle. In 1503, he established in Paris his new publishing house, Parelum Ascensiaunum, editing mostly humanistic writings. For a complete bibliography of Bade’s own writings and publications, see Renouard 1908; and Béné 1979, 4-9. 2 I am referring to the later edition, c. 1500, Paris, BnF, Rés. m Y 750. 3 Drouyn c.1500, fol. Lxxii v. 4 Brant 1994, 58.

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5 As in Brant’s seminal model, each chapter is accompanied by a motto (inscriptio) followed by an adapted illustration (pictura), and both rhymed and prose texts that function as moralistic commentaries. 6 Béné 1979, 65-66. 7 Some years later, Symphorien Champier (a physician and humanist in Lyons) responding to Bade’s/Drouyn’s offensive works, published his own version, entitled La Nef des dames vertueuses (Paris 1503), a text that opened the great debate known as “le querelle des femmes”. This debate still echoed in the writings of humanists in the second-half of the sixteenth century, through Rabelais’s misogynist writings and Francois de Billon’s treatise. See Béné 1979, 10. 8 Ship of Fools, 343. See also further in this chapter: “so they who have their lamp upset/Or not their oil have lighted yet/And go to seek oil every where/when far away the soul would fare” (344). 9 See Ship of Fools, 344 in creating this new visualization, the painter–engraver may have been inspired by certain sculpted Gothic portals, especially in Germany, showing the Last Judgment in which the foolish virgins symbolize lost souls. 10 Mâle 1958, 198 and note 4. 11  Tertullian was apparently the first to relate the foolish virgins with the senses in his commentary on Matthew’s parable; the virgins were conceived as foolish because they were so easily deceived and tempted through the senses. See Tertullian 1885, especially 219-20. 11 Bloomfield 1952, 45, 171, 185, 238 and 360. See also Li, 1995, 14 and note 35. 12  On this issue, see Matthiews Grieco 1991, Chapter 3, “Les multiples défauts du sexe faible”, especially 248-56. In Latin, however, vices are in the feminine gender; see Nordenfalk 1985, 7. 13 Bade 1500, Præfatio, fol. aiii: 06. 14 Drouyn’s emphatic association between carnal sins, folly and death, appears to have later inspired another French Renaissance edifying booklet, Le Triumph de Haulte Folie: see Pinson 2007. For the topic of a perilous journey, see Pinson 2009, Chapter 3: “Perilous Navigation”. 15 See, for example, Valeriano Bolzani (Commantaires Hiéroglyphiques ou images des choses, Lyons, 1576, I, 278). Commenting on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, he puts forward the antithesis between them: “par lesquelles sont entendus les cinq senses parfaicts & lumineux des hommes sages, & iceux mesmes tenebreux & offesques es fols & insensez” (the wise virgins, symbolizing, however, the conduct of virtuous men and the others are tenebrous, offenders, fools and senseless). 16 Bade 1500, fol. aiii v. See also, Warner 1983, 58. 17 Saint Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte, Book 1, 12, 33-37. 18 In the rose-window in Notre Dame in Paris, a young courtesan is seen at her toilet gazing at herself in the mirror, representative of Luxuria. The mirror and comb are also attributes of the seductive mermaid or siren, but also refer to Venus at her toilet. 19 Drouyn, La grant nef des folles, fol. aiiii v.

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20 The same woodcut illustration accompanies two different chapters: Pride (fol. li) and Voluptuas (fol. lvbi), using for both “ships” the common attribute of the mirror. 21 Drouyn, La grant nef des folles fols. xvii r and xvii v. 22 Berthold Furtmeyer, Tree of Life and Death, Archbishop of Salzburg Missal. Munich, Bayerische Staatbibliothek, Clm.15710 fol. 60v. 23  Adam, on the other hand, is depicted in the Speculum as an innocent man, tempted to sin only out of love for his wife. See Lutz and Perdrizet 1907, 122. See also Pinson 1995, 699. 24 For the reciprocal alter-ego reflected image Eve/serpent see my forthcoming article, “Led by Eve - The Large Ship of Female–Fools and the Five Senses (1498; 1500)”: see also Pinson 1995, 699-700. 25 St Bernard de Clairvaux, 710-11. 26 Brant outlined the image of the grotesque demonized fool in his poem Von Fastnacht narren (ch. 110b), annexed to his original Narrenschiff in the 1495 second edition. 27 For a discussion on Murner’s work, see Lefebvre, 1968, 189. According to the author, Murner follows Brant’s example; however, I would suggest that he might have rather been inspired by Bade, as he elaborates the motif of Eve’s skiff. 28 Bade 1500, fol. aiii v. 29 Psalm 53, 1; in a late medieval illustration of Dixit Insipiens, (fourteenth century, Hamburg, Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. in Scr. 83 fol. 54v ) the traditional figure of fool–sinner that usually illustrates the fool who “hath said in his heart there is no God”, is intriguingly replaced by Eve tempting Adam, now incarnating the folly of ignoring the Lord. 30 Tertullian, De Culta Feminarum, 1, 12; see Warner 1983, 58-59. 31 Brant 1494, Ship of Fools, Chapter 108, “The Schluraffen Ship”; see Lefebvre, 1968, 112-114 and also Nordenfalk 1978, 12. 32 For an analogical imagery in the Roman de la Rose, see Fleming 1969, 69. 33 A contemporary printed illustrated edition published in Paris, by Antoine Vérard c.1500-1505, Glasgow, University Library, Hunterian Bw.3.6. 34 Drouyn, c. 1500, fol. XXXbv. 35 Idem , fol. XXXbiii. 36 Idem , fols. XXXVv and XXXViii. 37 The anonymous Burgundian author of the Ovide moralisé (c.1316-28), conceives Venus as the incarnation of Lust (Venus c’est a dire la Luxure; 4, 1634): there, she personifies the destructive powers of the femme fatale. In his edifying commentary on the fable of the forbidden love of Mars and Venus, the unknown author deliberately stresses the association between carnal love, folly (tenebreues folie, i.e. “tenebrous folly”), death, perdition and damnation (Idem, 4, 1728-31; 1752-54 and 5, 3004-07; 3032-33). 38 For this topic, see also Pinson 2006.

CHAPTER SIX BELLES LETTRES: HIEROGLYPHS, EMBLEMS 1 AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMAGES PEDRO GERMANO LEAL

Les emblemes sont aussi ancienne que le monde, puisque le monde est pour ainsi dire, une Emblême de la Divinité (Ménestrier 1684, 5)

As one can speak in terms of “word-emblem”, studying verbal icons inside conventional literature, it seems also reasonable to believe in the existence of an “image-emblem”, observing when a “learned image” may arise and dialogically display its textual (or intellectual) appeal, even outside emblem books. Aware of this possibility, this work is focused on how the emblem can be a cultural materialization of an idea of “writing through images” particularly nourished by the speculation over hieroglyphs during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In order to explore this thesis, this paper has two fundamental axes: firstly, by focusing attention on the confusion among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors and theoreticians between “emblem”, “device”, and “hieroglyphs”, I question whether the emblem may be understood as a writing-system in itself; and secondly, I attempt to identify some aspects of this script, highlighting briefly its preponderant position as a subtle and silent transmission of ideological and philosophical content. Claude-François Ménestrier is taken as a main authority on this occasion because he not only establishes his own contribution on emblem theory, but compares and synthesises other authors’ work. In addition, he makes very special use of two concepts adopted here: the images sçavants2 and the Belles Lettres. It must be said that it is curious, not to say quite symptomatic, to see a discipline usually devoted to sophisticated and

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classical literature being applied to a wide range of visual genres3, particularly if we consider the hypothesis of images as a means of writing. C’est de cet art merueilleux [the Egyptian hieroglyphs], que sont sortis les Emblemes, les deuises, les Enigmes, les chiffres, les blasons, & les empreintes des medailles & des monnoyes, qui font vne partie des belles lettres. La Poësie mesme & l’Eloquence sont des peintures sçavantes, puis que l’vne n’est qu’vne pure imitation, & que l’autre a ses figures, & ses Images […] (Ménestrier 1662, 4).

By saying that Poetry and Rhetoric are “learned paintings” (comparable with the nature of emblems, devices, and coats of arms) because of their discursive/mental images, the Jesuit author possibly brings to light an idea of enunciation that seems very close to Diderot’s position: […] le discours n’est plus seulement un enchaînement de termes énergiques qui exposent la pensée avec force et noblesse, mais que c’est encore un tissu d’hiéroglyphes entassés les uns sur les autres qui la peignent. Je pourrais dire, en ce sens, que toute poésie est emblématique (Diderot, Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets, 52).

The Hieroglyphs and the other images sçavantes: An Overview Parallel to the emblematic tradition, was the early modern interest in the hieroglyph, born out of the Graeco-Roman misinterpretation of authentic Egyptian writing.4 For more than three centuries, these new theories and repertoires of “hieroglyphs” spawned much speculation, and the inventions undoubtedly influenced the intellectual milieu of the Renaissance and Baroque era. At one point, “hieroglyphs” stopped being understood strictly as ancient Egyptian writing, or as characters drawn exclusively in line with Egyptian aesthetics; this was mostly because neo-platonic conceptions of the hieroglyph circulated among the European literati without graphic illustrations.5 Instead, hieroglyphs became a very special way of writing through images (also a vocabulary of “silent signs”6), invented by the Egyptians, but opened to new arrangements and design (for example, Jean Cousin’s graphic interpretation of Horapollo7 or the engravings in Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica), so as to serve the new demand for contemporary visual expression. There were neither rules saying how hieroglyphs should be depicted (following models, as in the Niloic script), nor a grammar explaining how to put these signs together; soon Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica and other compilations of “neo-hieroglyphs” were taken as

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source books from which to compose or interpret emblems or devices, paintings, sculptures, etc. If we consider the influence of this interest in hieroglyphics, many different examples will present themselves. Among them, Albrecht Dürer’s work as engraver is of particular importance, especially in the well-known panegyric of the Ehrenpforte Maximilians I (1515), not only because it somehow confirms the acceptance of hieroglyphs among intellectuals and politicians, but because it invites questions as to why these symbols were used in this context.8 Do the hieroglyphs attribute the authority of an ancestral language to the eulogy, or draw attention to Maximilian’s own erudition? Is this message universal and eternal, or is it understood only by a privileged and erudite class?9 Another example is the “Jeroglíficos de las Nuestras Postrimerías” (1672) painted by the Siglo de Oro artist Juan de Valdez Leal, where the objects depicted in the scenes can be understood as hieroglyphic signs10; and in the literary field, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) is probably the earliest artistic prose incursion into the field of hieroglyphics, which certainly promoted interest in this subject and influenced many artists.11 However, the persistence of hieroglyphs or speculation over them in emblematic contexts is unquestionable, and deserves more diligent consideration. This liaison is announced more or less directly by some authors through an emblem or device, or among theoreticians of Belles Lettres. Accordingly, the close relation between “hieroglyph” and “emblem” can already be observed in Andrea Alciato’s brief comment about his own creation: The words signify, the things are signified: though sometimes things signify, as the Hieroglyphs of Orus and Chaeremon. Based on their arguments I have composed a small book of poetry, whose title is “Emblemata”.12

In the following century, another author, Michael Maier, produced works in both these fields: Arcana arcanissima hoc est Hieroglyphica Aegyptio-Graeca (1614) and Atalanta fugiens (1617), his famous emblem book.13 Although Alciato and Maier are well-known emblematists, and very representative thinkers of their time, they cannot offer evidence to support any inference asserting that picturae were composed with a hieroglyphical intention (or, as I prefer, inspiration). However, the idea of the hieroglyph appears regularly in emblems. For instance, already in 1555, Achille Bocchi composed an emblem “on the mysteries of the Egyptians letters” (Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere, 1555: Book 5, 332, Fig. 6.1).

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After that, in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, ancient and moderne... (London, 1634), one of the components of the pictura is an owl explicitly called “the hieroglyph used for night” in the subscriptio: naturally, the concept here is used as a synonym of “symbol”, but its graphic appearance and textual explanation may suggest that other things depicted in emblem scenes could be understood by Wither as hieroglyphs (Fig. 6.2).14 Only four years later, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo also express his idea of hieroglyphs in one of his devices, His Polis: Ingeniosos los Griegos enbolvièron en fingidos acontecimientos (como en Geroligicos los Egipcios) no solamente la Philosophia natural, sino tambien la moral, i la politica, ò por ocultallas al vulgo, ò por imprimillas major en los animos con lo dulce, i entrenido de las fabulas. (Idea de um principe politico christiano, representada en cien Empresas..., 1640, 368)

In fact, perhaps because of the proximity regarding the concepts of “emblem”, “device” and “hieroglyph” (due to the shared use of “speaking pictures” in these codes), and a conscious confusion among them made by some authors,15 many early modern theoreticians attempted to postulate some differences between these traditions by pointing out genre distinctions (as with Giovio’s rules to create imprese.)16 And sometimes these distinctions were based on the overall purpose of each genre – that is to say, on the profane function of the emblem, compared with the sacred principle of the hieroglyph: Le Hieroglyphe ne conuient qu’aux choses sacrées comme son nom le demonǕtre, au lieu, que l’Embleme conuient aux choses morales c’est à dire, qu’il sert a representer les vertus, les vices, les passions, & les maximes du gouuernement politique, & de la conduite Economique. (Ménestrier, L’art des Emblèmes, 19).

Beyond, the apotheosis of the commonplace, the natural teaching or exemplar evidence in emblems would firmly contrast with the notion of concealed truths hidden by divine hieroglyphics. This is exemplified in the two following excerpts: We observe therefore that the Egyptians were the first to use those symbols which they called hieroglyphs, and with these they sought to ensure that their remarkable and indeed abstruse knowledge should be perceived only by themselves. For they deliberately and wisely kept the common crowd away from it with these ingenious and learned symbols, as I have already pointed out, and by this means they intended that the secrets of their really

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important and difficult teaching should be heard by chaste and honest ears and well-prepared minds (Mignault, 31). Des quelles [divises] comme l’Egyptien s’ay doit à exprimer son intention, par ses lettres Hieroglifiques: quasi par mesme moyen, se pourra ayder le vulgaire ignorant à congnoitre & aymer la Vertu (Paradin 1551, 6). C’est le proper des Emblêmes de rendre intelligible les choses le plus difficiles, parce que c’est le propre des Emblêmes d’enseigner. Il n’en est pas de meme des Devises, de Hieroplygiques (sic), & des Symboles, qui ont presque toujours quelquer chose de mysterieux & de cachê. Que tou le monde ne penetre pas (Ménestrier 1684, 15).

Nevertheless, especially in Portugal,17 Spain,18, and France,19 even erudite authors still accepted that “emblem”, “device”, and “hieroglyph” could be the same thing. Ménestrier attempt to clarify the differences among those concepts explaining, for instance, that Valeriano “confounded all these [learned] images under the name ‘hieroglyphs’ and Alciato under the name ‘emblem’”,20 or asserting that Anselme Boodt employed the term “hierographia” referring to the art of making devices.21 Either establishing or supposing these differences or affinities, it was commonly accepted that hieroglyphs originated in Egypt and that emblems and devices somehow descended from them.22 We can see from the following there is a small but meaningful selection of passages on the Egyptian (hieroglyphic) origins of the images sçavantes: ce que nous appellons aujoud’huy Devise doit tenir un peu plus de l’Aegyptien … puis que, comme par marques hieroglyphiques, on declaire à couvert ce qu’on veut exprimer de sa principale intention, de son courage, de ses desseins, & resolution (L’Anglois 1584, fol. 5 r). Questo sò ben io, e’l tengo per paradosso, che sono i Ieroglifici quasi vna base oue si fondano L’Imprese (Capaccio 1592, 5). [...] de todas las letras solas aquellas que enseñan las verdades, y el camino de la virtud, se deuen dezir letras, les dieron nõbre de sagradas; a imitacion de las quales se han introduzido las q~ en el presente livro llamamos Emblemas (Horozco y Covarrubias 1604, 9).

As can be observed, there is constant repetition which reverberates in a large number of authors, producing an interesting harmony of views.

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Emblems as a Writing System If we accept that hieroglyphs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were somehow understood as what we call today a “writing-system” (once they were invented by the Egyptians to write down their wisdom), and emblems were often confused with them, emblems subsequently appear as a sort of script in themselves, compounded by phonetic and ideographic devices; that is, different semiotic systems working under the same genre, or artistic practice.23 As a result, the thread of this discussion leads to a much wider conception of writing in the Renaissance and Baroque periods24 than the one we are used to dealing with today.25 Of course, the Renaissance hieroglyphs were not the authentic Egyptian sign system we know today. So, my use of the terms “writing” here corresponds to a general idea which comprehends nota (marques), littera (letters, letras), graphia, scriptura, pingere26, scribere, seen here and there when dealing with hieroglyphs during and beyond the humanist era. On the other hand, one could argue that an important intellectual like Mignault impedes this understanding of emblem as writing, when he avows that: Even before the actual discovery of signs or letters and the use of writing, [men] had devised certain crude symbols, such as of animals, or stars, or other things, which they called “hieroglyphs”, that is, sacred carvings (Mignault, 31).

Nonetheless, just a little later, dealing more specifically with the “Egyptian symbols”, the very same author applies the word scriptus to designate the barbarian (which includes Egyptian) use of its “rude signs”: But I will say just one thing. All those who in ancient times set down anything in writing about things divine, both barbarians and Greeks, wanted the fundamental principles of things to remain hidden, and committed the truth itself to enigmas, signs, symbols, and certain allegorical figures.27

Moreover, etymologically speaking, İȡȠȖȜȪijȠȢ or hieroglyphum could be translated at that time as “sacred engraving”, “sacred carving” or even “sacred sculpture”, better then “sacred writing” – a very attractive coincidence for modern speculation.28 So, since it is not desirable to analyze this phenomenon under contemporary and often restrictive concepts of “writing-systems”, it shall be explored in a much wider sense: in other words, the Belles Lettres (as the group of images sçavantes,

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especially the idea of hieroglyphs of the period) are to modern grammatology what alchemy is to chemistry.

Towards the Philosophy of Images …speaking in hieroglyphics is nothing but unveiling the nature of things human and divine. Valeriano, Hieroglyphica.

Apart from aesthetic and mnemonic appeals, one of the reasons for the widespread use of this polyvalent writing-system (the emblem) possibly depends on its almost exclusive and inherent capacity to deliver at one blow two aspects of humanistic thinking: at a glance, moral philosophy is expounded by the verses, and the philosophy of nature is revealed by the images. By “hieroglyphic intuition”, of course, I do not mean that emblematic picturae were composed strictly with motifs or signs taken from hieroglyphic repertoires, like Horapollo’s or Valeriano’s. Instead, I suggest that the visual appropriation of natural examples, loci communes, classic mythology and literature, and even religious themes, could be stirred by the hieroglyphic imagination – by the idea of a learned image solemnly writing down the teachings of nature, of civil experience (tradition), of wise ancestors, of God. In brief, the hieroglyph appears not only as content, but as form. Furthermore, during the Renaissance the celebrated comparison between image and poetry (instigated by a very controversial interpretation of Horace’s notion of ut pictura poesis29) became a serious dispute, especially when the formula “poetry is a speaking picture and painting a silent poem”30 was revitalized and added to this quarrel. Leonardo, one of the most passionate defenders of the supremacy of painting over all other arts, manifests his opinion as follows: And if a poet should say: “I will invent a fiction with a great purpose”, the painter can do the same, as Apelles painted Calumny. […] If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy. Poetry describes the action of the mind, painting considers what the mind may effect by the motions [of the body]. If poetry can terrify people by hideous fictions, painting can do as much by depicting the same things in action (Leonardo da Vinci, 654).

Besides the evident animosity,31 Leonardo stresses the very important connection between “poetry/moral philosophy” and “picture/nature philosophy” in the Renaissance, and almost provides a motto for Ménestrier’s precise judgement:

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While some artists and authors were absorbed by this famous paragon,32 emblematists could see (consciously or not) synergistic combinations of image and text, which finally let the picture not only speak, but teach: Ie dis que l’Embleme est quelque fois un enseignement sçauant, pource qu’on l’employe souuent pour l’explication des choses naturelles (Menestrier 1684, 17). Ce terme [emblem] n’est plus en usage parmy nous que pour les images d’instruction. Qui servent a nous representer la Philosophie des mœrs, & la Philosophie de la nature, comme le sçavant Minos [Mignault] le remarqua dans la Harangue Latine qu’il fit à Paris l’an 1578. Devant que d’enseigner les Emblêmes d’Alciat. Philosophia morum & natura tota in omnibus Emblematis occupatur. (Ménestrier 1684, 3)

The majority of emblematic images do not represent something already said in the text, like the majority of illustrated books for children today, but create a vital dialogue with the inscriptio and subscriptio.33 Besides, the compact quality of the image (a “precise” textual description of its contents would take much more space and reading time) and its pleasant appearance to the eye can impress its essence upon memory. In fact, the western world has been aware of visual mnemonic devices since Simonides de Ceos, but the ars memoriae was revived with particular devotion during the Renaissance.34 Apart from emblems and devices, the didactic use of images can be observed from church frescoes conveying religious lessons in the Middle Ages, to Comenius’ modern principles of teaching. The pedagogical purposes of emblems and devices can be verified through the titles of some books (as Emblems for the Improvement and Entertainment of Youth; Miroir des vertus et des arts, and many others…), in commentaries like Francis Bacon’s “Emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to image sensible, which strike the memory more”,35 and by applied studies on how emblem books have been used in education. Much more could be said if religious instruction is added to this discussion. On the other hand, the qualities listed above cannot be seen as the exclusive reason for the use of engravings in this case: they divide its privilege and merits with the “learned image” idea, sometimes borrowing the authority of the hieroglyphs through examples gathered from Nature

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itself (by means of its philosophy presented by the pictura) and other sources. Together with the author, the emblem reader is an eyewitness of Nature’s unspoken truths though this “fidele miroir” (Ménestrier 1684, 12).36 On balance, all images sçavantes and related visual forms of expression (such as alchemical manuscripts, some engravings, frontispieces, and so forth) constitute a complex writing-system, a kaleidoscopic code which accords with the subtlety of Renaissance and Baroque wisdom.

* This particular quality of Renaissance and Baroque thinking–viz. to be delivered by images–complicates scholarly conclusions for their subjective implications and potential further misinterpretations. For some reason, the image is not seen as a proper vehicle for the philosophical thought.37 In light of this fact, it is far from usual to find Robert Fludd’s emblematic charts38, Jacob Bohme’s schemes, alchemical cosmologies and their visual formulae39, meaningful frontispieces like Dürer’s “Philosophia”40, or even emblems in historic accounts of the philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: frequently, the philosophy of this age is simply described by history books as a revival of neo-platonic beliefs quickly followed by the Enlightenment – perhaps because its main contribution is not easily translated into words, nor allows for authoritative interpretations (Fig. 6.3). Notwithstanding, the universal nature of things offers more to this philosophy (that is, of images), and it contains nothing that cannot be transposed into emblems, and by meditating on them the man can derive useful doctrines on the virtues of civil life. That is so true, that as the History is illuminated by the coins and medals, the moral philosophy is illuminated through the emblems (Caussin, 194).

Afterword As Peter M. Daly has pointed out, there are so many diverse emblem books that any attempt to elaborate a general theory based on a single premise or particular starting point is likely to fail.41 Therefore, this essay does not aim to constitute a universal hypothesis of the relation between image/text in emblems or other learned images, neither to state a “correct” interpretation of the picturae: rather, the guiding objective here is to address the issue of Renaissance and Baroque hieroglyphs not only as a resource for motifs, but as the conceptual background – sometimes

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amalgamated with the images sçavantes to broaden its textual essence and challenge our contemporary understanding of writing.

Fig. 6.1. “Ex Mysticis Aegyptiorum Litteris”, Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere (1555). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Fig. 6.2. “In nocte consilium”, George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (1634). Courtesy of the English Emblem Book Project.

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Fig. 6.3. “Integrae naturae speculum artistique imago”, Robert Fludd, Utrisque cosmi maioris salicet et minoris metaphysica (1617). Courtesy of Berkeley University Library.

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Notes 1

This paper and related research was made possible by a travel grant from the Programme of Cultural Interchange and Diffusion, Ministério da Cultura do Brasil. The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude and respect. 2 Ménestrier divides the learned images into four main categories: mathematical images (such as diagrams, writing characters, images related to science, heraldry, genealogical trees, cabalistic figures, etc.); philosophical figures (or symbolic figures); theological figures (hieroglyphs); and moral images (emblems): see Ménestrier 1684, 13. 3 This is maybe because of the need for literary erudition to negotiate the sea of motifs and quotations integral to the learned images genres. 4 Giehlow 1915, Volkmann 1969, Dieckmann 1970; and Iversen 1993, among others, explore these interpretations. 5 Plotinus’ idea of hieroglyph should be considered here. 6 As Alciato declares in the Praefatio of his Liber emblematum (Augsburg, 1531): “Et valeat tacitis scribere quisque notis” (and that one may write by means of these silent signs). 7 Horapollo 1543. 8 The work was directly inspired by Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica and produced with Pirkheimer and Stabius’ intellectual collaboration. 9 Because the hieroglyphs “last forever” and do not reproduce a particular language, Leon Battista Alberti argued that they should be used to decorate buildings (De re aedificatoria, 1443/1452). 10 A very similar theme (another memento mori) and “objects” can be found in George Wither first emblem, “By knowledge only life we gain /All other things to Death pertain”: see Wither 1634. 11 See Volkmann 1969; and Iversen 1993. 12 “Verba significant, inquit, res significantur: tamentsi et res quandoque significent, ut Hieroglyphica Orum et Chaeremonem, cuius argumenti et nos carmine libellum composuimus, cui titulus est Emblemata” (Alciato, De verborum significatione: Book 1, 530). 13 Maier introduces his emblematic rendering of alchemical ideas by a brief account of “the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians”. He also writes about “the hieroglyphs of the Greek” – as he understands the allegories in mythology. 14 I employ the term “emblem scene” to embody the entire engraving, from the immediately significant foreground to the fatti (background). 15 In different contexts, especially during the sixteenth century, emblem and device books have been called collections of “hieroglyphs”, for example, Marco Mantova Benavides’ Zographia sive Hieroglyphica (1566); Alonso de Ledesma’s Epigrammas y Hieroglyphicos a la vida de Christo, festividades de nuestra Senora, excelencias de Santos, y grandezas de Segovia (1625); Vincenzo Ricci’s Geroglici Morali (1626); Francis Quarles’s Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638); Nicolas de la Iglesia’s Flores de Miraflores, hieróglifos sagrados,

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verdades figuradas... (1659); or even the later Science Hieroglyphique (1746) by Daniel De la Feuille. 16 These regulations included the avoidance of the use of the human figure and the minor number of figures in the picture; such rules did not extend to emblems: see Daly 1998, 28. 17 Despite the fact that Portugal had a limited tradition of emblem books (though rich examples of applied emblematics), Luis Nunes Tinoco’s A Phenix de Portugal Prodigioza (1687) features a “meditation” upon a rose which emblematically alludes to the death of Queen Maria Sophia Isabel as a “sad hieroglyph”. 18 Horapollo 1991, 28. 19 Russell 1985, 345. 20 “C’est ce qui a fait que a fait que Pierius [Valeriano] a confondu toutes ces Images sous le nom de Hieroglyphiques, & Alciat sous celuy d’Emblêmes” (Ménestrier 1662, 4). Also, Ménestrier observes “L’Embléme peux aussi tenir de la nature des Hieroglyphes, quand il sert a nous instruire des mysteres & des maximes de la Religion” (Ménestrier 1684, 17). 21 Ibid., 62. Boodt also indentifies the two parts of the device as “hieroglyphicon” (or pictura) and “symbola” (or scriptura). These same very parts called by Menestrier “body” and “soul”. 22 Goropius Becanus’ Hieroglyphica is evidently an exception here. 23 We may observe a certain similarity between the Renaissance hieroglyph and the authentic form of the Egyptians (composed with phonetic and non-phonetic signs). I defend the use of “ideographic” instead of “logographic” when dealing with some writing-systems (especially the Egyptian) because along with the symbolic meaning, it can also cover the idea of “silent sign” (present in the “determinative” class of signs) or “plural-reading sign” (where one is allowed to read different words like “fighter”, “warrior”, “combatant” under the same signifier). Such concepts are not implied in the definition of logos. 24 I am particularly interested in investigating how far the discussion about graphic language–today led by Semiotics, Grammatology or Linguistics—was pursued by theoreticians of emblems and devices during the Renaissance and Baroque. 25 This derives from the Enlightenment, especially through Rousseau, with echoes in Saussure, as Derrida keenly observes in his De la Gramatologie (1967). 26 Used by Bernadino Trebatio in his translation of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica. 27 Sed unum id duntaxat. Omnes quotquot vetustis temporibus de rebus divinis aliquid scriptis mandarunt, tam barbari quam Graeci, rerum principia occulta esse voluerunt, et ipsum verum (IJвĮȜȘșξȢ) aenigmatis, signis, symbolis, et allegoricis quibusdam figuris tradiderunt. 28 This is true especially for the engravers, who were affirming their position among other artists. I agree that the hieroglyphic phenomenon also served subjectively to provide arguments and authority to raise the graphic arts’ status from mere craft to art. I would like to stress that the importance of printing as the transition from a medieval/oral culture to Renaissance/visual culture is not irrelevant, nor even secondary, but the specific stage when the emblematic phenomenon came to light.

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Ars poetica aut epistola ad Pisones, 1-13. Attributed to Simonides de Ceos, by Plutarch (De gloria Atheniensium, Book 3, 346-347). 31 On other occasions Leonardo is even more radical, calling the poetry “a blind picture” (probably offended with idea of the picture as “mute poetry”...): “Se tu dimanderai la pittura muta poesia, ancora il pittore potrà dire la poesia orba pittura. Or guarda qual è piú dannoso mostro, o il cieco, o il muto” (Come a pittura avanza tutte le opere umane per sottili speculazioni appartenenti a quella, 12). However, both serves to “demonstrate the many moral conducts”: “La pittura è una poesia muta, e la poesia è una pittura cieca, (...) e per l'una e per l'altra si può dimostrare molti morali costumi” (Che differenza è dalla pittura alla poesia, 15). 32 Many other artists and theoreticians of painting or poetry took part in this heated discussion, such as Bernadino Daniello, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Giovanni Battista Armenini, and Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy. 33 Curiously the emblematic pictura can be also interpreted as playing a role very similar to the “determinatives” sign in ancient Egyptian authentic writing. There these hieroglyphs operated as semantic components (without phonetic correspondence) placed after a word to determine the proper meaning of a phonetic construction, thereby avoiding potential homonyms. 34 Yates 1966. 35 Advancement of Learning, Book 2, 15, 3. 36 The role of the emblem reader as a spectator also could explain the term “theatre” in some emblem book titles, such as Guillaume de La Perrière’s Le Théâtre des Bons Engins (1539). 37 Unfortunately there is no space to explore this facet of “logocentrism” here. 38 In his Utrisque cosmi maioris salicet et minoris metaphysica (1617), the famous engraving Integrae naturae speculum artistique imago (fol. 4) is said to be an “emblematic mirror” (fol. 5). Some years later, in Medicina catholica (1629) he uses an interesting expression when referring to his engraved chart; it is, he writes, a “hieroglyphic emblem that explains all the Mystery of the Catholic Medicine” (fol. 3). 39 See, for example, the Ripley Scrowle, the Mutus liber (1677) or Splendor solis (1532-1535). 40 See Konrad Celtis’ Quatuor libri amorum (1512). 41 Daly 1998, 4. 30

CHAPTER SEVEN EMBLEMATIC TRADITION IN RENAISSANCE PRINTERS’ DEVICES IN POLAND JUSTYNA KILIAēCZYK-ZIĉBA

The first printers to operate at the end of the fifteenth century in Kraków, the capital of multinational Poland, already used printers’ devices in their publications. In these early publications, the devices were used as a form of trade mark, an element that enabled visual identification of publishers’ products and protected them against forgery. Soon, however, master-printers began to employ their devices in a different manner: placed mostly on the title pages of their books, these graphic signs were supposed to reflect the publishing house’s profile and the publisher’s world view. 1 Therefore among the printers’ devices used in sixteenthcentury Europe, including Kraków’s printing houses, we find both relatively easily read symbols and many examples of erudite and esoteric signs which are sometimes difficult to identify and interpret. After all, the typographers of the Renaissance were frequently not only businessmen, but people with intellectual ambitions, inescapably involved in cultural activities as well as entrepreneurship: “Theirs was a special enterprise which linked the production of goods to the production of ideas”.2 Either truly learned and exhibiting a remarkable command of erudite skills themselves, or helped and advised by the scholars and poets working for them, Polish Renaissance printers tended to choose as their devices signs inspired by symbolic and archetypal cultural codes; they referred to classical sources, at times pre-classical, traditio pagana et christiana, as well as to medieval imagery and, finally, to contemporary books of emblems. The relationship developed between emblem collections and printers’ devices differed from case to case: in some instances, it amounted to the imitation of a representation found in an emblematic source (quite frequently itself transferred through a printer’s device of another publishing house); in others, common motifs were employed by both

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printers and authors of emblem books – motifs which belonged to a universal symbolic code that in a sense constituted a counterpart of Latin as a language of the continent’s intellectual elites.3 In this article I would like to discuss some examples of the three ways in which emblem collections influenced printers’ devices from Renaissance Polish publishing houses: 1) the copying of emblems from a particular collection (from Alciato of course, but sometimes through the devices of Western European, e.g. Dutch, printers); 2) the merging and transforming of forms found in different emblem books; and 3), the blending of their emblematic inspiration with iconographic ideas from other sources. Another issue that I would like to touch upon here, without going into much detail, is the occurrence in Polish printers’ devices of motifs from well-known emblem books, although their impact on the devices must be excluded for chronological reasons. My text will seek to offer only an outline of these matters, and will not exhaust what is an extensive subject. Later to be called “emblematum pater et princeps”, Andrea Alciato characterized his Emblemata in a well-known letter to a friend, Francesco Calvo, at the turn of December 1522 and January 1523 thus:4 I describe in each of the epigrams something or other which may be supposed to intimate something exceptional in the affairs of men or in the natural world, and from which painters, goldsmiths and other metalworkers can manufacture the sort of thing we call badges and fix on our caps, or the marks used by publishers, Aldus’ anchor, Froben’s dove, or Calvi’s own elephant….5

Regardless of how we interpret the tone of this statement, it is undeniable that the future codifier of emblems places among the users of symbolic figures, frequently accompanied by a verbal commentary, printers who copy symbolic representations as identification for their publishing houses. Alciato writes that there is an analogy between the things he himself describes and existing publishers’ marks, foreseeing at the same time that his descriptions might well serve as models for new devices. In fact, sixteenth-century European publishers willingly and in different ways referred in their devices to the symbolism of Alciato’s emblems. The catalogues of printers’ devices used in Renaissance publishing houses prove that many of his emblems reappeared with minor modifications as printers’ devices. 6 It is recognized, however, that the relationship between emblematic figures and printers’ devices differed, and that it was not always the case that emblem books influenced printers in choosing their symbolic marks. This can be well exemplified by one of

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the most famous printers’ devices in Europe, namely, that of Aldus Mantius’ publishing house, an image of a dolphin wound around an anchor with the motto, “Festina lente”. This composition, known from Roman coins and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the famous work by Francesco Colonna, was widely commentated on by Erasmus: it is believed to have also inspired Alciato and his followers, as well as numerous printers, who most probably recognized both sources, the emblem and the device.7 Analysis of the origins and symbolism of some European devices, younger than Aldus’ dolphin, lends further doubt whether figures taken from emblem books inspired printers or whether ideas embodied in printers’ devices were used during the preparation of emblem collections by Alciato and other authors. An element in one of Alciato’s emblematic compositions, representing “Concord” may serve as an example here. In the first edition of Alciato’s Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531), under the inscription “Concordia” there is a pictura representing a flock of birds that walk behind their crowned leader. In later editions (starting with the 1534 Paris edition of Wechel) the picture shows a sceptre standing on a plinth, with a crow on each side of it, while other birds are flying above (Fig. 7.1). On the other hand, a printer’s device employing a very similar visualisation of a sceptre and two crows, but with an inscription from Sallust “Concordia res parvae crescunt” was used by the Antwerp publishing house of Joannes Steelsius. What is interesting is that the early versions of Steelsius’ device were almost identical with the pictura in Alciato’s collection (although they incorporated a motto and an armillary sphere on the rectangular frame of the image) and were used first in 1534, that is, the same year when the newly amended version of Alciato’s book was printed (Fig. 7.2). Therefore, one may pose the question, was it Steelsius who took inspiration from the Paris edition of Alciato’s collection or the other way round? Subsequent editions of the famous book appeared from the Antwerp publishing house with its trademark.8 This emblematic device of Steelsius is also significant for the history of Polish printers’ devices, mainly due to the reason that one of its later versions used from the 1540s onwards served as inspiration for an unknown author who prepared a woodcut device for a Kraków publisher, Mateusz Siebeneicher (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). This device is framed within an oval and shows the birds and the sceptre standing not on a plinth or ancient sarcophagus, but on a rock and with its inscription in a medallion-shaped surround. Although it is difficult to judge what induced the Polish printer to use a device of emblematic origin or whether he took his mark from Alciato or influenced the Italian emblematist, the undeniable graphic

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similarity proves that the printer’s device of the Antwerp publisher constituted a direct model for Siebeneicher’s mark. Acknowledging that the device of the Kraków printer was modelled on Steelsius’ device, one cannot deny its emblematic references. Used for the first time in 1558, this mark was one of the first Polish printers’ devices with an emblematic character and apparent debt to Alciato.9 It seems that from among the many sixteenth-century emblem collections this, the most renowned one, had the most impact on the graphic shape and symbolic meaning of the devices used by printers of that time. Researchers have many times pointed to the parallels between printers’ devices and pictures from the different editions of Emblematum liber. It has been recognized that Renaissance publishers, like Siebeneicher, frequently employed emblematic figures as inspiration for the devices used by their publishing houses, via a foreign printer’s mark.10 Renaissance printers, especially later ones, when knowledge of emblematic art had become widespread in Europe, drew their inspiration directly from emblem books. And the emblem books, including Alciato’s work, could have constituted the source of inspiration for an iconographic device of yet another Polish Renaissance publishing house, the device used by the ZamoĞü Academy Publishing House. It was used from 1597 and represented Bellerophon sitting on Pegasus (Fig. 7.5). It is worthwhile saying something here about the printing house itself. Unlike, for example, Kraków publishing houses, the ZamoĞü Academy Publishing House was not established in a large city where important trade routes converged and with a royal court and old university. ZamoĞü was founded only in the 1570s, following the will of the magnate, hetman and Chancellor of Poland, Jan Zamoyski. In ZamoĞü, the magnate wanted to realize his dream of an ideal Renaissance city, a type of urban utopia. Zamoyski wanted his seat to be not only a grand fortress, a harmonious location where every detail was well planned, but a centre of science and culture. Therefore, he established a university there, the Akademia Zamoyska, and a printing house to serve it. Zamoyski, a very well educated lover and connoisseur of antiquity, initiated many artistic events and willingly took on the role of auctor intellectualis of the works of visual arts that were realized according to his taste and his frequently detailed guidelines. 11 Undoubtedly, he had an influence on the shape of the printer’s device used by the ZamoĞü Academy Publishing House. However, I believe that Jan Januszowski, the most renowned Kraków printer of the sixteenth century and who had helped the magnate organize the publishing house, must have played a more significant role too. The two men chose for the device of the newly established publishing house the representation of Bellerophon

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on a winged horse. The decision must have been influenced by representations with a similar motif used as printers’ devices in many European countries.12 Picturae from the emblem books of Alciato and one of his followers and friends, Achille Bocchi, most probably constituted the source of inspiration (Figs. 7.6 and 7.7). The works of both humanists, which must have been known to the well-read creators of Zamoyski’s device, include emblems that interpret the fight between Bellerophon and the Chimera. The figures from Emblematum libellus and Symbolicae quaestiones (published in 1555 and reissued in 1574) were considerably transformed in Zamoyski’s device. This was due to two main reasons: firstly, because of the low proficiency of the Polish artist and secondly, because of the adaptation of an old representation to a new function. The knight riding Pegasus was surrounded by a wreath of laurel and olive (known from Zamoyski’s medal and referring to his motto “Utraque civis”). The Chimera was removed from the illustration as her partly goat-like body could evoke connotations with Zamoyski’s coat of arms, that is, Półkozic, meaning literally “half-goat”. A spring was added, most probably to symbolize the Zamoyska Academy, as its founder would refer to it as Hippeum and fons perennis. The inscriptions that accompany the picturae in Alciato’s and Bocchi’s emblems were also excluded but they are worth analyzing, as their “virtual presence” makes it possible to guess what the creator of Zamoyski’s device wanted to communicate through the speechless language of the images used. In Alciato’s work the inscriptio is “Consilio et virtute Chimaeram superari, id est, fortiores et deceptores” (Wisdom and courage defeat the Chimera, i.e. the powerful and deceivers). The Academy’s device based on this interpretation of the scene could be understood first as a reference to Zamoyski, who most probably wanted to be perceived as the one who defeats the unlawful, thanks to his wisdom and virtue. As a composition, it could also illustrate virtutes et artes in the Academy’s curriculum and programme. 13 In Bocchi’s Symbolicae quaestiones, the motto over the picture is, “ARS RHETOR[ICA] TRIPLEX: MOVET, IVVAT, DOCET, SED PRAEPOTENS EST VERITAS DIVINITVS. SIC MONSTRA VITIOR[UM] DOMAT PRVDENTIA” (The art of rhetoric, having three purposes, moves, pleases and teaches, but pre-eminent is the truth that comes from God. Thus Prudence subdues the monsters of the vices). 14 The second part of the motto by the Bolognese author has a similar meaning to that of Alciato: both optimistically stress that the forces of evil—embodied in the Chimera—can be defeated if fought by a virtuous mind or prudent wisdom. The first sentence of Bocchi’s

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inscription is, however, new to Alciato’s template and is implying quite interesting messages. It clearly echoes not only Quintilian’s definition of the aims of rhetoric, but the belief in the power of the verbal arts, rhetorical skill used to honest ends, to herald the “truth coming from God”. This rhetorical interpretation of the fight with the Chimera, based on the suggestions of classical authors, was considerably popular among the humanists of the sixteenth century and could attract also those intellectuals looking for a proper device for a printing house that was closely related to an academic institution. 15 According to this interpretation, Bellerophon killing the Chimera would not symbolize a person but an idea; therefore, he would not only embody the efforts of Jan Zamoyski, the founder of the Academy and the publishing house, but the power of wisdom, of talents (including rhetorical ones) and the might of godly truth, all of which was contained in the books issued by the ZamoĞü Academy Publishing House.16 The device of the Kraków printing house, led by the advisor and assistant to Zamoyski, Jan Januszowski, had similarly ambiguous meaning and eclectic origins. Januszowski was one of the most versatile men of the Polish Renaissance. For thirty years he ran a printing house, the Officina Lazari, which is considered to be the most renowned publishing house of sixteenth-century Poland. He was a student of Kraków and Padua universities and worked as a royal secretary. He was famous not only as a master-printer, but as a lawyer, writer and an excellent translator. Januszowski chose in 1583 an image of an obelisk for the device of his publishing house (Fig. 7.8). This reflected a particular craze for Egypt that started at the end of the fifteenth century and had an impact on shaping the Renaissance culture of Europe, as well as the intellectual fascinations of Januszowski.17 The printer was interested in astronomy and astrology: an obelisk was also a device used for astronomical observations, especially in the Kraków astronomical tradition. Januszowski also published hermetic treatises: under his direction, the Officina Lazari issued from 1584 subsequent volumes of Hanibal Roselli’s opus magnum, the most opulent commentary to Corpus hermeticum and Asclepius.18 The obelisk device of the Officina Lazari can be interpreted first and foremost as a symbol of supernatural knowledge, but gained by means of human effort. Unfortunately, the scope of this article does not allow for presenting a more detailed justification for this claim, but it is acknowledged that Januszowski knew Pliny’s opinion that the first obelisks were erected in Egypt from godly inspiration and was aware of the deliberations of Joachimus Reticus, who wrote that obelisks used to be devoted to the sun, the king of the world and the eye that shed light on all

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things. He was also aware that according to the practice of Christianizing pagan monuments, an obelisk, which reminds us of a ray of sunlight, signifies Christ, the Light of the World and the True Sun. The obelisk is a sign that unites heaven and earth and symbolizes human thought and the immeasurable wisdom of God.19 The Kraków publisher did not want, however, the obelisks printed on the title pages of books published by the Officina Lazari to be interpreted solely as hermetic references to divine, eternal wisdom. By choosing an image of the Egyptian monument for the device of his printing house, Januszowski also made conscious references to another interpretation of the obelisk, which was frequently understood in the sixteenth century as a symbol of fame and immortality. Such an interpretation of obelisks, as a symbol of glorious memory that defeats time, was not a rare thing in the Renaissance. It is visible in the works of architects, sculptors, graphic artists and creators of books (also in Poland, and Kraków20) and in the Symbolicae quaestiones of Achille Bocchi. Bocchi’s emblem book contains a symbolum with an obelisk signifying true glory and eternal remembrance.21 It has a meaningful inscription over the image: “Resurgit ex virtute vera Gloria” (Fig. 7.9). It may therefore be claimed that this particular collection of emblems served as inspiration for Januszowski to choose the obelisk as a symbol of fame that overcomes time. Such an interpretation of the obelisk must have appealed to Januszowski, an intellectual and master-printer, who regarded books as an antidote for the fleeting nature of things and who expressed this belief many times in his works. This emblematic reference to Bocchi’s Symbolicae quaestiones does not exclude, of course, other sources, iconographical and ideological, that could have had an impact on the shape of the Officina Lazari’s device. The obelisk constituted an excellent device as it provoked manifold interpretations. It was a representation evoking wide connotations and referring to ancient tradition: a hermetic sign of godly wisdom and a symbol of earthly fame preserved in human memory. Finishing this short review, I would like to mention two more devices used by the printers of Renaissance Poland that are related to emblematic representations, but are not derived from them. The first one is Terminus, a device of Hieronim Wietor, who worked in sixteenth-century Kraków. The second one, a goat nibbling on a willow tree, was a sign used by Maciej WirzbiĊta, a Calvinist printer active in the same city from 1555 onwards. The representation of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries, is of course to be found in the Emblematum liber of Alciato. Although the emblem was not present in the early editions of the book, it appeared in the Venetian

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edition of 1546. Before, however, Terminus found his way into Alciato’s book, he had been used in Krakow, as a printer’s device of one of the city’s publishers, Hieronim Wietor (Fig. 7.10). The appearance of Terminus among Alciato’s emblematic compositions constitutes the most visible proof of the influence of Erasmus’ writings and the impact of Alciato’s personal connections with him with regard to his emblem book. 22 The Kraków printer’s device also has the Erasmian source: Hieronim Wietor is to be counted among the most enthusiastic early sixteenth-century admirers and promoters of Erasmus’ work in Poland. Following the editions of Frobenius, Wietor printed in Kraków most of the Erasmian titles.23 The fact that Wietor used Erasmus’ personal symbol as his printer’s device is one of the manifestations of this enthusiastic approach towards the works of the Dutch humanist. Wietor used the Terminus device for the first time in 1523, in an edition of the famous handbook Opus de conscribendis epistolis. The imagery of the mark was clearly based on Quentin Metsys’ medal (Fig. 7.11). The Terminus on the printer’s device and the image of the god on the Erasmus medal are not, of course, identical, but the similarity between the two representations is not limited only to the subject. The author of the Kraków woodcut followed Metsys and showed Terminus in profile, although the god’s shoulders and torso are captured from the front. In both works Terminus’ forehead is exposed, his hair long and flowing in the wind; he also has a beard (on the printer’s device) and stubble (on the medal). The bust is set upon a square base. Metsys placed the herm on a rocky mound overgrown with grass, while the author of the woodcut interpreted this element as a steep, rocky hill with a gently rounded summit. The Kraków representation also copies the medal’s distribution of majuscule letters in the word “Terminus” on the base. The author of the woodcut also borrowed the idea to place the motto “Concedo nulli” horizontally level with the god’s mouth, as if Terminus himself was uttering these words.24 Yet another proof confirming the direct relation between Wietor’s mark and Metsys’ work is the eschatological meaning of the mottoes that accompany the image of Terminus. In 1523, Greek, Latin and Hebrew inscriptions were added around the frame of the woodcut of the Roman god: the first, Greek one: “ÓȡĮ IJȑȜȠȢ ȝĮțȡȠà ȕȓȠȣ” (Keep the end of a long life in view) is the sentence that comes from the legend of the Erasmus medal.25 It is much more difficult to identify the sources of the aforementioned device of Maciej WirzbiĊta: a representation of a goat nibbling on a tree, used for the first time as a printer’s device in 1563 (Fig. 7.12). It was a

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punning device, since it referred to the printer’s surname, as a willow-tree in Polish is wierzba; it also linked with the symbolic tradition wherein willow seedlings were a sign of good tidings and a willow-tree with young branches symbolized the Church that continues to grow despite oppression. 26 Readers acquainted with the visual code of the time were expected to interpret WirzbiĊta’s device as the symbol of the printer’s perseverance in faith and as an announcement of his publishing programme: largely religious, Calvinistic and Evangelical. The emblematic references of this device should not be ignored, as the woodcut which from 1563 onwards was used as WirzbiĊta’s device first appeared in a collection of poems by Mikołaj Rej, a Polish vernacular writer and a Calvinist who most probably helped to establish Maciej WirzbiĊta’s publishing house. The collection was entitled ħwierzyniec, and was published in 1562 on Wirzbieta’s presses. It contained numerous emblematic compositions (Rej adopted some of them from Alciato and created his own emblems), among them one entitled “Wirzba na stałoĞü” (The willow tree as a symbol of perseverance). Apart from the motto, the tripartite structure of Rej’s emblem constituted a pictura of a goat nibbling at a willow-tree (and which can be easily identified with the image used later as WirzbiĊta’s device) and of an epigram that explains the composition’s meaning. The silent and constantly renewing willow-tree is a symbol of the Evangelicals, the co-believers of Rej and WirzbiĊta, who, while committed to Christ, persistently tolerate persecution from a world deaf to the words of the Gospel. The world is symbolized in the emblem by a greedy goat.27 It is worth noting that the Kraków woodcut of the willow-tree and goat was related to the European visual tradition. Illustrations showing nibbling goats rearing on their hind legs to reach high leaves are to be found in medieval manuscripts. But, surprisingly, horned animals were not perceived there as despoilers. The goat, and more precisely the she-goat, capra, was understood (according to the Physiologus) as a sign of Christ or of a soul striving to reach Him.28 The basis for the comparison was a conviction that mountain goats choose the best food, which grows up high and which is difficult to reach. The bestiary capra also functioned as a symbol of spiritual searching, moral progress, and going “upwards” and this tradition reverberates in Renaissance emblematics, for example, in the works of Joachim Camerarius. In the second centuria of his Symbola et emblemata we find a pictura showing a goat climbing a laurel tree and reaching for leaves. The image is accompanied by the motto “Erigor ut erigar”, wherein the capra is a symbol of ambitions, the ability to overcome difficulties whilst striving for fame (Fig. 7.13). Moral

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interpretation of this natural phenomenon is supported by relevant quotations from the Bible and ancient authors.29 Thanks to the testimony of the Italian humanist Giulio Cesare Capaccio in Delle imprese trattato (1592) we also know that a similar image of a goat functioned as an impresa in sixteenth-century Italy. It is interesting to note that the feeding animal nibbles not on a laurel tree, but “a bitter willow-tree”. The visual presentation is accompanied by the motto “Mihi dulce” (It is sweet to me), whereas the entire composition is meant to symbolize the incessant drive towards virtue.30 Mikołaj Rej, from whose work WirzbiĊta borrowed an illustration to use as his device, could not have imitated Camerarius, as the second centuria of Symbola et emblemata was published in 1595. It is perhaps possible that wide reading allowed him to encounter the willow tree impresa mentioned by Capaccio in Delle imprese trattato. However, both of these sixteenth-century representations of goats climbing tree trunks constitute testimony to the presence of the motif in Renaissance culture. The Polish willow tree is most probably rooted in the same tradition as the Italian and German works. However, something worthy of mention here is the fact that the Polish use of the motif modifies in an original way the iconographical heritage of wider Europe: the old scene, thanks to the shifting of accents and a new interpretation, transforms it from a symbol of persistent striving into one of persistent resistance. When analyzing the significances of old printers’ devices we need to be aware that their complicated relations with their cultural sources must remain hypothetical for us and their meaning mysterious, because we rarely possess evidence that they were intended to bear certain meanings by their sponsors, or that they were understood accordingly by sixteenthand seventeenth-century readers. The emblematic character of many printers’ and publishers’ devices in all European countries, including Poland, is, however, unquestionable and important, regardless of whether the inspiration came directly from emblem books or through the medium of the devices of foreign printers. This stimulates further research in order to establish how significant emblematic printers’ devices may have been in the transmission and reception of emblematic forms and ideas.

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Fig. 7.1. “Concordia”, Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libri II (Antwerp, 1567). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.2. Device of Joannes Steelsius. Similar versions were used from 1534 onwards. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.3. Device of Joannes Steelsius. Similar versions were used from 1542 onwards. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

Fig. 7.4. Device of Mateusz Siebeneicher. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.5. Device of Drukarnia Akademii Zamoyskiej (ZamoĞü Academy Publishing House). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.6. “Consilio et virtute Chimaeram superari, id est fortiores, et deceptores”, Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libri II (Antwerp, 1567). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.7. Symbolum 137, Achille Bocchi, Symbolicae quaestiones (Bologna, 1574). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.8. Device of the Officina Lazari. Used from 1583 onwards. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.9. Symbolum 48, Achille Bocchi, Symbolicae quaestiones (Bologna, 1574). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.10. Device of Hieronim Wietor. Used from 1523 onwards. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

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Fig. 7.11. Erasmus of Rotterdam portrait medal, 1519. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 7.12. Device of Maciej WirzbiĊta. Used from 1563 onwards. Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków.

Fig. 7.13. Joachim Camerarius, Symbola et emblemata (Nuremberg, 1592). Courtesy of the Biblioteka JagielloĔska, Kraków

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Notes 1

Krzak-Weiss 2006, 15-25. Eisenstein 1981, 9. 3 Sokolski 2000, 34. 4 Alciato was so named by a seventeenth-century scholar Bohuslaus Balbinus. See Pelc 2002, 18. 5 A frequently quoted passage, translated by Robert Cummings: see Cummings 1996. The same issue of Emblematica includes also a translation by Charles W. M. Henebry. 6 Daly, Silcox 1991, 186-187; Sabbe 1932, 72-119 (where, however, there are no examples from Poland); GrzeĞkowiak 2007. 7 Mann Philips, 1964, 171-180; Wolkenhauer 2002, 165-185. 8 P. Buchwald-Pelcowa 1981, 109-112; Vandeweghe, Op de Beeck 1993, 68-69, 224-227. 9 Krzak-Weiss 2006, 141-142. 10 Sabbe 1932, 108-119; McKerrow 1949, xxv; Daly and Silcox 1991, 186-187. 11 Kowalczyk 1980, 12-40. 12 Similar images were used by Charles Périer (from 1550, in Paris) or Christoph Corvinus (from 1584, in Frankfurt am Main). See Buchwald-Pelcowa 1983, 76-78. Bellorophon appeared also in English devices: see: McKerrow 1949, figs. 117 and 166. 13 Kowalczyk 1980, 172; Kowalczyk 1981, 355-356. 14 Translation after Watson 1993, 68 and 145. 15 It was known, for example, by Pierio Valeriano Bolzani (citing Grzegorz Naziansenus), and propagated especially by Lodovico Ricchieri in Antiquae lectiones, published for the first time in Venice in 1516. See Watson 1993, 145. 16 It is worth noting that Pegasus was connected not only with the victory over the Chimera, but with the Muses, and was regarded in the Renaissance and in classical literature and art as a symbol of fame, first and foremost the fame of an artist and scholar. See De Girolami Cheney 1998, 309. 17 Dannenfeldt 1959, 8-15. 18 Yates 1964, 179; Czerkawski 1992, 113. 19 Chojecka 1976, 123-124; Miziołek 1994, 154-160. Numerous representations of obelisks appear also in sixteenth-century (and later) emblem books. They interpret the image of obelisk in many ways but most of them are rather irrelevant for decoding the meaning of the Officina Lazari’s device. See Henkel and Schöne 1967, 1222-1226. More detailed information on the origins and meaning of Januszowski’s printer’s device is provided in KiliaĔczyk-ZiĊba 2007, 75-96. 20 Heckscher 1947, 177-181; Miziołek 1994, 161-163; Pelc 2002, fig. 15. 21 The obelisk image appears in Bocchi’s work as both an element of an emblematic composition and a type of a “monument on paper” or design of a gravestone. It was designed for Ugo de’ Pepoli, a young man who died in 1543. E. S. Watson believes that its appearance must have been inspired either by the dead 2

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man’s personal device or the family’s coat of arms, as Girolamo Ruscelli, in his work Le Imprese Illustri, published in 1584 in Venice, gave the count Fabio de’ Popli as an impresa of a broken pyramid – a monument visually close to an obelisk. See Watson 1993, 110. 22 The influence of Erasmus’ Adages upon Alciato was made clear by Claude Mignault’s commentary on the Emblemata (1571). The impact of Erasmus’ work on Alciato is also revealed in contemporary editions of Emblemata and in the work of emblem researchers. See, for example, Woods Callahan 1989, 73-90. 23 The widespread knowledge of Erasmus’ work in sixteenth-century Poland has been a subject of many works, among others, Cytowska 1972 and Glomski 1997. 24 Smolderen 1994, 349. 25 For more on Terminus as Erasmus’ symbol and sixteenth-century interpretations of it, see Wind 1937; Panofsky 1969; and McKonica 1971. 26 De Cleene, Lejeune 2003, 726-740. 27 Winger, 1975, 419-420. In the emblematic tradition a willow tree was named frugisperda (after Homer’s Odyssey) and presented as a negative example by Alciato, Camerarius and other writers: see Henckel and Schone 1967, from 244. 28 Kobielus 2002, 153; Rowland 1973, 80-85. 29 Joachim Camerarius himself eagerly used the Physiologus when working on his emblems. See Praz 1964, 47-48; and Papy 2003, 220-221. 30 Tung 2006, No. 0973. A goat nibbling at a tree is to be found in Ferrante Carrafa’s impresa in the collection Le imprese illustri. See Girolamo Ruscelli, Le imprese illustri, Venice 1566, 219. According to the commentary, a goat eats a plant called dictamnos, Physiologus’ symbol of Christ. See Kobielus 2002, 153.

PART II: EMBLEMS IN DISCOURSES OF POLITICS, POWER AND PRESTIGE

CHAPTER EIGHT THE MEDAL AND ITS REVERSE: ICONOGRAPHIC MODELS IN THE CONFLICTS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE CRISTINA FONTCUBERTA I FAMADAS

From their inception, medals were used to commemorate significant historical events as well as to honour distinguished individuals with portraits. In these areas, the medal as a form of propaganda has been extensively researched. However, there have not been enough scholarly enquiries directed at how medals were used to criticize individuals, institutions or historical events. With this in mind, this essay focuses on the “other side of the coin.” Nevertheless, the themes are vast and so the issue at hand cannot be covered fully within the scope of one essay. Nonetheless, by looking at a few specific examples one can gain a better understanding of important factors in critical medals, including how these works emerged, the images they presented, the models they used, the advantages they offered their commissioning agents, and the techniques of persuasion they deployed. At present, literature on this topic is limited and, at best, fragmentary. No contemporary study exists about the use of medals as a form of social critique during the early modern period: nevertheless, some research on related issues and within a particular context are worth highlighting, such as the now classic works by British scholars including Hawkins and Pierrepont, and more recently by Mark Jones and Philip Attwood.1 By way of contrast, controversial prints of the enemy produced by European nations during the early modern period are better known: their aim was to ridicule enemies within the framework of various conflicts and wars, and they were used as a propaganda tool during, for example, the religious wars of the sixteenth century or the Spanish invasion of the Netherlands. Even in the political climate of France under Louis XIV we find some images of protest—some of great vehemence—which have been analyzed in several articles. But these visual protests, or “counterpropaganda”,

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as some scholars have called them, were also manifested by images minted in metal. In effect, medals, along with the graphic or visual arts, were used as a form of critiquing society, and both works in bronze or silver and on paper or canvas borrowed from the same pool of imagery. Subsequently, engravings and broadsheets bore some of the most daring images during the religious wars of the sixteenth century where they were used to ridicule both factions’ enemies. Pinkerton was among the first authors to shed light on these matters during the eighteenth century, and he affirmed that medals served as the signal representative form of political and religious satire before the emergence of the printing press. Furthermore, Pierrepont averred that medals created during this period were equally as brusque and obscene as engravings and broadsheets. Nonetheless, they were increasingly important in contributing to the success of the Reformation.2 One of the most frequently depicted images was the iconography representing the controversial Pope-Devil or Cardinal-Fool (Fig. 8.1) that can be found both on paper and metal. Arising as an attack against the Catholic clergy, its visual success was very extensive, especially when one considers how many works have survived to modern times, and how even as late as the seventeenth century stamps were printed with the same imagery. The iconography of these double heads was also reproduced within paintings, porcelain, ceramics, gems, games counters and, of course, in prints, and began to emerge frequently, especially after the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. It is believed that the first works of this kind appeared between 1537 and 1542 as direct attacks against the Catholic Church. They were based on the association that Luther made between the Pope and the Devil. The images were repetitive, albeit with certain variations, such as whether the satirical figure wore a papal tiara or cardinal’s galero, whether clerical status was indicated by cross or orb, whether the Devil wore horns like a goat, a satyr, or like a donkey’s ears, or whether the Fool had a hat and bells. Furthermore, many believed that the beardless face was based on the image of Pope Leo X. Some medals were inscribed with the number 666, alluding to the number of the Beast in the Revelation of St John, though Catholic partisans identified this apocalyptic figure as Luther. Actually, the prototypes for these designs were attributed to Nicholas von Amsdorf, the first Protestant Bishop of Nuremberg, who in 1542 helped Luther translate the Vulgate into German. Yet, given that the majority of these works were anonymous and that the images were so similar makes it difficult to catalogue them or even to confirm this data.3 Anonymity was frequent throughout all conflicts: as a consequence of the

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essential polemic of these works, they often were censored. During this period, the objectives of Charles V’s prohibitions were to halt images deemed impertinent, and this led to such material being suppressed. During Henri IV’s reign in France, there existed the contrôleur general des effigies. That the authorities felt it necessary to institute such controls indicates the anxiety satirical images generated among the powerful. The effectiveness of their censorship can be measured by the lack of modern scholarship on this material, and as a register of its reception. Consequently, one silence provides further explanation for the other. Since the Reformation, the parallels between satirical images represented on paper and metal were frequent: the iconographic models were present until the end of the seventeenth century, during which time Europe was plagued by religious and political conflicts.,n France within the context of the religious wars, the Huguenots were successful in using these types of satirical medal. Dutch artists such as Theodor de Bry created an engraving in 1588 where the Pope-Devil image appears. It is based on a painting by an anonymous Dutch artist preserved in Utrecht.4 In relation to this, scholars such as the eminent art historian E.H. Gombrich acknowledged the popularity of these medals, especially ones that disparaged the Pope. While both Protestants and Catholics minted satirical medals, the Lutherans can be credited with inventing the form, and as Cartier stated, “the affirmation preceded the negation just as the work preceded the parody”.5 As we have seen, the creators of these pieces tended to remain anonymous, but in some cases works were signed by artists, some of whom were quite well known. For example, during the Reformation, Peter Flötner participated in anti-Catholic critiques. In Figure 8.2, one sees a caricature of the pontiff.6 Subsequently, it is a different interpretation of the Pope-Devil prototype in which the Devil is whispering into the Pope’s ear, inspiring him to sin. This image was also represented in works on paper, such as Erhard Schön’s famous engravings.7 Yet, given the quantity and repetition of similar works representing different conflicts within the early modern era, as well as their inherently complex iconography, greater analysis of this theme is required. One medal of discerning quality was made by Hans Klur in 1546. Here, the Pope is caricatured as Laocoön, and, in the process, the value of the sculpture, which the Pope had exhibited with great pride, is diminished.8 Titian was actually the first artist to parody it, back in 1506; that is, immediately after it was unearthed and placed in the Vatican (Fig. 8.3). The transformation of the heroic group into monkeys has been analyzed in many articles, and its significance has been widely debated.

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According to Janson, it might represent a satire on those doctors who still followed Galen; the Greek physician had dissected monkeys and was criticized by Andreas Vesalius, teacher of anatomy, and a friend of Titian. According to Muraro and Rosand, this is a declaration with a humorous undertone about the superiority of Art over Nature, as Aretino had proclaimed. 9 In any case, it is not surprising that Protestants seized the opportunity and used it as part of their arsenal against popery. In the case of Klur, the offending image of Paul III is shown sprawling on the ground; he is riding on top of a serpent while some figures defecate on his tiara. In this case, the model that constitutes the centre of the invention is a sculpture, perhaps even one by Titian. Nonetheless, the same scatological imagery can also be found in other engravings which pertained to proponents of Reformation satire. Cranach the Elder illustrated Luther’s treatise Abbildung des Papstums in 1545, and in one of his woodcuts we see people defecating on the papal coat of arms, as well as on the papal tiara. On the right side of Melchior Lorch’s 1545 engraving, The Pope as a Wild Man, the Devil, with a cardinal’s hat, appears seated over a papal bull on which he defecates. 10 Essentially, artists who worked on these types of images frequently took as models images which had been previously diffused on propaganda medals. That is to say, inverting the positive images that glorified the enemy became one of the most habitual resources used within critical works and counterpropaganda. In reference to anti-Catholic prints, Scribner asserted that “awe is inverted to crude familiarity, dignity to indignity, religious respect to blasphemous contempt”.11 Both the ruling powers and their enemies immediately understood the importance that medals had in transmitting messages, and powerful monarchs such as Philip II of Spain or Elizabeth I of England used them for their own glorification. Nonetheless, their rivals also knew how to take advantage of medals as a form of criticism and protest. During the Revolt of the Netherlands and the build up to the Spanish Armada artists created engravings and medals in order to diminish the most powerful agency of the time, the Duke of Alba and his government representatives. The rebellion which took place in 1570 galvanized Dutch medallists: with the creation of an independent, Protestant republican state, as well as the emergence of a new cadre of wealthy merchants who became the Catholic monarchy’s new enemies, the context changed and so artists took on different commissions. For example, they denounced Philip and Alba as tyrants and continued to portray the Pope as the Antichrist or Devil. Using the same iconography from previous years, as Mark Jones confirms, “the

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Dutch Protestants converted the medal into an absolute pamphleteer art form”.12 One of the historical events that generated many works hostile to Spain was the defeat of the Armada by the English in 1588. The Dutch celebrated the English victory as though it was their own and in 1588 Dutch artists circulated commemorative medals (Fig. 8.4). On one side of the coin the Pope, kings, bishops and other important figures are gathered as a council; their eyes are blindfolded and they stand on ground covered with iron spikes. This satirical representation ably depicts the failure of Philip II, the Duke of Guise, and other princes to join together against Elizabeth. On the other side of the coin, there is a scene of wrecked Spanish ships: the Latin inscription states, “It is hard to hit the iron spikes. Oh, the blind minds, the men’s blind hearts. Only You, God, are magnificent and You do magnificent things; You God, are the only one” and “Veni, Vide, Vive, 1588”. It was completed in Middelburg, probably under the orders of the prince.13 Furthermore, not only were the most important events illustrated with subversive pieces, but minor episodes as well. In 1587, artists articulated their opposition to the governorship of the Earl of Leicester by creating different medals: one piece shows the Dutch falling in the fire of Leicester’s government while trying to escape the smoke of the Spanish regime.14 Leicester was a convinced Protestant who led an expeditionary force of English troops to help the Dutch; at first he was acclaimed as a saviour, but he soon became a controversial figure because, among other things, his soldiers proved insubordinate, he banned commerce with the enemy, and finally, attempted a failed coup d’état. Some Dutch observers also thought that through him Elizabeth wanted to exercise absolute control over the Northern Netherlands. In this regard, polemical medals and engravings frequently shared iconographical models, sometimes in a more faithful way than others. In a chain with a medallic pendant (Fig. 8.5), elements of two known engravings are reproduced. They were produced in response to the Spanish invasion of the Netherlands: they are The Iconoclasm and The Duke of Alba’s Throne, both by Franz Hogenberg.15 One can see some identical scenes in the medallic design. This example illustrates the other uses of polemical medals. For example, some carry drilled holes that indicate they were once worn as pendants by partisans of each group. An even more useful approach encompassed an individual wearing a set of rival insignia. Indeed, as Pierrepont confirmed in his analysis of the Reformation, “worn by Catholics in a Protestant district, or vice-versa, they probably would have saved the carrier from many problems”.16

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The Netherlands clearly achieved high levels of artistic sophistication during the period of the Duke of Alba’s government. But, decades later, the invasion of Louis XIV forced engravers and medallists into renewed frenetic creativity. Indeed, as in France and England, large numbers of Dutch medals were struck reflecting the principal ideas of the period, trends which confirm the important role played by medals in these societies. An important Dutch school of medallists emerged in the 1680s comprising of Jan Smeltzing, Jan Luder and Jan Boskam. Their medals showed impressive narrative content and reflected, on occasion, current religious and political struggles. They also ridiculed Louis XIV with wit and conviction. Under Louis, medals were widely admired and exploited and consequently a contrôleur général des effigies was created by the French government in 1672 to thwart forgeries and to control production. Soon afterwards, the Metallic History was created which served to immortalize the king, and in turn, the State. It appears that this ambitious programme had been proposed by Pierre Antoine Rascas, curator of the Medal Cabinet under Henri IV. Rascas’ arguments reveal the important role of medals: on one side texts and illustrations could be combined, whilst on the other the artist could set forward the inalterable and immortal image of the person to be commemorated. These were characteristics promoted and exploited by the French monarchy up to the time of Louis XIV. For Rascas, without medals “the living and certain memory of all great princes ... would be entirely lost”.17 Under Louis XIV, the control and production of medals intensified with the foundation of Petite Académie by Colbert in 1663. Also important was the publication of the Médailles sur les Principaux Evénéments du Règne de Louis le Grand. It was published in 1702 and contained 286 medals which encompassed seventy-seven years of French history and set out to glorify its monarchy. Nevertheless, their detractors knew how to evade censorship and although production was a monopoly controlled by the Academy, the Sun King was not in any way immune from attack. Peter Burke, who has analyzed the “the reverse of the medal” in his book The Fabrication of Louis XIV, affirmed that the powerful “impact” of the underground printing press included the falsification of the official history of Ménestrier in 1691.18 As in former conflicts, if one of the objectives of satirists was to invert the official image that the Academy sought to promote, then the victories of Louis were transformed into mockeries in the hands of his enemies. In one piece, we find the inscription Venit, Vidit sed non Vinci (a similar inscription to the medal against the Armada), but the image shows the king falling from the Netherlands towards Versailles in the distant background. Furthermore, an image of women driving a carriage alludes to

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Louis’s well known penchant for mistresses. His preference for the company of courtesans over military engagement is ridiculed, opening up Louis to charges of cowardice and poor governance. Indeed, these accusations were common critiques of his regime, and feature in engravings and some paintings with similar illustrative themes, such as the anonymous engraving that represents the king and his harem in the battlefield. 19 In a painting by Joseph Werner, a Swiss artist who was unsuccessful in the French Court, Louis appears as an elderly satyr participating in a bacchanal with one of his lovers, Mme de Maintenon. It seems possible that Werner produced this work as personal revenge against his former patron.20 The inversion of the image was a common resource for medallists, and according to Jones, there is one medal unrivalled in its satirical edge. The image is a caricature of another medal that celebrates the triumph of France through the depiction of Louis as Apollo; in the satirist’s hand, however, this triumphal figure is transformed into the Colossus of Rhodes shown in a state of collapse as a result of its own intrinsic weight.21 Louis’ alliance with the Turks and his irreligiosityespecially after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were also attacked in medals that contradicted the virtues disseminated by him. In a medal of 1685 we see a diabolical trinity of a dragon with the Pope, a Frenchman, and a Jesuit which refers to the theologian Pierre Jurieu who affirmed that the destruction of the Huguenots was prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The beast is represented on top of quartered Protestants, while on the reverse other victims are shown being hanged or led through the streets in chains.22 Because medallic art was not geographically widespread, foreign medallists were commissioned to produce medals when a conflict required it. This was the case in England, where the production of medals remained in the hands of foreigners. There was a significant interest in medals in England, but production tended to be the preserve of the Dutch for the most part, just as it had during the period of the Armada. The lack of local or autochthonous works can be explained by the fact that the painted miniature, an English speciality, played a similar role to the medal in disseminating small portraits. However, the Civil War of 1642-1648 led to an increase in demand for portraits as signs of loyalty both for Royalists and supporters of Parliament. Here, the medal was the ideal way of promoting these positions, and medals of this period understandably used miniatures as their models. Hence, in England, these two forms of visual art were combined. According to Hawkins, who in 1885 published an important catalogue of British historical medals, a new era began in the history of the

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British medal after the raising of the Royal Standard in 1642 which signalled the beginning of the conflict.23 It is also worth highlighting some medals that attacked Catholics, not least anti-Jesuit satires that arose during the Popish Plot of 1678. Public hysteria had reached a peak with the discovery of the body of Sir Edmund Godfrey. One medal shows two monks strangling Sir Edmund with the legend Justice Killers to his Holiness. The Pope, inspired by the Devil, scrutinizes them and the inscription reads Rome’s Revenge or Sir Edmund Godfrey murthered in the Pope’s Slaughterhouse.24 The polemic was also translated onto medals in response to the rule of the Catholic king, James II. With the Revolution of 1688-1689, William of Orange and his British supporters used all the persuasive instruments at their disposal, including treatises, engravings and medals, to “shape the opinion of a wide sector of society”, according to Schwoerer in his study of the Revolution’s propaganda. 25 Schwoerer avers that never before in Europe had such means been used for a unique purpose on such a scale and with such effect. In order to discredit the enemy, a rumour was spread stating that the heir of the king and Mary of Modena was illegitimate. Indeed, this issue even caused William of Orange to order an investigation. Some satirists invented vehement compositions attacking the status of the Prince of Wales. Hence, the windmill, which was meant to symbolize vulgar ascendancy, was used in the shields of fictitious arms and represented the heir to the throne in engravings and medals. Various medals allude to the prince’s illegitimacy, such as a Dutch medal in which Truth opens the door of a cabinet to a Jesuit, probably Father Petre, the queen’s confessor. It was said that he might be father of the false heir, the one who let trickery pass in the name of a child with pyx and crown; the name on the door is inscribed Jacobus Franciscus Edwardus supposititius.26 With the crowning of William and Mary, twenty-eight commemorative medals of a political character were minted. One of them criticizes the Catholic James and all of the typical elements of anti-Jacobite propaganda are present. On one side of the medal is a crowned Belgian Lion, representing William, with the hat and lance of Liberty in one hand and a banner with a Christian monogram in the other. The Lion ejects James II and Father Petre who cradles a child with a windmill in his arms. The snakes underneath their feet indicate discord and something diabolical, and in the distance a French boat waits for them. On the other side, two figures identified as the Princesses Mary and Anne, appeal to Jupiter’s throne (again, an allusion to William of Orange), while their father, Saturn (James II) who has conspired against the interests of his son, devours a boy. It is understood that James II, just like Saturn, wanted to ruin his son-in-law by

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introducing a fraudulent heir during the succession. Consequently, he was expelled from the kingdom. 27 The same type of imagery appears in contemporary engravings, and the fables of Saturn and Jupiter also appear within poetry. 28 There are numerous visual or graphic examples of this critical trope, and some, such as those carried out by Romeyn de Hooghe are distinguished by their quality and invective nature. After the publication of an official engraving by Bernard Lens of Mary and her son, an anonymous work appeared which introduced into the composition the figure of Father Petre, thereby changing its significance. More elaborate and complex images also repeated the idea of the illegitimacy of the throne. In the engravings Europe alarmaded by the son of a windmiller, or Epiphany of the New Antichrist, there is a parallel between the windmill of the boy and the crucifix of the clergy, with diabolical implications. In the The Flight of Papacy from England, Father Petre drives a carriage containing the king who is taking a rosary, a cross, the baby, and his toy. In Sic itur ad astra silicet, Father Petre is shown as the central protagonist surrounded by all his vices.29 The Jacobites did not remain quiet in the face of these literary and visual satires of their king, and they accused Mary of patricide. Subsequently, they compared her to the Roman matron Tullia, who persuaded her husband Tarquin to kill her father in order to inherit the throne. The propagandistic medals were changed in oppositional terms.30 One pro-Orange medal was designed by the radical Whig John Hampden and executed by John Roettier. It depicts Jove thundering against Phaeton who is driving a chariot over a burning landscape: that is to say, James II has almost destroyed his government in England and has been displaced in order to save it.31 The Jacobites identified Phaeton and the chariot with Tullia (Mary) who steps on the remains of her dethroned father. The accusation directed towards Mary was that she was a woman who betrayed her duties as a daughter. This notion, which was disseminated by her enemies, disturbed Mary enough to ban plays such as King Lear or Richard III. This reaction proves to be very revealing in terms of the effect that the visual arts can have. The dissemination of these messages is strongly related to the transmission of the models used in these works. We have seen from our examples that it was common to use the same theme on paper and on medals, or to borrow a motif from another medal. One can see this “recycling” of imagery in an engraving from 1689 that revisited the theme of the Pope-Devil and the Cardinal-Fool. 32 It pertains to the conflict of 1689 in which the dispute against the Catholic monarchy gave new life to these old images hostile to the Pope and the Roman Church.

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Works on metal and paper sometimes had even closer ties, especially since it was common for medals to be sold by booksellers and individuals who sold engravings; another factor to consider, therefore, is that artists in both media often knew each others’ work. Thus, as Jones confirms, there were references on medals to contemporary engravings; furthermore, within engravings there were also references to medals, so their relation to one another was reciprocal. The print Le renversement de la monarchie universelle dating from 1706 contains representations of the obverse and reverse of the medal Ludovicus magnus, Anna maior. Equally there were references to prints on medals. The title-page of Ptolomeus, Copernicus en Merkuur op de Parnas over de Zon en de Waerled, is a likely prototype for the medal on the same subject struck in Nuremberg.33 At the same time, catalogues with illustrations of medals also existed. Within the pirated edition of Ménestrier’s medallic history, five satirical art prints were slyly introduced with a note saying that they were no less 34 pertinent in illustrating the career of Louis XIV. As Jones affirms, medallists had a strong need to include a lot of information within medals in order to achieve a complete satirical composition, and this had an enormous influence on drawings and composition. Taking the same model as the enemy in order to ridicule him could awaken one’s imagination and create tremendously original works, such as Klur’s medal caricaturing the Pope as Laocoön. Yet inverting the enemy’s model increased the dangerous possibility of losing one’s creative spirit. The advantages of inverting an already known image were clear in that, most likely, the resulting negative image could more easily be identified by the public. Moreover, the critique could have a greater impact because it would be more easily understood and disseminated. It is probable that in some works where the message was essential or the audience wide, artists preferred to sacrifice the finer points of detail or artistic refinement in favour of clearer images or even older themes. But as we have seen, some satirical medals are of very high quality. As with other conflicts, the Third Anglo-Dutch War was accompanied by an exchange of propaganda. One example, a medal by Christopher Adolfzoon initially struck to commemorate the Peace of Breda in 1677 provoked Charles II’s indignation and he insisted on having it suppressed (Figs. 8.6a and 8.6b).On the obverse we see the allegorical figure of the Netherlands triumphing over Ambition and the inscription, Procul Hinc Mala Bestia Regnis. Although the Dutch claimed they were referring to the grievances of the war, the image and motto were understood in England as specific allusions to the monarchy of Charles II. On the reverse, Peace triumphs over Ambition and representative symbols such as

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the crown, sword, coins and helmet lie below her feet. The British interpreted this clutter of objects as their national symbols lying in defeat. It is probable that Charles II was reflected in the face of the Mala Bestia since it bears resemblance to his image on a medal by Pieter van Abeele from 1660.35 There are several other details in this medal, but it is worth noting that many of the allegories represented are repeated in other works that commemorate Breda or the Battle of Chatham. Nonetheless, this medal is the only one with a satirical edge. Hence, it deals with a delicate theme, one which uses emblematic models characteristic of the era. Therefore, the figure of Holland holding a sceptre and being blessed by God as he takes Neptune prisoner stems from Dutch cartography, more specifically, from a work by Nicholas Visscher, who, according to Barbeau, saw the illustration of maps as an important form of visual propaganda. It also shows another example of the relationship between numismatics and other types of engraving. Although the Dutch used them for propaganda, medals were considered to be a form of historical record, kept in special cabinets and handed down to one’s heirs: they were meant to last for centuries, or even millenia. In an age so keen on history, “false historical Medals” were intrinsically provocative.36 Thus, the reaction of Charles II to Adolfzoon’s medal can perhaps be better understood. If subversive medals were considered such a sharp provocation, the Adolfzoon medal went too far: it “was not only political propaganda: it was personal invective meant for the English king himself, an attack on his very manhood”.37 The Breda medal also illustrates the effects and reactions that these types of work could provoke. It conveys the ambiguity that sometimes can be found within these types of works stemming from their complex allegories. Despite the excuses made by the Dutch governor in convincing the British ambassador that the figure referred to, “war, envy and discord”‚ the English did not doubt that the Mala Bestia was a direct attack on the monarchy. Indeed, Charles found the medal to be so offensive that even five years later he spoke so bitterly about it that the Dutch sought to recall all extant copies. But the Dutch believed Charles’s displeasure to be unfounded, and that his insistence on the suppression of the piece amounted to interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation; in any case, they protested, Charles had authorized anti-Dutch medals during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.38 So, it is clear that polemical medals were used by both sides in this conflict, and it is interesting to see that the Dutch reminded Charles of this in order to undermine the grounds of his complaint.  One indispensable premise that created the conditions for polemical medals was a state of conflict between parties. However, not all conflicts

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were carried on with medallic commentary. In the case of Spain, for example, no medals of this kind were produced, despite Spain’s regular involvement in political and military disputes in the early modern era. Consequently, experts such as Javier Gimeno affirm that there is little written about Spanish medals. The most important reason for this is the fact that autochthonous production did not appear until the Borbón era in the eighteenth century. Moreover, bellicose medals did not develop until the Napoleonic Wars. Previously, as was the case in other European monarchies, medals were used by Spanish monarchs like Charles V as instruments of propaganda. Yet, they commissioned German, Dutch and Italian artists to produce them. Under Philip V, a period of medal production began in the service of the throne and as a “national” art. Nonetheless, models and compositions were still imported from abroad. With Spain’s late introduction to medals, Gimeno concludes that, “as such, it was conceived within the classical realm of an institutional or official art”.39 Because of this and other causes, Spain was not promising terrain for opponents of the political regime: I have analyzed this peculiarity of the Spanish case in other studies.40 A grosso modo, this was as a result of the strength of an absolute monarchy and its union with the Church, the active role of the Inquisition as censors, the lack of a graphic art and medallic tradition, and the strict vigilance maintained over the representation of religious issues. Also of great importance was the fact that the Spanish Empire did not undergo its own Reformation, nor did it witness an important internal conflict powerful enough to inspire the use of visual works as a form of attack. On the other hand, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish monarchy frequently had to justify its acts of invasion through using images of triumph in propagandistic art. There was no need to use the visual arts to ridicule Spain’s enemies: triumphalist imagery emphasized instead the Spanish as victorious conquerors. However, Spain’s enemies used satire regularly and the Spanish Empire was the target of many visual attacks. In a Dutch medal from 1585, reference is made to the Richmond Declaration, in which Elizabeth I’s help is solicited by the Dutch after the Spanish occupation of Antwerp. On the obverse, the queen appears on the throne while two delegates proffer flowers. The inscription, Macte, Animi, Rosa, Nectare, Imbuta, (Gain inspiration, the rose is full of nectar), refers to Elizabeth’s help. On the reverse, in reference to the cities under Spanish control, we see a representation of two Spanish gentlemen feeding a horse and a donkey, symbols of the cities of Antwerp and Nimegen. The satirical inscription reads Spectra Ambrosia, Vescitor Feno. But as I have already remarked, the situation

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was asymmetrical and there are no Spanish medals corresponding to these Dutch examples.41 The visual arts, and specifically medals, were utilized as a form of attack during various conflicts within early modern Europe. The medal’s qualities were exploited by different factions within the same struggle: they recognized their durability, their rapid but controlled diffusion, their appeal to a more select audience, and their potential to be minted again. At times, medals shared the same iconographic models as engravings, the great weapon of polemic during this era, and the relationship between medals and broadsheets was reciprocal. They also shared similar means of diffusion and propagation; but it is important to bear in mind the different kind of audience to whom they were addressed. If the inversion of propagandistic themes was frequent within subversive medals, then one cause of the decrease in production was the weakening of power on the part of the target. While Louis XIV’s reign was at its zenith, the Academy produced many sophisticated medals. These subsequently dwindled as the regime ebbed. Alas, the same thing also occurred within Dutch workshops, and the cessation of hostilities resulted in the almost complete disappearance of polemical images. Peace had put an end to the insults.42

Fig. 8.1. Pope-Devil or the Cardinal-Fool, German, anonymous. Mid sixteenthcentury medal. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 8.2. Anti-papal medal, Peter Flötner; lead, 59mm, mid sixteenth century. Photograph by Nicolai Kästner. Courtesy of the Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich.

Fig. 8.3. Caricature of Laocoön, Nicolò Boldrini (?), woodcut after Titian’s design, c. 1550. Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

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Fig. 8.4. Medal celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Gerard van Bijlaer; silver, 52mm, 1588. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Fig. 8.5. Engraved silver medallion, anonymous, 68 x 77mm, after 1570. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Het Konincklijk Penningkabinet, Leiden.

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Fig. 8.6a. Obverse of medal celebrating the Peace of Breda, Christopher Adolfzoon, silver, 71mm, 1667. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

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Fig. 8.6b. Reverse of medal celebrating the Peace of Breda, Christopher Adolfzoon, silver, 71mm, 1667. Courtesy of the Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum.

Notes 1

Pierrepont 1927, 2. This is one of the pioneering studies on the subject, but the author explains that some scholars have previously paid attention to it, such as Etienne Cartier in Revue Numismatique (1851), 36-58. He also quotes some German articles, but affirms that much work is still to be done in this area. See also Jones 1988; and Attwood 2003. This paper was presented at the Winchester conference a year before the exhibition “Medals of Dishonour” opened at the British Museum. Concerning this exhibition, see Attwood and Powell 2009. 2 Pinkerton, Essay on Medals, 1789, Vol. 2, 42, cited in Pierrepont 1927, 1.

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3 This attribution was made by Klotz, following Juncker and Seckendorf: see Pierrepont 1927, 5. The writings by Luther in which he made this identification were his Life and the Table-Talk and the well-known pamphlet of 1544, Contra Papatum a Diabolo Fundatum. 4 For De Bry’s engraving, see Massing 1991, fig. 53; for the anonymous painting, see Zipj and Caron 1981, 29-33, fig. 16. 5 Quoted in Pierrepont 1927, 4. 6 Domanig 1907, plate 10.78; cited in Hill 1978, 111. 7 See Bartrum 1995, 92; Smith 1993, 3ff. 8 See Settis 1999, 4. For this piece, see Wischermann 1979, 113-145. 9 Janson 1952, 355-368; Muraro and Rosand 1976, 110-115, no. 49. 10 For these prints, see Scribner 1994, figs. 59, 104 and 134 respectively. 11 Scribner 1994, 165. 12 Jones 1988, 74. 13 There are other similar medals that contained the same anti-Spanish message. See Rodríguez-Salgado et. al. 1988, Chapter 16, “After the Armada”. 14 For this example, see ibid., Chapter 6, “War and Rebellion in the Netherlands.” The medal is preserved at the British Museum, London. 15 For a reproduction and description of both engravings, see Tanis and Horst 1993, cat. 2, 7 and 8. 16 Pierrepont 1927, 8. 17 Cited in Jones 1979, 2. 18 See Burke 1995, 129-142. 19 For these two works, see Burke 1995, figs 61 and 62. 20 This painting is preserved in the Collection Von Muralt of Zurich: see Glaesemer 1974, cat. 246 and 292. 21 See Jones 1979, 25, cat. 67 and 68. 22 See Jones 1982–1983, 120-126, cat. 14 and 15. 23 See Hawkins 1885, xiv-xvii. 24 See the description in Hawkins 1885, xvii. 25 Schwoerer 1977, 843. 26 Hawkins 1885, xvii-xviii. 27 Schwoerer 1989, 731-733. 28 The medal also appears in Hawkins 1885, 674-675, no. 48. A literary example is George Stepney, An Epistle to Charles Montague, Esq., on his Majesty’s Voyage to Holland, 7, cited in Schwoerer 1988, 733. 29 An article that analyzes polemical visual works during this episode is Harley and MacLeod 1989, 49-59. For the works discussed by Hooghe, see Griffiths 1998, 108-111, figs. 205 and 206; and Landwehr 1973. 30 Schwoerer 1989, 734-735. For Jacobite medals, Hawkins 1885, 662-663, no. 25. 31 Schwoerer 1989, 737, fig. 4. 32 Cillessen 1997, 172. 33 Jones 1982-1983, 210, figs. 75, 76 and 53. 34 Burke 1995, 140, fig. 60.

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35 Barbeau 1990, 11, fig. 2. It is a medal in silver entitled The Embarkation of Charles II at Scheveningen (70 mm) with a portrait of the King on its obverse. 36 Barbeau 1990, 15. 37 Ibid. 38 See Cillessen 1997, 22-23. 39 Javier Gimeno in Jones 1988, 311-351. For works on this matter, see, for example, Rodríguez G. De Ceballos 1994 and Cano 1994. None of these works indicates the existence of a Spanish medal with a strong, satirical intention. See, for example, Checa et al. 1998; Checa 1999; and Soly 1999. 40 The results of this research have been presented at other congresses; see Fontcuberta i Famadas 2003; and Fontcuberta i Famadas 2006. 41 For a reproduction and commentary, see, for example, Bouza 1998, 560. 42 This article has been written under the auspices of the Research Group “Art i religió a Catalunya Durant els segles XVI I XVII: l’impacte de la Contrareforma en les arts visuals i l’arquitectura (AIRC)”, Ref. SGR200500079, and recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

CHAPTER NINE GOTHIC REFORMATION: EMBLEMATICS AND SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SWEDEN SIMON MCKEOWN     Undoubtedly the greatest bibliographical treasure in Sweden is the

Codex Argenteus, or Silver Bible, dating from c.520 AD and preserved at Uppsala University Library.1 The importance of Bishop Wulfila’s fourthcentury translation of the Gospels into the Gothic tongue lies perhaps primarily in the fact that it marks the earliest surviving example of any written Germanic language. As an aesthetic object too, the Codex Argenteus is quite remarkable: the silver letters that give the book its name are inscribed on imperial purple vellum, giving a clear sense of the colour and exoticism of the Ostrogothic empire of Theodoric the Great. But although the pages evince that long-lost culture, the book’s binding dates from more recent times. It takes the form of a casing of beaten silver made in the latter half of the seventeenth century (Fig. 9.1). The Codex Argenteus was housed in this binding in 1668-1669 on the instructions of Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622-1686), the Chancellor of Sweden and of Uppsala University. He believed it was important to provide a suitably magnificent cover for the manuscript before donating it to the university in the greatest cultural bequest in the institution’s history. The book’s deposition in Uppsala’s library marked the end of its long peregrination from sixth-century Ravenna. The Codex had come to Sweden only a few years before. Looted by Swedish troops from the collections of Rudolf II in Prague in 1648, the manuscript was presented to Queen Christina by her general Hans Christoffer von Königsmarck. She was sufficiently uninterested in it to pass it to her Librarian Isaac Vossius on her abdication in lieu of unpaid salary.2 When Vossius brought the manuscript to his native Holland, its

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true importance was recognized by his uncle, the learned philologist Franciscus Junius. As Junius prepared an edition of the Gothic Gospels for publication, De la Gardie got wind of this incomparable treasure, and through the conventional, if spurious, understanding of the Gothic people’s Scandinavian provenance, appreciated the patriotic importance of the Codex to an emergent Great Power.3 Vossius accepted payment of 500 riksdalers for the manuscript which was duly dispatched to Sweden. In the competitive nationalist spirit of the late seventeenth century, this book was seen as evidence for a flourishing high culture in ancient Sweden centuries before literary instincts stirred in France, England, or Holland - let alone Denmark. In providing a new binding for the Codex Argenteus, De la Gardie enlisted the help of the leading practitioner of the visual arts in contemporary Sweden, the Hamburg-born court artist David Klöcker, later ennobled Ehrenstrahl (1628-1698). Ehrenstrahl’s design was then passed for execution to the court silversmith, the Swede Hans Bengtsson Sellingh (†1688).4 De la Gardie’s choice of binding was in many ways apposite, its precious material matching the manuscript’s common name, the Silver Bible. In addition, it offered satisfying aesthetic rapport with the silver script on the purple leaves. But it has also been suggested that De la Gardie was consciously imitating the heavy, costly bindings that encased important Bibles, Psalters, missals and hagiographies from the early Christian era to the Baroque.5 It was his purpose, too, to record his central part in presenting the book to the library: the back panel of the binding is taken up with De la Gardie’s coat of arms, a seventeenth-century inscription of his role as donor. But it is the front panel that draws the eye, and it is with this iconographical construction that we shall be chiefly concerned. It shows an allegorical scene set within a floral border. We see three principal figures; that of Time, depicted as an elderly winged man lifting a graveslab; a naked woman rising up from the tomb beneath; and, in the background, a bishop seated at a writing desk. De la Gardie identified this last figure in his speech of donation in 1669; it is, he tells us, “Ulfilas … shown seated, as if writing the said book”.6 He did not need to elaborate upon the identity of the foreground figures, because as educated contemporaries would have known, they represented the familiar iconographical pairing of Time and Truth. The scene illustrates the famous adage “Veritas filia Temporis” (Truth is the daughter of Time), an epigrammatic saw traceable to Aulus Gellius in the Noctes Atticæ of the 1st century AD, but of greater, if obscure, antiquity.7 According to this maxim, truth may lie concealed for years, but will be revealed with the

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passing of time, a concept that implied either the uncovering of falsehood and wickedness, or the acknowledgement of unrecognized achievement, service, or sacrifice. The idea of Truth as the Daughter of Time was transmitted to seventeenth-century readers through collections of apophthegms and sententiae—it appears, for example, in Erasmus’ great Adagia—and through many emblem books, including those of Hadrianus Junius, Geffrey Whitney, and Jacob Cats.8 It may have been from emblematic sources that De la Gardie received the idea for the binding: De la Gardie may be regarded as one of the most emblematically literate figures from Sweden’s Age of Greatness, with several discrete emblematic decorative schemas in his various residences and palaces, and numerous emblem books in his extensive libraries.9 In Ehrenstrahl’s interpretation of the Truth, the Daughter of Time theme, Winged Time raises a heavy gravestone to release a young woman from an underground vault. She emerges unclothed because she is the Naked Truth. In her left hand she holds a large folio inscribed “Codex Argenteus,” while with her right she gestures at a recessed room behind her in which sits the figure of Wulfila busy at his writing desk. Subtle burnishing of the silver creates a nimbus around Truth’s head: her resurrection brings enlightenment, an understanding emphasized in an engraving of Ehrenstrahl’s design by Dionysius Padt-Brugge used for the frontispiece of the edition of the Codex Argenteus prepared by the court poet Georg Stiernhielm and his Board of Antiquities in 1671 (Fig. 9.2).10 Just as Truth is uncovered by Time, so Wulfila is uncovered by putti who lift up a curtain to grant us a privileged glimpse into his hidden studiolum. Two more putti bear up a cartouche with the inscription “Vlphila redivivus et patriae restitutus cura M[agnus]G[abriel] De la Gardie R[egni] S[veciae] Cancellarij Anno 1669” (Wulfila brought back to life and restored to his native land by Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Royal Chancellor of Sweden, in the year 1669). Scholarly analysis of this deployment of the Truth and Time allegory in conjunction with Wulfila has been slight. Perhaps it has been thought self-evident that De la Gardie or Ehrenstrahl alluded to the act of donation being a patriotic recovery of a manuscript long concealed. After all, in his speech of donation, De la Gardie celebrated the fact that he was able to “restore [the manuscript] to the nation once more after it had been for so many centuries in the hands of strangers”.11 The only scholar to enquire further into the allegory of Sellingh’s cover was the late Allan Ellenius who recognized that the Time Revealed by Truth topos bore particular fascination for Protestants who saw it as a cipher for Psalm 85, 11, “Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from

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heaven”, a verse regarded as typologically foreshadowing the Reformation. (It might here be added that a text from Matthew 10 was understood in a similar fashion: “There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”). For Professor Ellenius, the figure of Truth needed to be understood as “synonymous with God’s Word”.12 It is from precisely this perspective that we need to view Ehrenstrahl’s design, because the silver binding of the Codex Argenteus appears to advance some tendentious claims. Sellingh’s work articulates a robust and controversial interpretation of the Gothic Bible’s significance, rhetoricizing the ancient manuscript as a proto-Protestant document, and re-imagining it as allied to the Reformers in the protracted Reformation controversy. Evidence for the location of Wulfila’s Ostrogoth Gospels in the Protestant, specifically Lutheran, milieu is signalled by the words set into a banderole at the extreme top of the panel. The legend reads “verbum Domini manet in æternum” (The Word of the Lord endures forever), the text from the First Epistle of Peter that served as the fundamental tenet of Lutheranism, the logocentric conviction of the primacy of Biblical authority over all doctrines and teachings of the Church. The mysterious survival from the Ostrogothic Empire is hailed as proof of the inexorable and enduring force of God’s Word. It should come as no surprise to find Time and Truth enlisted in such service: as Fritz Saxl demonstrated in his classic study of the Veritas filia Temporis theme, the notion of Time and Truth was seized upon by Reformers at an early date. Its visual formulation first appeared in 1521 as the device of the Protestant printer Johann Knoblauch of Strasbourg, publisher of works later to be included on the Index. His woodblock device showed the Naked Truth rising up from out of a cave and was moralized by the text from Psalm 85 noted above. The image made its way into England in the mid 1530s as frontispiece to William Marshall’s Goodly Prymer in Englyshe, a vernacular prayer book showing Winged Time leading Naked Truth from a cave with the texts, “Truthe, the doughter of tyme,” and “Tyme reveleth all thynges.” Similar to this is the printer’s device of Conrad Badius of Geneva, a publisher associated with the Calvinist community. The motto accompanying his woodcut emphasizes Time as subject to Providence: “God by Time restoreth Trvth and maketh her victorious.” In all of these conceptions, Truth is implicitly linked with the agents of Christian reform: for long concealed, True Religion is revealed to the light. The degree to which Truth Revealed by Time had become integrated into the lexicon of controversy is illustrated by its use among Henry VIII’s

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offspring. In 1553, Edward VI, Henry’s sickly Protestant heir, died at the age of fifteen. During his reign, an anonymous balladeer had accused English Catholics of locking Lady Truth in a cage, but expressed confidence that Time, “the father of Veritie”, would rescue her from fraud and deceit. Now Edward was dead, his half-sister Mary implemented the re-Catholicization of England. Mary took as her personal motto “Veritas filia Temporis”, wherein she subverted the Edwardine imagery by presenting herself as the daughter delivered by Time to be true heir to her father’s throne. This device was repeated on coins of the realm, the Great State Seal, and in her personal arms. It was seemingly in direct response to these assertions that Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth in turn laid claim to the notion of Truth, the Daughter of Time in her iconography. It appears as early as her triumphal entry into London on 14th January 1559, the day before her coronation. During the course of the procession, the royal party was detained by a carefully stage-managed interlude at Cheapside. An eyewitness describes the scene: Between … hylles was made artificiallye one hollowe place or cave, with doore and locke enclosed; oute of the whiche, a lyttle before the Quenes Hyghnes commynge thither, issued one personage, whose name was Tyme, apparaylled as an olde man, with a sythe in his hande, havynge wynges artificiallye made, leadinge a personage of lesser stature then himselfe, whiche was fynely and well apparaylled, all cladde in whyte silke, and directlye over her head was set her name and tytle, in Latin and Englyshe, “Temporis filia, The Daughter of Tyme” … And on her brest was written her propre name, whiche was “Veritas”, Trueth, who helde a booke in her hande, upon the which was written, Verbum Veritatis, the Woorde of Trueth.13

The informant goes on to describe how “Veritas” gave the book to Elizabeth, whereupon, “as soone as she had received the booke, [she] kissed it, and with both her handes held up the same, and so laid it upon her brest”. The significance of this action was that the book offered to her was an English translation of the Bible, a book which had been banned by Mary. When she had first spotted the stage, as yet empty of actors, Elizabeth is reported to have asked her advisors what entertainment was intended: “And it was tolde her Grace, that there was placed Tyme. Tyme? quoth she, and Tyme hath brought me hether”.14 Her response shows the ubiquity of the Time/Truth conceit, as well as her willingness to perform the mythopoeic role created for her. The layers of subtle iconographical significance extended still further: as David Daniell has sensationally discovered, the precise version of the English Bible presented to the queen was the 1557 edition of the New Testament printed by Conrad Badius in

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Geneva which carried on its title-page his printer’s mark of Truth Revealed by Time (Fig. 9.3).15 Elizabeth assured the London crowd that she “would oftentimes reade over that booke.” For reformers across Europe the essential truth that needed to be revealed was the contents of Holy Scripture, released as from a cave from the ecclesiastical language of Latin into the free understanding of the vernacular. Indeed this concept was dramatized in an emblem from the 1560s by the French Protestant noblewoman Georgette de Montenay, and later adapted for English readers by Geffrey Whitney. In this emblem, Montenay shows an open Bible borne aloft by divine wings, tearing the book from chains binding it to Satan lurking below in a cave. In Whitney’s subscriptio we learn that “Thovghe Sathan strive, with all his maine, and mighte,/To hide the truthe, and dimme the lawe deuine:/Yet to his worde, the Lorde doth giue such lighte,/That to the East, and West, the same doth shine”.16 The controversy between the reformers and Rome concerning free or mediated access to the Bible was virulent and divisive. The intractability of the problem was sealed by the pronouncement issued by the Council of Trent on 8th April 1546 prescribing that the Latin Vulgate translation of Jerome should “be regarded as authoritative in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expository discourses, and that no one may make bold to presume to reject it on any pretext.”17 Of course, Wulfila’s Gothic translation of the Gospels did not challenge the authority of Jerome’s Vulgate: it predated it. This simple fact seems to have dictated the way Wulfila is depicted on the silver binding. We see Wulfila set back in a recessed space, bent forward as he works on the large folio volume set before him. Behind him stand an arched doorway and a wall lined with bookshelves. Of course, this general iconography recalls traditional representations of the evangelists. But certain factors in this representation of Wulfila compel us to see another familiar iconographic template: the visual trope of “St Jerome in His Study.” Painters had focused specifically upon the figure of Jerome in this guise with particular frequency from the end of the fifteenth century. It was to become an ever-more popular topos throughout the sixteenth century as the Counter-Reformation gained momentum, and was treated in the seventeenth century by such figures as Caravaggio, Rubens, La Tour, and Vouet. These representations show Jerome, the doctus maximus, seated at his desk in the act of reading or writing. The work Jerome is preoccupied with in these repeated scenes is, of course, his translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin, known from the 1590s as the Vulgate, and established by Tridentine edict as embodying unchallengeable authority. If

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we map Sellingh’s representation of Wulfila onto this archetype, we find interesting results. An identical semiotic matrix is common to both: seated scholar/translator/priest, desk, manuscript, pen, bookshelves, ecclesiastical clothing, enclosed space, seclusion. In the seventeenth-century Swedish context this paradigmatic representation of the holy man inspired by God to labour over an authoritative and enduring scriptural text is appropriated and reinvented. The renovated image displaces Jerome from his sanctified position as conduit of God’s Word to mankind; an alternative narrative of divine inspiration granted to Wulfila supplants the traditions of the Roman Church which, ironically, had argued that Jerome’s text was written before “Roman eloquence was corrupted … by Gothic barbarism”.18 The re-application of the scholar-in-his-study iconography associated with Jerome to another figure seems to have had a precedent elsewhere in northern Europe, although on the other side of the confessional divide. Erasmus, great editor and champion of Jerome, established his international reputation with his four-volume edition of Jerome’s Epistolae. This huge editorial undertaking, almost half of the full Opera omnia published by Johannes Frobenius in 1515 and sponsored by Pope Leo X and the Emperor Maximilian, offered texts free from the corruptions and errors Jerome’s words had accumulated over centuries. Having worked for so long upon his author, Erasmus believed he had unique empathy with Jerome’s mind and methods. But as Lisa Jardine has shown, there are moments in the scholar’s prefatory Vita Hieronymi where “the attentive reader might judge that Erasmus is claiming Jerome as his own.”19 She advances the idea that “Erasmus chose to inhabit the familiar figure of St Jerome, with all the grandeur and intellectual gravitas that might thereby accrue to him”, evidence for which she finds in written and graphic portraits of the scholar.20 Certainly, in the most familiar images of Erasmus, those by Metsys, Holbein, or Dürer, we find him poised at his study desk, books to hand and on shelves, in every line, the man of letters. His academic cap can be mapped onto Jerome’s cardinal’s hat; his ascetic face captures the dedication of the divis litterarum princeps. The texts worked on by both men are often one and the same, the later scholar restoring the precious words of his forebear. Erasmus’ melding of his own identity with that of the Doctor of the Church was no act of humility or sublimation; in fact, it was just the opposite. The alignment of his character with so great a mentor amplified Erasmus’ reputation before Europe. And, as Professor Jardine highlights, he actively forged these comparisons in his writings. He advances a particularly bold claim twice in epistles, the idea that through his scholarly endeavours, Jerome is restored to life (Hieronymi redivivus). In the

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dedicatory epistle of the Jerome volumes addressed to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, Erasmus declares, “I have borne in this such a burden of toil that one could almost say I have killed myself in my efforts to give Jerome a new lease of life.”21 But the work has been worthwhile, because through it, Jerome has been “recalled to the light from some sort of nether region”.22 In a second letter, this time addressed to Cardinal Raffaele Riaro, Erasmus asks, “I wonder if Jerome himself expended so much effort on the writing of his works as they will cost me in the correction? At least I have thrown myself into this task so zealously that one could almost say that I had worked myself to death that Jerome might live again.”23 This idea of “Hieronymi redivivus”, broadcast through Erasmus’ printed correspondence as well as the prefatory matter of the Jerome edition, leached into commonplaces of praise. Albrecht von Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, for example, marvelled that through Erasmus’ agency “Jerome has returned to the light of day, and is as it were raised from the dead”.24 François Deloynes maintained that he saw “Jerome himself … returning to the light of day … in a new garment of immortality and restored to his original and native glory.”25 It is tempting to see a knowing allusion to this encomiastic literature of “Hieronymi redivivus” in the phrase chosen for De la Gardie’s cartouche on Sellingh’s silver binding. The inscription on the cartouche echoes the Erasmian panegyria: De la Gardie’s donation effects “Vlphila redivivus”, the restoring of Wulfila to life. Once again, as in the iconographic superimposition of Wulfila in his study for the figure of Jerome, the desert father is displaced from the formula, and Wulfila given pre-eminence. The great advocate of monasticism, clerical celibacy, Marian devotion, and author of the Roman Bible is pitched from his chair to be replaced by the Gothic bishop. But to what effect is this suppression of Jerome deployed, other than as an obvious gesture of Lutheran antagonism towards Roman sanctification of the Vulgate and its author?26 I think we can usefully approach this problem by considering the claims Swedes advanced concerning what they understood to be their native translation of scripture, and its relation to that written by Jerome. It was known to seventeenth-century scholars that Wulfila (c.311-383 AD) and Jerome (c.342-420 AD) were close contemporaries, with the crucial seniority lying with Wulfila. The Gothic Bible, therefore, could possibly be seen to pre-date the Vulgate of Jerome and hold claim to greater authority and legitimacy.27 We know that considerable symbolic importance concentrated on the Gothic Bible; a generation of Swedish scholars in thrall to Olof Rudbeck’s patriotic agenda discerned in its pages vital indications of holy learning and piety among their ancestors. To their

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understanding, the book was now at last naturalized among its own people, as De la Gardie proclaimed in his donation speech and through the inscription on the cover. In the former, De la Gardie let it be known that he was moved to present the book to the university out of consideration for “the love [he bore] for the antiquities of [his] native land.”28 De la Gardie was at the forefront of the Gothic movement in Sweden, and his love for Hyperborean antiquities led him to establish the Antikvitetskollegium (College of Antiquities) in 1666, an academy that sought to document and preserve runestones, cairn tombs, stone circles, and inscriptions. It also made money available to bring manuscripts and books relating to Swedish or Gothic antiquity into the country, and sponsored archaeological expeditions and reports. It was for his efforts in such areas that De la Gardie became hailed as “Gothicae dum Palma Minervae/Gardius assurget ramis Oleisque virebit/Aeternas” (the prime sapling of Gothic Minerva, De la Gardie, [who] grows high with his branches of eternally flourishing olives).29 The author of this tribute was Andreas Stobaeus, Professor poeseos extraordinarius at Lund University, a position secured through De la Gardie’s wide-ranging patronage. The appeal to the ancient Goths as mythic forbears of the Swedish nation was not simply part of the rhetoric of legitimation common among emergent nation states in the seventeenth century. It was nurtured in large part by the successes of Gustavus Adolphus and his generals against the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War and its satellite conflicts. Had it not been the Goths who had toppled Roman supremacy in antiquity? Now, with almost typological patterning, Swedish armies were once more the terror of Europe; the heirs of the Goths were once again in the ascendancy over decadent, exhausted Rome. The iconography of Sellingh’s binding points towards the superiority of Wulfila’s Gothic Gospels over the Roman text of Jerome. This is further reflected in the patriotic publication of the Codex Argenteus prepared by Stiernhielm and published two years later under De la Gardie’s aegis. This polyglot edition sets out its four texts in pre-meditated and deliberate order of precedence: Gothic, Icelandic, Swedish (called Swedo-Gothic), and finally “vulgar Latin”. The term used for the language of the Romans on the title-page is “vulgata Latina”, strictly “common Latin”, but with an accessible pejorative connotation. It is also noteworthy that the Council of Trent’s commendation of Jerome’s Bible referred to it as “hæc vetus et vulgata editio” (the translation in common use).30 To what extent might we see the stooped figure of Wulfila leaning over his desk in Sellingh’s silver binding and Padt-Brugge’s frontispiece as an encoded claim that the Swedish people, through their progenitors, the

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Goths, acknowledged the light of True Religion many centuries before it was enkindled within the breasts of Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Tyndale, or Calvin? The idea that the silver casing for the Codex Argenteus may articulate strong patriotic ideas inflected with reformist ideology corresponds to findings by historians working within the visual culture of late seventeenth-century Sweden. Art-historical scholars have drawn attention in recent times to the effects of a nationalist competitive tendency in Swedish art of the Stormaktstid (Age of Greatness), a mentality driven by a patriotic urge to rival and challenge more established European nations in the arena of representation and prestige.31 Some of these tendencies are present in Ehrenstrahl’s composition for the silver binding of the Codex Argenteus. In addition to celebrating De la Gardie’s bounty and benevolence, the cover expresses patriotic pride in an artefact that was believed to form a link between contemporary Sweden and a glorious Gothic past. But more than this, the codex showed signs of an early and vibrant religious feeling among the Gothic people, a faith uncontaminated by the errors infecting the Roman Church, and only revived in Sweden since the reforms of Olaus Petri. Wulfila provided a vernacular Bible for his people a generation before Jerome set the Word into the language of the Vulgate, a Gothic gesture of evangelical openness that echoed the simplicity of the primitive church. With the text of Wulfila in every sense recovered, the Swedes could appeal to a precious emblem of their supposed forebears, and find in it a reassuring line of continuity as Goths, ancient and modern, faced the world with sword in one hand and scripture in the other.

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Fig. 9.1. Front cover of the Codex Argenteus, Hans Bengtsson Sellingh and David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, beaten silver, c.1668-1669. Courtesy of Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek.

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Fig. 9.2. Frontispiece to 1671 edition of the Codex Argenteus, Dionysius PadtBrugge and David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, copper engraving, 1671. Courtesy of Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek.

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Fig. 9.3. Title-page of The Nevve Testament of Ovr Lord Iesus Christ (Geneva, 1557). Courtesy of Lambeth Palace Library, London.

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Notes * For a more detailed account of the iconographical themes in the silver binding of the Codex Argenteus, see McKeown 2005a. 1 The famous book bears the proud catalogue number UUB DG 1. The text can be read in various editions, principally the photographic facsimile made by Uppsala University in the early twentieth century: see Codex Argenteus 1927; see also the definitive scholarly edition, Codex Argenteus 1854. Of the voluminous secondary material, see especially Munkhammar 1998; Friesen and Grape 1928; and Kleberg 1984. 2 See especially Grape 1927; Tjäder 1975; and Munkhammar 1998, 133-136. 3 Concerning Gothicism in Imperial Sweden, see McKeown 2009, 146-148; and Hansson 2009. 4 Little is known of Sellingh’s life or career: see Knut Andersson, “Hans Bengtsson Sellingh,” in Svenskt konstnärs lexikon, ed. Johnny Roosval, Gunnar Exholm, Ragnar Josephson et al, Vol. 5 (Malmö: Allhems, 1967), 115; and Upmark 1925, 60. 5 See Munkhammar 1998, 147-151. 6 “…Ulphilae beläte sitter lijka som skrifwandes bem:te bok….” Cited in the transcript of De la Gardie’s speech of donation published in Uppsala Universitet Akademiska Konsistoriets Protokoll, Vol 8, 241-243. The speech is discussed in Åslund 1992, 184-190. 7 Aulus Gellius, Book 12, xi, 393-395. 8 Junius 1565; Whitney 1586; Cats 1632. 9 See Lindahl 1968, 72-82; Ellenius 1973-1974, 160-192; Boström 1980, 91-110; Rosell 1988; Rosell 1994; and McKeown 2005b. 10 D.N. Jesu Christi SS. Evangelia ab Ulfila Gothorum in Moesia Episcopo Circa Annum a Nato Christo CCCLX Ex Græco Gothice translata, nunc cum Parallelis Versionibus, Sveo-Gothica, Norræna, seu Islandica, & vulgata Latina edita (Stockholm, 1671). 11 “…det [Bible] hafwer kunnat Patriae igen restituera, sedan det så månge hundrade åhr hafwer främmandes händer swäfwat”: cited in Tjäder 1975, 70, n. 5. 12 Ellenius 1966, 87. 13 Cited in Nichols 1788-1823, Vol. 1, 50. 14 Ibid., 48. 15 See Daniell 2003, 276-277. 16 Whitney 1586, 166. 17 Cited in Rice 1985, 185. 18 Ibid., 84. 19 Jardine 1993, 68. 20 Ibid., 4. Her thesis is elaborated particularly in Chapter 2, “The In(de)scribable Aura of the Scholar-Saint in His Study: Erasmus’s Life and Letters of St Jerome,” 55-82. 21 Cited in Jardine 1993, 68. 22 Ibid., 71.

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Ibid., 78. “Brandenburg to Erasmus, 13th September 1517,” in Erasmus 1974-2003, Vol. 5, 118-119. 25 “Deloynes to Erasmus, c.25th November 1516,” in Erasmus 1974-2003, Vol. 4, 155. 26 Martin Luther had remarked in his Table Talk, “There is more learning in Aesop than in all of Jerome”; and “There is no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome. All he writes about is fasting and virginity.” 27 The two translations were separated by a span of 20-25 years. 28 Åslund 1992, 187. 29 See Andreas Stobaeus, Augur Apollo (Stockholm: Niklas Wankijf, nd [1672?]). The text has been edited in Stobaeus 1994, 60-101. 30 See Rice 1985 176. 31 This idea is strongly represented in Ellenius 2003. 24

CHAPTER TEN CELEBRATION TIME: THE IMAGO PRIMI SAECULI SOCIETATIS IESU AND ITS DUTCH ADAPTATION AS PART OF THE FESTIVITIES OF 1640 COMMEMORATING THE JESUIT ORDER’S CENTENARY LIEN ROGGEN

1. Introduction Lately when in Germany I met a gentleman who was in possession of a work which he believes to be unique, or nearly so. It is termed, - “Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu”. […] The gentlemen who saw the book with me are desirous of knowing the history of the publication and subsequent attempted suppression of this work, and also what the object of the original publication may have been.1

In 1856, the journal Notes and Queries listed this interesting question about the production and reception of the Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu (The Image of the Jesuit Order’s First Centenary). The journal only replied with a partial answer. Apart from contesting the uniqueness of the book, it briefly hinted at the object of the original publication, which was “to give a history of the Order from its foundation, with an account of its various missions”.2 Also, it attributed the book to De Tollenaere, the provincial of the Flemish-Belgian province at that time.3 Nowadays more complete answers can be given since over the years researchers interested in seventeenth-century Jesuit emblem books have paid more detailed attention to the Imago. This has resulted in partial analyses of its rhetoric, its adversaries, and its iconology, as well as in a comprehensive monograph by Salviucci Insolera.

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In this article, I would like to focus again on the Imago’s initial function and examine how it operated within the actual festivities on the occasion of the Jesuits’ centenary. In secondary literature, the Imago has been labelled not only a commemorative or jubilee volume, but a festive volume: “Lié à une fête, monument destiné à en laisser un souvenir durable, le livre est conçu lui-même comme une fête: ses différents chapitres spectacula aut ludi vocari possunt.”4 To begin with, I want to assess more precisely this festive character of the Imago. Secondly, I will concentrate on how the Imago functioned within the real festivities in applied form. In particular I will present and discuss the reproductions which were made of some of the Imago’s emblems and which were exhibited during the 1640 celebrations. To reconstruct this active participation of the Imago in the festivities, I will rely upon contemporary reports, and thus not only on the Annales Antverpienses by Daniel Papebrochius SJ (1628-1714) from some sixty years later, as has been done in previous research.5 Finally, I aim to pinpoint the stature of the Imago’s Dutch counterpart, the Af-beeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, which was approved on 17th December 1640 and appeared in February 1641 when the festive year had already ended, and therefore had other likely objectives. To know how and to what degree the Imago took part in the festivities, we have to go back in time. In 1639 the General of the Order residing in Rome, Muzio Vitelleschi, wrote a number of letters to all provincials to alert them to the Order’s anniversary and to advise them on the organization of the celebrations.6 Valentin, who studies the Jesuit theatre, has spotted some contradictions in the advice: on the one hand, Vitelleschi urged for prudence and modesty in display so as not to provoke public opinion, Catholic or otherwise; on the other hand, he wanted to mark the occasion with religious and literary events.7 As an example, the General attached to the letter the festivities programme of the Roman College, which listed masses, prayers, processions, triumphal arches, poems, riddles, paintings and theatre.8

2. The Imago: A Commemorative/Festive Volume Literary Events in Honour of the Centenary Among the literary events that were organized, many jubilee volumes can be counted.9 In the Belgian province a number of initiatives were taken of which the Imago was undoubtedly the most impressive.

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The French-Belgian province presented in 1640 two emblem books: De Iubileo Societatis Iesu ab ea condita anno saeculari MDCXL by Joannes Bourghesius, and Sacrarum heroidum epistolae by Joannes Vincartius. The former volume firstly discusses the meaning of jubilees throughout the ages and secondly focuses on its meaning for the Order.10 Of the latter volume, which fits in the tradition of (Christian) imitations of Ovid’s Heroides–a series of fictitious letters by mythological women convincing their lovers to return to them–only the third part concerns the jubilee.11 In a number of letters, famous Jesuits comment on the jubilee year. Each letter is preceded by an introduction on the subject, an oval engraving by Rucholl, a short explanation of the engraving, a motto, and finally the letter. In the final letter, “Societas Iesu Filijs suis, Anno suo saeculari”, the Order addresses its members and discusses the jubilee year. The engraving accompanying the letter brings together a few emblematic images by which the Order represents itself and its work and which are also found in the Imago, such as the palm tree12 (fertility under difficult conditions), the phoenix (resurrection and eternal life), ships (missions), indigenous people (heretics to be converted), and Jesuits tying up branches of a vine (controlling their own troops).13 In 1641 the Synopis primi saeculi Societatis Iesu by Jacobus Damianus appeared in Tournai. The consent to print dates from 12th January 1641 and the approbation was given a few days later, on 18th January. In six parts, called books, the Synopsis gives an account of the missions and hardships under the rule of the six successive generals (Ignatius, Lainez, Borgia, Mercurian, Aquaviva and Vitelleschi). The book has a clear chronological plan: in the margin of the pages run two timelines to indicate which event happened at what point in the Christian calendar (annus Christi) and in the first century of the Jesuits (annus Societatis). That the Synopsis focused greatly on the Society’s hardships can already be derived from the frontispiece, which clearly presents the Jesuits as a militant order. The centre of the frontispiece is occupied by a pedestal on which the title of the work is written and on top of which is placed a construction of shields, breastplates and helmets. Behind these, appear guns, axes and trumpets. From the firing guns, smoke is released carrying the logo of the Order in the same way as the trumpets are blaring “IHS”. The Order’s logo is present on all the pieces of armour, as well as on the banners. The two main enemies the Order had to overcome during the first century, namely Envy and Heresy, are presented allegorically on both sides of the pedestal. On the left, Envy is portrayed with her hair made of snakes and tearing books into pieces. On the right, Heresy, wearing an indigenous head-dress and a straw skirt, is depicted with her hands tied behind her back and with

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broken idols scattered around her. The Synopsis’ French translation, entitled Tableau racourci de ce qui s’est fait par la Compagnie de Iesus durant son premier an, appeared in 1642. Except for the missing frontispiece, the Tableau racourci is a rather faithful translation. In the Flemish-Belgian province, Provincial Joannes De Tollenaere complied with General Vitelleschi’s call as he convened the most renowned Jesuits from the province to consider not only how to celebrate the centenary, but how to preserve a recollection of it.14 It was Joannes Bollandus–working on the Acta Sanctorum, a critical edition of the saints’ lives—who conceived the idea of the Imago.15 Under his supervision the Imago came to be a historical-encomiastic volume giving the history of the Order in six books. In the address to the reader, one is informed that each book parallels a phase in Christ’s life: birth, progress, works, sufferings and glory. The sixth book is entirely devoted to the Flemish province and repeats the chronology of the previous books. Published in a folio volume of almost a thousand pages containing rhetorical and poetical exercises, 126 exquisite emblems, and a rich monumental frontispiece, the Imago was intended to impress. Of the Latin volume, costing eighteen guilders, many copies were sent to booksellers and Jesuit houses all over Europe.16 The Order’s general Vitelleschi who had warned of the danger of selfpraise, eventually approved of the volume.17

The Festive Character of the Imago As Fumaroli has already observed, the Imago is not just a commemorative volume, but a festive volume. I will now discuss at more length the festive character which shows itself both in the presentation of the volume and in its content, namely in the emblems, poems and prose parts dealing with the jubilee. Concerning the presentation, it is clear that the Imago was intended to impress. Upon opening the Imago the reader first lays eyes on the large, Baroque and architectural frontispiece–designed by Philippe Fruytiers and engraved by Cornelis Galle the Elder–in which the central figure is a female allegory of the Jesuit Order (Fig. 10.1).18 The allegorical figure is seated, bearing the IHS logo on her breast and looking up to heaven. In her left hand she holds a burning cross which stands for the triumph of the Order despite its sufferings, while her right hand is holding a pen and resting on an open book. Lying to the right of her feet is Old Father Time, referring to the past hundred years and the aspiration for an eternal dedication to God, while on the other side a cardinal’s hat and a mitre are lying on the ground, signalling the Jesuits’ promise to turn down any

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ecclesiastical honours. Below the allegory of the Order hangs a scroll with the full title of the work, and underneath this is a cartouche with information concerning the printer and year of publication. The two putti hanging on the bottom of the scroll and the two putti holding the cartouche present the four basic vows of the Order; from left to right: obedience, obedience to the pope, chastity, and poverty. On both sides of the allegory stands a column on top of which a cherub is blowing a horn and holding a plate: the plate on the left shows two capital Ls, the Roman numeral for fifty, while the plate on the right shows the Roman numeral C which stands for one hundred. The numerals on both sides clearly refer to the centenary of the Order. From the top of each column hang three emblems supported by a range of putti. Each of the plates, six in total, exploits the metaphor of the Society/the Moon receiving light or inspiration from Christ/the Sun and refers to one specific book within the Imago.19 On the base of the left column a palm tree is depicted and accompanied with the motto “In senecta uberi” meaning that the Order bears fruits in old age. On the base of the right column a burning phoenix is shown together with the motto “Bene patientes erunt” signifying, according to the address to the reader, the Order’s renewal and rejuvenation.20 Finally, three putti representing martyrdom, wisdom, and purity crown the allegorical figure of the Order. These last three putti spanning the allegory, and thus connecting the two columns, make the construction look like a triumphal arch. In his article on the evolution of the emblematic frontispiece to the theatrical frontispiece, Ralph Dekoninck mentions that books with an architectural frontispiece consisting of, for instance, a triumphal arch, give an encomiastic feel to the book and activate the metaphor of the book as monument.21 The triumphal arch–together with the trumpet heralding that Loyola embraces one hundred years (“Centum Loyola amplectitur annos”) and the plates mentioning LL and C–overtly emphasise the festive character of the volume. Additionally, Dekoninck has pointed out that such monumental frontispieces concern the same visual culture of ephemeral architecture found in joyous entries and religious or profane festivities with their complex iconographical programmes including sculptures, paintings and tableaux vivants.22 Elaborating on the bookmonument metaphor, Fumaroli had already described the Imago as an “église fictive”: “un monument architectonique, avec sa façade (le frontispice), son péristyle (la dédicace et la préface) et ses six ‘chapelles’ [the six chapters] que le lecteur-pèlerin visitera à la suite”.23 So, the reader of the Imago is invited to enter through the triumphal arch and festive frontispiece which not only sets the tone for the rest of the encomiastic

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volume, but serves as a visual table of contents: it announces in the six emblems hanging from the columns, the six chapters of the volume. In addition, a number of iconic and textual elements of the frontispiece occur later on in the volume: for instance, the palm tree (50), the phoenix (580), the compass (323), the two Ls (49) and the motto “Centum Loyola amplectitur annos” (49). Apart from the frontispiece, the Imago proves to be a “fête littéraire et typographique”, to use Fumaroli’s words, also in its content.24 Following the frontispiece, the address to the reader–which includes an explanation of the frontispiece and a synopsis of the volume–finishes with the remark that the writers do not intend to simply recount the Order’s history, but to express in the next pages the happiness they feel because it is the year in which the centenary is celebrated.25 With two chronograms they subsequently focus on the festive year. The capitals of the first chronogram are formed with a passage from Psalm 32 that declares that the righteous must rejoice in the Lord, namely “eXVLtate, eXVLtate IVstI In DoMIno”: taken together, the letters make up the Roman numerals for 1639. In the next chronogram, taken from Luke 1, “My spirit has rejoiced in God, my saviour” and by which they wish to thank God in the jubilee year, the year 1640 is concealed: “eXVLtaVIt spIrItVs MeVs In Deo saLVtarI”. Next, under the heading “Dissertationes prolegomenae de anno saeculari et iubileo” the reader finds a vindication for celebrating the centenary (Dissertation 2-6) and a note on the style of the Imago (Dissertation 7).26 From Dissertation 2 to 6, the Jesuits defend their right to celebrate their first hundred years by referring to different religions and communities that in the course of history also marked jubilees. The defence starts by explaining how every hundred years the Romans used to organise festivities to celebrate the establishment and rise of the city of Rome and thank the gods with ludi saeculares. Under the reign of Emperor Constantine the celebrations were stripped of their idolatrous practices and were inspired by the Christian faith. Also the Jews had jubilees: after God had led the Jews out of Egypt, the Jews included one year of joy in every fifty during which slaves were freed and debts were cancelled. Among Christians, it was Pope Boniface who decreed in 1300 that a jubilee should encompass one hundred years. The justification continues by mentioning the private practice of priests, clerics and married people to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. The vindication reaches its culmination point in the sixth dissertation dealing with the centenary of the Lutherans and their opposition against the Jesuits’ jubilee. It goes that if the sect of Luther celebrated their centenary, the Jesuits have more reason to rejoice in theirs. After all, the Lutherans only spread their belief in a

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small part of Europe and they did not convert people in Africa, America and Asia, whereas the Jesuits succeeded in both missions. Moreover, the Jesuits fought heavily against the Lutherans and re-converted new Lutherans to Catholicism. Also, the figure of Luther cannot stand comparison with Ignatius. The reader is finally encouraged to take all the arguments into account and to decide that the Jesuits have every right to celebrate their hundredth anniversary. The seventh and last dissertation briefly discusses the structure and style of the volume. To prevent the jubilee volume from being a sterile and dry narration (“neque sterilis placuit neque nuda narration”, Imago, 23) the Imago was interlarded with songs, orations and emblems (“Ne nuda sit narratio, adiuncta carmina item orationes & emblemata”, Imago, 23). Some of these poetical exercises concern the jubilee as a topic, such as a horoscope of the Order, founded on the feast day of the saints Cosmas and Damian (29), a jubilee song directed to Jesus and Mary for taking care of the Order (“Carmen saeculare ad Iesum et Mariam pro incolumitate societatis”, 40), a prayer on the patronage of the Holy Virgin and the success that befell the society under the Virgin’s custody (“Oratio quinta: De patrocinio D. Virginis, & felicitate Societatis, quod sub eius singulari sit tutela”, 133) and two emblems. The first emblem entitled “Jubilee of the Society of Jesus” (Societas IESU iubileum) shows in the pictura a lute (“cithara”) lying on a table, while the motto taken from Psalm 94 states “Let us praise God our Saviour” (“Iubilemus Deo salutari nostro”, Imago, 47-48). In the subscriptio the Order is prompted to celebrate the centenary by singing and playing the lute. The emphasis in the first three verses that all those who bear the name of Jesus have to sing merrily the song of their centenary (“Age, Saeculare carmen/Cane laeta turba, nomen/Domini gerens IESU”) is repeated further on in the poem. The subscriptio continues that after all the hardships, the resistance from Calvin and Luther, but also the successes (e.g. in the missions), it is now time to celebrate. Immediately following upon this very enthusiastic and festive emblem, the reader encounters the emblem which includes in its pictura the two capital Ls and in its motto the phrase “Centum LoyoLa amplectitur annos” which were already present in the frontispiece (Fig. 10.2).

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2. The Public Display of Emblems from the Imago during the Festival Summer of 1640 Multimedia Spectacle in Antwerp Since General Vitelleschi’s letter was addressed to all provincials, everywhere that the Jesuits resided festivities were planned. The aforementioned Synopsis reports the celebrations in major European cities such as Rome, Madrid and Vienna.27 According to archival records of the Flemish-Belgian province reporting the events of 1639 and 1640, the Jesuits also organised celebrations in the different cities of the province where the Order had a house.28 I will focus on Antwerp, the city where the provincial resided and where the initiative was taken for the publication of the Imago.29 In Antwerp, the festivities started on the eve of 27th September 1639 with a speech on the jubilee year that beseeched the crowd to thank and praise God.30 The speech was followed by music and singing. The festivities continued on 27th September, the day on which in 1540 the Order had officially been approved by Pope Paul III. In the early morning church bells and trumpets announced the feast day and drew crowds of people to the Jesuit church.31 At ten o’clock, a chanted mass was conducted by the Bishop of Antwerp who consecrated the banner of the centenary hanging from the vaulting. The banner, made of damask, was decorated with the images of the first “founders” and protectors of the Order, Jesus and Mary, supporting a golden ring from which flames flashed all over the banner. In the ring, which stands for eternity, two capital Cs are entwined: the first C refers to the past century, the second C to the next century. In the church which was decorated with flowers, silver chandeliers and statues, the Jesuits also put up an emblematic construction: a large panel showed the heavens enlightened by the Sun. The accompanying motto “Manet ut sol” compared the Order with the everlasting Sun.32 Although the main focus of the 1639 celebration was on the interior decoration of the church and its indoor events, some outdoor spectacle was also organised.33 In the evening of 27th September, people could witness a sound and light show with fireworks. From the tower of the Jesuit church Jesus’ name was lit up by the glow of fire, and in front of the church a huge pole was erected which carried thirty burning pots and on top a nest with a phoenix.34 The phoenix carried a motto: “I am not dying, but will be reborn” (Non morior, sed orior).35 Clearly the iconology (ring, Sun and phoenix)–which also occurs in some emblems of the Imago–emphasised the Order’s aspirations for eternity.36 In 1640 the festivities took place from the eve of 31st July, the

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feast day of the Order’s founder Ignatius of Loyola, until 7th August.37 During this festive week several masses and sermons were held, spectacles with fireworks and music were organised, and a theatre play was staged. According to the report of the Antwerp College, the Jesuit church was now decorated even more splendidly than in 1639.38 Indeed, as one walked through the double doors over which Fame blew a horn, one stepped inside a richly adorned sacred space. Of interest to us are the side galleries where emblems from the Imago were put on display.

An Emblem Exhibition of the Imago Whereas Papebrochius’ Annales Antverpienses–which was the only source in past research–mentions only briefly the reproductions,39 the report of the Antwerp domus professa from 1640 describes in great detail where and how exactly the emblems were displayed in the church.40 The report states that the reproductions were hung in the side galleries of the church which consist of a lower and upper storey. On the base of each column of the upper storey hung a panel supported by two little angels. Each panel showed a reproduction, painted in colour, of a pictura from the Imago. In addition, the accompanying epigrams were shown. In between every pair of angels hung a garland of greenery. Remarkably, the waxen faces of the fifty-four angels were modelled after the faces of the pupils attending the college, in a style like that of Rubens, who had, in fact, designed the ceiling paintings for the side galleries.41 The report proudly adds that the likenesses were so great that parents could easily recognize their sons and the sons themselves.42 The display of emblems from the Imago in the church on the event of the centennial was clearly anchored in the practice of affixiones. Affixiones, or emblematic exhibitions, were exercises in rhetoric and part of the education of Jesuit colleges. At fixed moments in the school year and at occasional celebrations, pupils conceived emblems that fitted the theme selected by their teachers.43 These exhibitions were attended by clerical and secular dignitaries, but also by parents, and offered the Jesuits the ideal situation for promoting their college education. In 1640 they probably aimed at propagating the grandeur and invincibility of the Order. That parents recognized their sons, the pupils, in the faces of the angels holding the emblems, affirms that the exhibition of the Imago was embedded in the college practice of affixiones. Possibly the staff of the Antwerp college, perhaps together with their pupils, organized the exhibition. Very likely they consciously chose the location of the galleries where they used to train youngsters (pupils as well as the poor city youth)

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in the consolidation of their faith. Pupils were often recruited for festivities: not only for affixiones, but for cavalcades and plays in which they acted. Furthermore, these plays were devised and directed by the teachers.44 In 1640 nearly four hundred pupils of the Antwerp college performed the play “Ludus Saecularis de ortu et progressu Soc. Jesu”. In other Flemish cities similar plays were scheduled. According to the report of the Antwerp college the play was welcomed with lots of applause and was staged four times to meet the public’s demand.45 Interestingly, the play’s synopsis overlaps with the Imago’s ground plan since its five acts greatly parallel the first five books of the Imago. The teachers who wrote the play clearly found inspiration in the jubilee volume. This procedure and method stresses once more how the Imago was adapted to fit in the festivities. In addition, it exposes a strategy of preaching to a wide public a sense of the Order’s self-assertive ideas formulated in the Imago. Returning to the affixiones, it is worth mentioning that the emblems from ephemeral events were often saved from oblivion when they were reproduced in commemorative volumes. This is, for instance, shown by Porteman for the Brussels college.46 Dimler noted something similar for commemorative emblem books on Borgia’s canonization.47 For our case study, the Apparatus emblematicus published by the college of Vienna in 1671 is revealing. Its frontispiece still shows how the emblems were originally hung in the Jesuit church of Vienna.48 Clearly, the emblems were exhibited in a similar way here as in Antwerp. Concerning the Imago, it has now become apparent that the normal order of first organizing an affixio and subsequently reusing its emblems in a commemorative volume was reversed. Indeed, the Imago’s privilege dates from January 1640 and the approbation from February. Shortly afterwards the jubilee volume was printed by Moretus. Only later, in the first week of August 1640, the emblems were displayed. However, the story of the Imago does not stop here. The Imago of which most Jesuit houses or colleges presumably had a copy to remember the centenary, found its way into affixiones held in colleges after 1640. In 1640, some pupils even received a copy as a prize.49 Commemorative volumes as souvenirs for the college and participating pupils would not just pile up in the college library, but would inspire future generations of pupils.50 In his monograph Porteman signalled how the Imago lived on in the later Brussels affixiones: the emblem with a fishing putto of the 1650 affixio went back to the emblem on page 177 of the Imago, whereas the emblem with a putto writing on a blackboard of the 1663 affixio was inspired by the emblem on page 722.51 More examples from the Brussels material can be given. For instance, in 1646 the students recycled the emblem with the pharmacist

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(Imago, 454 and IDC Ms.20305/ IMG.0028); in 1662 the emblem with an eagle taking a sparrow on its shoulder to the sky was influential (Imago, 724 and IDC Ms.20332/AMG.0056); and in 1666 the emblem with the sunflower functioned as a source (Imago, 194 and IDC Ms.20321/IMG.0026).52 In the college of Courtrai, students were likewise inspired by the Imago.

Ten Preserved Emblems of the Affixio of 1640 Only recently, some of the emblems of the affixio made for the festivities of 1640 have been rediscovered in the Carolus Borromeus church (the former St Ignatius church) in Antwerp by Father Rudi Mannaerts.53 In 1927 the Jesuit researcher Alfred Poncelet reported in his well-documented monograph on the Jesuits of the Low Countries that some of the reproductions were kept in the attic of the church.54 In total ten complete reproductions and a fragment of an eleventh were found set into large wooden doors.55 Two of these doors are still installed in a suite overlooking the choir, from which the nobility could follow mass. Apparently, the Order found the emblems of the affixio too precious to throw away. What happened to the remaining affixiones is not known. In fact, it is not even clear how many emblems were produced for the affixio. However, taking into account that there were fifty-four angels and a maximum of twenty pillars to be decorated, I estimate that around eighteen emblems were produced. Of these twenty pillars, either the two pilasters merging into the altarpiece or, less likely, the two pillars at the back of the church were not used. According to my estimations each emblem was then supported by two angels and the accompanying epigram supported by one angel, leading to a total of fifty-four angels. Of the ten emblems from the affixio, six deal with the religious vows, regulations and tasks of the Society (Imago, 195, 200, 202, 203, 322, 463), one with the jubilee (Imago, 49) and three with hardships and the Order’s adversaries (Imago, 566, 569, 577). With this colourful and attractive affixio the Order presented itself to the visitors of the church. Those visitors with knowledge of Latin could read the accompanying epigrams as well and unravel the interplay between pictura and motto – as was also the case in regular affixiones. When comparing the original picturae from the Imago with the reproductions, it becomes clear that the latter are not exact copies. Apart from the fact that the reproductions are all oil-on-canvas paintings rendered in colour and in a much larger format–measuring one hundred and twenty centimetres square, as they had to be seen from quite a

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distance–there are other and more significant differences between the original etched picturae and the later painted ones. The first and most striking difference is undoubtedly the presence of an amor divinus, clearly recognizable by its bow, arrow and halo, in each emblem of the affixio. In the emblems from the Imago there are only three picturae featuring an amor divinus–sometimes missing the bow and arrow–whereas the number of emblems with profane Cupids runs up to thirteen. As has been shown in past research by Dimler, Salviucci Insolera and Van Vaeck, the inventio of some emblems went back to emblem books from the secular tradition.56 Many of the Cupids in the Imago have been modelled after Cupids from profane emblem books, such as Vaenius’ Amorum emblemata (1615) and Heinsius’ Ambacht van Cupido.57 With respect to this, Van Vaeck showed that the Imago did not simply turn “profane love motifs into images of sacred love” nor annihilated “the profane discourse just by replacing it with a sacred narrative”, but that “[o]n the contrary some of the emblems in the Imago seem to activate and to incorporate the actual discourse of profane emblematics quite consciously.”58 In the affixio on the other hand, there seems to be a conscious choice for amor divinus: amor divinus is simply added to the pictura (cf. Imago, 49, 202, 566, 577) (compare Figs. 2 and 3); it occupies a completely newly designed pictura (cf. Imago, 200) (compare Figs. 5 and 6); it replaces an already present human figure (cf. Imago, 195, 203, 322, 463) or even Cupid (cf. Imago, 569). So, the figure of amor divinus becomes a constant value in each pictura of the affixio and it operates as a leitmotif which is not merely visual but meaningful. Indeed, it seems that amor divinus now turns out to be the visual embodiment in the affixio of the driving force behind the Jesuits’ project. In this way, the emblem in the Imago in which the pictura shows how amor divinus produces sparks by rubbing a stone against a metal bar is revealing (Imago, 714). The emblem treats how Ignatius of Loyola conceives the fire of divine love after being struck by a cannonball during the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. While Loyola recovered from his injury, he read spiritual texts on the life of Jesus, causing his religious conversion. Inspired by divine love, Ignatius would subsequently form his own Order and bring true Catholic faith to all people. Throughout the affixio then, divine love stands for the motivation behind the Jesuits. Also, besides simply having a deictic function, amor divinus often plays an active role in the affixio. This also becomes clear when taking into account the subscriptiones which were displayed in the church as well. By way of illustration, I will briefly discuss three picturae each representing a different mode of inserting amor divinus. The first pictura

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under discussion is reproduced after the emblem on the everlasting love of Ignatius for the Order (Imago, 49) (see Figs. 10.2 and 10.3). In the Imago the pictura shows two capital Ls, the Roman numeral for fifty, joined on top by a laurel wreath, while the motto declares that Loyola embraces one hundred years (“Centum LoyoLa amplectitur annos”). The image of the two Ls in the pictura making up hundred (years) is reinforced in the motto by putting the two Ls of Loyola’s name in capital. In the emblem of the affixio the laurel wreath is placed above amor divinus embracing the two Ls which suggests that it is now divine love supporting the Order as ardently as in the early years. This idea is in tune with verse 16 of the subscriptio that states that true love does not place limits of time on itself (“Nulla sibi verus tempora ponit Amor”). Also, the motto of the reproduction no longer renders the Ls of Loyola’s name in capital. For the inventio and dispositio of this pictura, the emblem on the Jesuits’ missions to India seems influential (Imago, 326) (Fig. 10.4) In this emblem an amor divinus is standing in between two globes while his left hand rests on the western hemisphere and his right hand on the eastern hemisphere. Of interest are two passages from the subscriptio, namely “this boy extends his embrace in front of each of the two globes” (utrumque/Hic puer amplexus expedit ante globum) and “God’s love is not confined by boundaries” (Dius amor nullis arctatur finibus). The second case is the emblem on the general communion, a practice the Jesuits started (Imago, 463). The pictura of the Imago depicts how Orpheus frees Eurydice from the Underworld by playing the cither, while the motto indicates that if Orpheus could summon the shadow of his wife relying on a Thracian cither and sounding strings, the cither of Jesus is the Eucharist (“Si potuit manes arcessere coniugis Orpheu, Threïciâ cithara fidisbusque canoris, Cithara IESU Eucharistia. Anagr.”). Because of lack of space in the affixio, the long motto was shortened to “The cither of Jesus as anagram for the Eucharist” (“cithara Iesu anagramma eucharistia”) which was still meaningful to the beholder. Also, in the pictura Orpheus is replaced by amor divinus and Eurydice is now wearing a contemporary Baroque dress. Dimler already noted that the emblem in the Imago Christianised mythology as the cither became the symbol for the Eucharist.59 In the affixio, the process of Christianization seems to take a further step as amor divinus replaces Orpheus. A last and very interesting case is the emblem dealing with the renewal of the spirit during the yearly retreat (Figs. 10.5 and 10.6). In the Imago (200), the idea of renewal is rendered through the metamorphosis of a silkworm into a moth. In the emblem from the affixio, the pictura no longer depicts a moth crawling out of its cocoon–which was clearly inspired by Emblem 51 “Amor elegantiae pater” from Jacob Cats’

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Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus (1618)–but an amor divinus leaning against a tree and releasing a small bird from its hand. This radical change and choice for a completely new pictura seems to be triggered by two textual fragments. First, the inventio of the new affixio was very likely influenced by verse ten of the subscriptio which says “Love, like Daedalus, equips one wings” (Hîc alas Daedalus aptat amor). Secondly, the new pictura links up better with the motto “Novum mutor in alitem” which translates as “I changed into a new bird” and which rephrases Horace’s “album mutor in alitem” (Ode 2, xx, 10). Clearly, the relationship between pictura and motto became more literal in this emblem. The second difference between the Imago’s picturae and their reproductions is exactly a tendency for a clear and literal relation between pictura and motto in the affixio. In the emblem on the Order being vainly defamed by slander, the pictura in the Imago depicts a ruler standing erect in a pond; despite its straightness, it appears crooked because of the refraction of the water (Imago, 566). According to the motto “Sibi conscia recta” the ruler, which stands for the Jesuit Order, knows of itself that it is erect. In the emblem of the affixio, the ruler is shown completely straight, even below the water surface. In other words, the message of the pictura and motto coincides. Whereas in the two previous examples (amor divinus releasing a bird and the ruler) the pictura was changed to portray the motto more literally, in other cases it is the motto that underwent changes and became more straightforward. For instance, in the emblem on the Society’s inclination to hardships (Imago, 569) the pictura depicts a Cupid playing with a kite while the motto claims that “adversity excels prosperity” (Praestant adversa fecundis). In the emblem from the affixio, amor divinus instead of Cupid is playing kite and as the motto indicates the kite can climb high in the sky “because of adverse winds” (Adversantibus auris). Thus, the metaphorical motto changes into a literal one. Strangely, the little head blowing wind has disappeared. Lastly, two other but smaller differences can be pointed out. Emblems from the Imago having a neutral, grey background, have in the painted reproductions a simple landscape as background (49 and 202). Finally, the reproductions sometimes do not keep the original frames of the emblems in the Imago.60

3. The Af-beeldinghe: A Different Story Now that we have shown how the Imago functioned as a festive volume, it is interesting to pinpoint the stature of its Dutch counterpart as well. Given that the Af-beeldinghe was actually published in February

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1641 when the festive year was long over, it is unsurprising that the volume did not form part of the festivities. Apart from some links with the jubilee–the foreword defending the Order’s right for a jubilee and the mention of 1640 on the frontispiece–the Imago and the Af-beeldinghe had very different objectives.61 The Af-beeldinghe, only available from 1641 and aimed at a Dutch-speaking market, appeared in a much humbler and cheaper quarto format costing nine guilders, instead of the Imago’s eighteen guilders.62 Leaving out all poetical intermezzi–including the songs and orations which added to the festive nature of the Imago–and twenty-two emblems, it slimmed the Imago down to seven hundred pages. Furthermore, the Af-beeldinghe was not just a translation, but an adaptation. Father Laurentius Uwens (1589-1641) rewrote the prose parts and Father Adriaen Poirters (1605-1674) provided the emblems with new subscriptiones. These changes also required a new title page which was designed by Abraham van Diepenbeeck and engraved by Michiel Natalis. To determine the specific character of the Af-beeldinghe, I will focus on the frontispiece, the twenty-two omitted emblems and the new subscriptiones. The Af-beeldinghe’s frontispiece did not copy that of the Imago which served as a table of contents for the volume.63 Instead, a new layout was chosen in which uniform allegorical figures foregrounded better the Order’s apostolate and vows. The central figure is still the allegory of the Order sitting on a pedestal while resting her left hand on a burning globe with a cross, signalling the zeal of Ignatius and his followers, and holding in her right hand an open book, representing the Order’s constitutions (Fig. 10.7). The Jesuits’ slogan “Ad maiorem gloriam dei” (To the greater glory of God) written on the open book is now given a central place. The title of the work is written on the pedestal and is surrounded by a snake biting its tail. This symbol of the Society’s hope for eternal endurance is an innovation. The figure on the left, the Holy Church holding the papal mitre, keys and a staff with a falcon, is new and expresses the Order’s obedience to the pope. The figure on the right depicted with a cross and with a cardinal’s hat and mitre at her feet, stands for the Order’s vow to turn down worldly or religious honours, an idea already present in the Imago. The three putti symbolising martyrdom, wisdom and purity in the Imago’s frontispiece, are substituted by allegorical figures. Each of them carries specific, meaningful attributes: Wisdom has a radiant face and holds a book with pen; Martyrdom has a sword wreathed in laurel, as well as a branch of laurel as token of victory; Purity has a green virgin crown, a mirror and a stalk of lilies. On the base of the platform which supports the three central allegories, two similar allegorical figures are depicted: Time

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on the left and Envy on the right. Old Father Time is displaced from the centre of the Imago’s frontispiece to the bottom of the page and is depicted much smaller. Time is equipped with a scythe and hourglass and bears a very small C, referring to the past hundred years, on top of his head. The newly introduced figure of Envy is depicted as an old woman with hair of snakes, and hints at the Order’s past and future enemies. When comparing the Imago’s and Af-beeldinghe’s frontispieces, it seems that the exuberant and crowded frontispiece of the Latin volume was replaced by one with a simpler and more digestible layout with uniform allegorical figures. The easy interpretation of the figures is guaranteed by providing the allegories with a range of significant attributes. Whereas the Imago’s frontispiece visualises the title,64 the aim of the Af-beeldinghe’s frontispiece consists in presenting the Order as an institution by focusing on its constitutions (the open book, obedience to the pope, the vow to eschew worldly and religious honours, the vow of chastity/purity) and its activities (dealing with envious enemies, preaching, martyrdom), as Salviucci Insolera has also observed.65 The emphasis also seems to have shifted from the jubilee and the survey of the past hundred years, resulting in the removal of the prominent plates bearing the letters “LL” and “C” and the trumpeting putti, to the aspirations for permanence, represented by the snake biting its tail. Regarding the twenty-two omitted emblems66, Salviucci Insolera observes that the Jesuits’ motive for this removal was of a “historicalreligious” nature: given that the Northern Netherlands were at the time a mission territory for the Jesuits—the so-called Missio Hollandica—they did not want to provoke the Protestants of the Northern Netherlands and spark off polemics.67 Therefore they deleted those emblems that were deemed too aggressive, proud and arrogant. That a number of emblems displaying self-confidence and triumph were removed is a fact. For instance, the emblem on the Society spreading faith all over the globe that shows blaring trumpets protruding from the heavens is one of the emblems to be sacrificed (Imago, 320). The subscriptio describes how the trumpets that were once used to summon men to war are now used by Loyola and his men to preach the Catholic faith in faraway places. Just as Phoebus’ rays enlighten the whole globe, Loyola’s message reaches people in America, Africa, Asia and India. However, Insolera’s argument does not apply to all deleted emblems, such as the emblem declaring that solitude increases the fervour of the spiritual exercises (Imago, 458). Moreover, a considerable number of aggressive and arrogant emblems were retained. In fact, the hypothesis of not provoking the Protestants does not really hold since the Af-beeldinghe still contains emblems in which Protestants and

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heretics in general are not spared. For instance, in the emblem entitled “De Hollandtsche Seyndinghe” (The Mission to Holland, Af-beeldinghe, 686), it is bluntly stated that for so long as the inhabitants of Holland obeyed the Spanish king and the Catholic faith, they would be happy. Now, times have changed and most of them are enslaved by the faith of Luther or Calvin. The subscriptio continues that it is up to the brave heroes of the Society to rescue the “wiser” part of the population who remained Catholic from the turmoil. In another emblem on the Missio Hollandica the Jesuits’ winning over of souls in the Netherlands is compared to the practice of hunters using ferrets to chase rabbits down their burrows (Afbeeldinghe, 688). It is also worth mentioning that Poirters, who provided the subscriptiones, wrote prior to the Af-beeldinghe a stinging pamphlet on the victory of Prince Ferdinand of Austria, an ally of the Spanish, over the Protestant Dutch troops at Kallo near Antwerp: Den Hollantschen Cael-af van Calloo. T’saemenspraeck tusschen eenen Hollandtschen Borger ende Schipper (The Defeat of the Dutch at Kallo. A Dialogue between a Dutch Citizen and a Skipper, 1638). The fictitious printing address, “The Bruised Orange in The Hague” (Ghedruckt te ’s Graevenhaege inden ghequetsten Orainge-appel), mocked once more the Dutch defeat.68 Also, the Afbeeldinghe’s frontispiece carried the personification of Envy, representative of all the Order’s enemies. So, it seems that other reasons played a role. Salviucci Insolera also observes that emblems with the Society’s IHS logo were removed.69 She argues that the Jesuits’ close identification with Jesus through this logo might be perceived as haughty, and provides a point of criticism for the heretics of Northern Europe.70 This argument would explain the deletion of five emblems (Imago, 45, 46, 318, 469 and 480). But again, the Jesuits responsible for the Af-beeldinghe did not seem to care much about Lutheran and Calvinists opinion.71 Maybe it is more likely that such emblems identifying the Order too prominently with Christ’s monogram were held back because other Catholic orders found them offensive. Besides this reason, other motives might have played a role. A second reason for the differences in the two books, which is however not really convincing, is the lack of time the authors of the Dutch text had in the production of their work: the Jesuits probably wanted to have the Af-beeldinghe finished as soon as possible. A third reason is that the book no longer needed to refer to the jubilee since the festive year was now over. It is observable that two festive emblems are missing: one entitled “Societatis Iesu Iubileum” where a lute represents the joy experienced during the festivities (Imago, 47), the other picturing two Ls and thanking Loyola, the founder of the Order, in the jubilee year (Imago,

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49). Notice also that the plate with the Ls was left out in the Afbeeldinghe’s frontispiece. A fourth reason is the authors’ desire to avoid repetition. A few times, the Af-beeldinghe only keeps one of two similar emblems from the Imago; for instance, the emblems on the spreading of Catholic faith which both depict two globes (Imago, 318 and 326), or the two emblems picturing an ark (Imago, 51 and 574). The similarity of these globe emblems was already noticed by the Jesuit Judocus Andries who was appointed to scrutinize the Imago for any flaws or irregularities, since the Order thought of reprinting the jubilee volume, an aim that did not materialise.72 He also noted to the provincial that the globes on page 318 were not emblematic enough because the signifier and signified coincided, that the trumpets were too common (Imago, 320), just as the candle was too simple for an emblem (Imago, 317).73 The first two emblems did not make it to the Af-beeldinghe. Possibly, these remarks remained in the minds of those who selected the emblems for the Dutch version of the Imago. With regard to the emblems with the globes, they removed the less emblematic one (Imago, 318). Another explanation for the absence of the latter emblem–which brings us back to the first reason–is that several little IHS logos are printed on the globes: each continent where the Jesuits resided bears an IHS stamp. For the 104 remaining emblems, Father Poirters wrote new subscriptiones. Whereas the Latin subscriptiones of the Imago amount to about twenty lines, the Dutch subscriptiones of the Af-beeldinghe are double in length, amounting to forty lines. Consequently, the slimmed down Af-beeldinghe focused more on the emblems. Poirters’ subscriptiones were more concrete, more explanatory, and at times more patronizing. At the same time they also accorded with the Dutch emblem tradition and literature. Just like Cats in his Spieghel van den ouden en nieuwen tydt (The Mirror of Old and Modern Times, 1632), Poirters added in the margin of the subscriptio phrases like “the child speaks”. The direct speech of the character from the pictura should stimulate the reader more to follow the given advice. Also, Poirters addressed a wider public than the Imago. In an emblem on catechism, a mother is urged to send her children to the catechism (Af-beeldinghe, 302), which does not happen in the Imago where a man simply promotes the catechism since it protects youngsters from hell (Imago, 477). In some emblems on the vow of chastity, “a broader public of youngsters” was aimed at, as Van Vaeck has already noted.74 For instance, in the emblem where Cupid is blowing bubbles, “maagden” (maidens) are warned to be careful, because a girl’s honour and bubbles are equally fragile (Af-beeldinghe, 112). In another emblem where Apollo is chasing Daphne, girls are advised to run away to save

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their honour (Af-beeldinghe, 118). If they do so, they will be crowned with laurels, like Daphne. Interestingly, Poirters recycled the subscriptio of the latter emblem to express the same message in his later masterpiece, the moralistic Het masker van de wereldt afgetrocken (The Mask Pulled Off the World, 1646), and in Den Spieghel van Philagie (The Mirror of Philagie, 1674).75

4. Conclusion I have demonstrated that, aside from being a commemorative volume, the Imago is also a festive volume. What is more, it is not just a festive volume in a rather “passive” sense, namely in the contents of a folio volume with orations, songs and emblems, but also in a more “active” sense, namely in its participation in the 1640 celebrations. In applied form, it functioned within an affixio in the Antwerp Jesuit church, and as a play performed by the pupils. Under these applied forms, it could propagate its triumphal and festive message to a wider public. The extensive comparison of the Imago with the rediscovered emblems from the affixio has shown that in the affixio the relation between motto and pictura became more literal, making the emblems speak more easily to the audience, and that amor divinus which was now given a prominent role, emphasised clearly that God was the instigator of the Order. Also, I have pointed out that the Imago was recycled in later emblem exhibitions organised in the Jesuit colleges to mark new festive events. Celebration was definitely not the main goal of the Af-beeldinghe, as references to the jubilee were left out. The analysis of the Af-beeldinghe’s frontispiece revealed instead that the focus lay more in the representation of the Order, its vows and its activities. Finally, the Imago’s Dutch adaptation addressed a wider public in Poirters’ newly written, and often more concrete subscriptiones.

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Fig. 10.1. Frontispiece, Imago primi saecvli Societatis Iesv (Antwerp, 1640). Courtesy of the Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, K.U. Leuven.

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Fig. 10.2. Emblem of Loyola, Imago primi saecvli Societatis Iesv (Antwerp, 1640), 49. Courtesy of the Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, K.U. Leuven.

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Fig. 10.3. “Centvm Loyola amplecititvr annos”, Affixio of 1640. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Carolus Borromeuskerk, Antwerp.

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Fig. 10.4. Emblem of Jesuit missions, Imago primi saecvli Societatis Iesv (Antwerp, 1640), 49. Courtesy of the Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, K.U. Leuven.

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Fig. 10.5. Emblem of moth and pupa, Imago primi saecvli Societatis Iesv (Antwerp, 1640), 49. Courtesy of the Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, K.U. Leuven.

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Fig. 10.6. “Novum mvtor in alitem”, Affixio of 1640. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Carolus Borromeuskerk, Antwerp.

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Fig. 10.7. Frontispiece of Af-beeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu voor ooghen ghestelt door de Duyts-Nederlantsche Provincie der selver Societeyt (Antwerp, 1640). Courtesy of the Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, K.U. Leuven

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Notes 1

Notes and Queries 1856, 191. The research for this contribution ties in with a VNC-project on the religious emblem tradition in the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the light of Hermann Hugo and which is run by my home university and the University of Utrecht. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Fumaroli 1994, 353-354. 5 These contemporary reports are kept in the Jesuit archive of the Flemish-Belgian province (folder 3670) to be found in the Public Records Office of Antwerp (Rijksarchief Antwerpen). I would like to thank Jeannine De Landtsheer and Toon Van Houdt for helping me with the translations of the archival pieces. Regarding the Imago, I am indebted to Michael Putnam for his English translation of the subscriptiones–which will appear as part of a monograph on the Imago soon to be published by Saint Joseph’s University Press in the series “Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts”. 6 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 62-67; Valentin 2001, 522. 7 Valentin 2001, 522; Porteman 1996b, 141. 8 Valentin 2001, 522. 9 For a listing and discussion of these literary events, see Salviucci Insolera 2004, 78-83. 10 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 82-83. 11 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 82. Also, two letters are recycled from an earlier work (1632) by Vincartius. 12 In Alciato’s Emblematum liber, the palm tree is attributed with a similar meaning. 13 Compare with the Imago: the palm tree (50), the phoenix (580), the ships (943, 944, 945, 946, 947), indigenous people (720), the tying up of a vine’s branches (203). 14 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 87. 15 Ibid.; Van Houdt 1996, 122. Note also that celebrations were not new for Bollandus: as a teacher of rhetoric he staged a play on the occasion of the consecration of the Antwerp Jesuit church (1621) and was, very likely, involved in organising the spectacles for Ignatius’ and Xavier’s canonizations (1622): see Porteman 2002, 105. 16 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 92; Vandevelde 1996, 151; Waterschoot 1996, 465. Balthasar Moretus the Elder printed 1050 copies. 17 Poncelet 1927, Vol. 2, 546-547. 18 Fumaroli 1994 (347-350) and Salviucci Insolera 2004 (109-111) also analyze the Imago’s frontispiece. 19 The first plate of the frontispiece refers to the first book of the Imago, the second plate to the second book, and so on. 20 The accompanying mottoes of the two emblems are taken from the same verse in Psalm 92: “Adhuc multiplicabuntur in senecta uberi et bene patientes erunt”,

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meaning literally “they shall still increase in a fruitful old age and shall be carrying/ flourishing well”. In the address to the reader, it is said–referring to Tertullian’s polemical essay De resurrectione carnis in which Chapter 13 comments upon Psalm 92: that the Society will not only flourish like a palm tree but also flourish/revive like a phoenix: “Sic nimirum Societas ut Palma, sive, ut ex Graeco vertit ille, ut Phoenix florebit” (Imago “Lectori S.” [unnumbered pages]). 21 Dekoninck 2002, 894. Concerning the Imago’s frontispiece, Dekoninck also notes, “Profondément influencé de la style rubénien, ce frontispice offre en quelque sorte une belle synthèse de cette histoire en combinant l’idée de monument, d’arc triomphal, de scène théâtrale, d’autel ou de piédestal, autant de connotations qui concourent ensemble à la glorification de la Compagnie, ici représentée par sa personnification” (904). 22 Dekoninck 2002, 894. 23 Fumaroli 1994, 347. 24 Ibid., 348. 25 “Temporis notam non adscribimus satis ipsa se prodit solenni illa, quâ Saecularis hic annus celebratur, laetitiâ: & quidem è sacris Paginis petitá” (Imago, Lectori S. [unnumbered pages]). 26 See the Imago for the different dissertations: on Roman jubilees (4-10), Jewish jubilees (10-13), Christian jubilees (13-16), private jubilees (16-18), the Lutherans’ jubilee (18-21). 27 See Synopsis 1641, 358-360 (and Tableau […] 1642, 508-511). For a discussion of the festivities in Antwerp and some other European cities, see also Salviucci Insolera 2004, 67-77. For a detailed analysis of the theatre play performed in Vienna, see Valentin 2001, 526-532. 28 Reports are kept of Jesuit houses (mostly colleges) established in the following cities: Aalst, Belle, Bergues, Bruges, Brussels, Courtrai, Dunkirk, Ghent, Halle, Ypres, Kassel, Lier, Louvain, Malines and Roermond. 29 Porteman 1996b discusses the play that the students of the Brussels College performed on the occasion of the centenary. 30 RA 3670 “Ex litteris annuis Domus Professa Societatis Jesu Antverpia anni 1639”. 31 The Jesuit church of Antwerp was built between 1615 and 1621. In 1621 the church was consecrated and dedicated to the Order’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola. After the Order’s suspension in 1773, the church was dedicated to Charles Borromeus. 32 RA 3670 “Ex litteris annuis Domus Professa Societatis Jesu Antverpia anni 1639”. 33 RA 3670 “Ex litteris annuis Domus Professa Societatis Jesu Antverpia anni 1639”. 34 RA 3670 “Collegium Antverpiense”, 11. 35 Ibid. 36 Compare with the Imago: sun (43), ring (opening emblem), phoenix (frontispiece and 580). The emblem with the ring on page 328 does not concern

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eternity as it focuses on the precious stone of the ring which stands for the human soul becoming precious when it answers its calling to join the Society. 37 Poncelet mentions the festivities in general terms: Poncelet 1927, Vol. 2, 545546. 38 RA 3670 “Collegium Antverpiense”, 11. 39 Mertens and Buschmann (eds.) 1845-1848, Vol. 4, 414: “[…] Imago Provinciae Flandro-Belgicae. Quae emblemata, aeri insculpta, volumen idstud ornant, eadem per ecclesiae parietes et porticus spectata fuerant vivis coloribus expressa.” 40 “Quot columnarum superiorum bases totidem tabulae a Genijs binis singulae sustentatae in quibus picta emblemata ex Imagine primi saeculi Societatis cum Epigraphis quaeque suis inerant mutuata, et bractea frondibusque adornata . Quatuor fuere et quinquaginta illi Genij, quos celeberrimae sacello suo virgines vestierant, laudemque a celeberrimo illo pictore Rubbenio retulerunt; videbant in his suos noverantque parentes filios, et in effigie cerea semet filij tante nempe erat simulacri cum effigie vera similitudo. Ordo vero hic erat. Columnae basim a latere genius, hunc arbusta florida ac frondifera, arbusta genius, rursum basis praefixo emblemate, et alter genius sequebatur” (RA 3670 “Jubileum Societatis Iesu Celebratum in Domo Professa Societatis Antverpiae”, 2). 41 Of the thirty-nine ceiling paintings–which were destroyed in the fire of 1718– twenty-one (located in the vaults of the lower gallery and the narthex) represent male and female saints, while eighteen (located in the vaults of the upper gallery) form a parallel sequence of nine Old and New Testament scenes. Of the latter eighteen, two paintings do not fit into the rigid typological scheme, but instead, as Knaap shows, form the fulcrum of various interlocking reading directions: see Knaap 2004, especially 155-157. 42 A discussion of the reproductions follows below: see “Ten Preserved Emblems of the Affixio of 1640”. 43 The planning of affixiones was often dependent of the local culture and festivities of the city where the college was established. For instance, in Brussels it was custom to keep affixiones on the feast of the Holy Sacrament of the Miracle (Porteman 1996a, 24 and 29). 44 Apart from the smaller monthly declamations/plays and the larger plays organised twice a year (at carnival and at the end of the school year), colleges were also involved in occasional plays (processions, jubilees, joyous entries, etc.) Class teachers supervised the monthly plays, whereas the rhetoric teacher was responsible for the writing and directing of the end of year plays (Proot 2008, 74, 100-101, 256, 261 and 264; Van den Boogerd 1961, 20, 26-27) See note 15 regarding Bollandus’ initiative in organising occasional plays as a rhetoric teacher. 45 RA 3670 “Collegium Antverpiense”, [11v°]: “Drama etiam summo omnium applausu ac gratulatione quater exhibitum […]”. 46 See Porteman 1996a. 47 Dimler 2002. 48 Ibid., 523-524.

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49 Papebrochius states: “[…] et inter praemia, studiosae iuventuti ex more distributa, primo cuiusque classis obtigit exemplum praefati voluminis [Imago] […]”: see Mertens and Buschmann (eds.) 1845-1848, Vol. 4, 414. 50 Porteman 1996a, 33; Van Houdt and Van Vaeck 2003, 883-885. 51 Porteman 1996a, 113 and 145. 52 Compare the emblems from the Imago with the CD-ROM Emblem Manuscripts, 1630-1685. Affixiones of the Brussels Jesuit College in the Royal Library of Belgium (Leiden: IDC, 1996), the supplement to Porteman’s study. 53 In the early 1980s Rudi Mannaerts came across four paintings which are placed in the doors of the northern suite. Later on, the verger Marc Hesbain alerted Mannaerts of similar paintings lying in an attic of the church. In September 2008 Paul Mommaers SJ contacted emblem specialist Karel Porteman, who in turn informed my supervisor Marc Van Vaeck as he knew that I was working on the missing emblems of the 1640 affixio. I would like to express my gratitude to Rudi Mannaerts, Paul Mommaers SJ, Marc Hesbain, Karel Porteman and Marc Van Vaeck for notifying me of the actual existence of the emblems. 54 Poncelet 1927, Vol. 2, 546 note 1. For Poncelet’s work on the Order’s centenary, see especially 544-549. 55 The ten complete emblems are reproduced after pages 49, 195, 200, 202, 203, 322, 463, 566, 569 and 577 of the Imago. 56 Dimler 1981; Salviucci Insolera 2004, 126-135; and Van Vaeck 2007. 57 For instance, the Cupid training a dog (Imago, 478) is inspired by Emblem 38 “Quo pergis, eodem vergo” from Vaenius’ Amorum emblemata (1608) and the Cupid looking in the mirror (Imago, 187) is modelled after Emblem 23 “Frigida accendit” from Hooft’s Emblemata amatoria (1611). 58 Van Vaeck 2007, 53-54. 59 Dimler 1981, 442. 60 In all cases a piece of the top part of the frame is altered because of the inserted motto. Apart from this, the reproductions of pages 195, 200, 203, 463, 566, and 569 have a completely different frame, whereas those of pages 202, 322, and 577 are similar. The reproduction of page 49 with the two Ls underwent a subtle and meaningful change: the laurel of the pictura is also present in the upper part of the frame. 61 The defence of the jubilee is shorter in the Af-beeldinghe. 62 Waterschoot 1996, 465. Of the Af-beeldinghe, 1525 copies were printed. 63 Apart from describing the Af-beeldinghe’s frontispiece Salviucci Insolera also compares the frontispieces of the Latin and Dutch volumes: see Salviucci Insolera 2004, 114-117. 64 This idea is in tune with Dekoninck situating the Imago, following Fumaroli 1994, within l’asianisme: “une esthétique plutôt baroque où l’illustration met littéralement le titre en representation, titre qui ne donne pas à lire mais à voire […]” (Dekoninck 2002, 893). 65 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 116.

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The omitted emblems concern the following pages from the Imago: 45, 47, 49, 51, 192, 193, 318, 320, 324, 458, 469, 480, 570, 573, 578, 579, 719, 725, 937, 939, 944 and 948. 67 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 142-143. For Salviucci Insolera’ s analysis, see 142149. 68 Rombauts 1937, 86-90. 69 Salviucci Insolera 2004, 147: “Risulta assai indicativo che per l’edizione fiamminga si sia preferito non riprodurre le incisioni raffiguranti il monogramma IHS, come si è gia sottolineato sopra, ad eccezione, pero della incisione di grande formato. Forse si è voluto attenuare l’attenzione verso l’identificazione del nome della Compagnia con Gesù: argomento dell’ imitatio Christi più volte criticato ed inteso come superbia e vanagloria proprio dagli esponenti eretici operanti nel nord Europa.” 70 Ibid. 71 Also in the Af-beeldinghe’s defence of the jubilee, it is noted assertively that the Jesuits have more right to celebrate than the Lutherans since they accomplished much more than those heretics. 72 Andries: Fol. 326 “Fere idem quod fol. 318.” (RA 1751, “Annotata quaedam, et dubia aliquot, Circa Imaginem primi saeculi societatis Jesu”). 73 Andries, Fol. 317 “Candela videtur simplicius esse emblema”; “Fol. 318 Duo orbes non videntur emblematice exprimere orbem, cuius sint res ipsa”; and Fol. 320 “Quatuor tubae videntur nimis vulgare emblema”; (RA 1751, “Annotata quaedam, et dubia aliquot, Circa Imaginem primi saeculi societatis Jesu”). 74 Van Vaeck 2007, 53. 75 See Salsmans 1935, 135-137; and Salsmans 1937, 194-195.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MORE EMBLEMES OU DEVISES CHRÉTIENNES – SAME TITLE BUT VERY DIFFERENT WORK ALISON M. SAUNDERS

My attention was first drawn to a late seventeenth-century emblem book by a writer who adopted the pseudonym “Philotheus” when, working on Georgette de Montenay several decades ago, I came across a copy of a French version of the work in the then Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, wrongly catalogued under the name of Montenay since the two works share the same title, Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes. Rather surprisingly in view of all the work which has been done on Montenay and her emblem book in the recent past, this completely different Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes by “Philotheus”, which was originally published in Latin, in 1677, under the title Symbola christiana, is even today still listed under Montenay’s name in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France catalogue.1 As well as their confusingly shared title (in the French version at least) Montenay’s mid sixteenth-century emblem book and Philotheus’ late seventeenth-century emblem book share other similarities. Both are oneoff creations produced by otherwise totally unpublished authors, both of whom were staunch Calvinists, and both works became international emblem books, published over several decades in different countries and in different languages. Furthermore, both works were highly popular, as is attested by the number of editions which they each ran through - even more editions in the case of Philotheus than Montenay. Yet for all the increased interest over the last fifteen years or so in religious emblem books generally, and more recently in Protestant emblem books in particular, while Montenay has now received due attention—particularly by Alison Adams in her recent study of French Protestant emblem writers—Philotheus’ work has been almost totally ignored by emblem scholars. It is listed in Praz’s bibliography, but not mentioned in his text.2 It also features in Landwehr’s bibliographies of Dutch, German and Romanic emblem books, and one of the two French versions is listed in

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the Bibliography of French Emblem Books, but to the best of my knowledge only Ingrid Höpel has discussed Philotheus’ emblems in two articles on painted emblems on house furniture in Northern Friesland, among which is an eighteenth-century painted cupboard now housed in the SchleswigHollstein Landesmuseum, decorated with four painted emblems copied from Philotheus’ work.3 The purpose of this article, therefore, is to remedy in some degree this situation, since Philotheus’ work is actually a very important emblematic phenomenon, not solely on account of its widespread European impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also because it has the further interest of demonstrating, in the second of the two French versions which were produced, how an originally strongly Calvinist work could be modified to suit a Catholic readership. Although some study has been made of the ways in which Catholic emblem books could be modified to suit Protestant tastes (Karl-Josef Höltgen, among others, has demonstrated how Jesuit emblem books could be adapted to accommodate a Protestant readership in England in his studies of Francis Quarles’s Emblemes, inspired by Hermann Hugo’s Pia desideria and the Typus mundi produced by the students of the Jesuit college in Antwerp), the reverse process whereby a Calvinist emblem book could be made acceptable to a Catholic readership, has been much less studied.4 Who, then, was the author who adopted the pseudonym Philotheus? He has often been wrongly identified as the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig (1617-1680), but in fact he was Karl Ludwig’s short-lived son, the Elector Palatine Karl II, who died when he was only thirty-four years old.5 Karl II was born in 1651, produced his emblem book in 1677, when he was twenty-six years old, three years before he succeeded his father as Elector Palatine in 1680, and he died in 1685. Little is known about him—we know rather more about his picturesque father, Karl Ludwig, and grandparents, the Elector Frederick V and his wife, Elizabeth of Bohemia— all of whom played an active role on the European political scene. 6 In contrast, Karl II seems to have been a much less colourful character. He had an unhappy youth after the divorce of his parents, which left him living in a state of disharmony with his father, Karl Ludwig, and his second wife, together with the various siblings of that marriage, at the Palatine court in Heidelberg, while his own mother, Karl Ludwig’s first wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel, left the Palatinate and returned to Kassel. He was a studious youth, and was educated by distinguished teachers, Samuel von Pufendorf (for whom Karl Ludwig created a special chair in Law at Heidelberg); Ezechiel Spanheim, who was Professor of Eloquence at Geneva, but who also had a strong interest in numismatics - an interest

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which he may well have passed on to Karl II; and the historian Paul Hachenberg, who is particularly significant here since it was he who wrote the preface to Karl’s emblem book. In 1671 Karl was married off by his father (against his own wishes) to a Danish princess, Wilhelmina Ernestine. In 1680 he went, accompanied by Hachenberg, to England to enlist (unsuccessfully) the aid of Charles II against Louis XIV. He was apparently awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine by Oxford University in 1680. That same year, while still away from home, he learned of his father’s death, and returned to the Palatinate to take up the succession. Over the remaining five years of his life as Elector Palatine he strove to reintroduce strict Calvinism within the Palatinate. When he died childless, the Palatinate passed to Philip Wilhelm, a member of another (Catholic) branch of the family. So Philotheus (or Karl II), the author of this emblem book was devout, Calvinist, and highly educated, but he was also royal - a prince whose relations spread across Europe. As well as being connected with the Danish royal family via his marriage to Wilhelmina Ernestine, daughter of King Frederick III of Denmark, he was also connected both to the English royal family and to the French royal family. Such a royal background is not at all typical of emblem writers. Although many emblem books were, of course, dedicated to royals, I can think of no other royal writer of an emblem book. Karl’s connection with the English royal family came through his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, and sister of Charles I, who married the Elector Frederick V, and who then became the Winter Queen (or Queen of Hearts), Elizabeth of Bohemia.7 His connection to the French royal family came via his younger sister, Elizabeth-Charlotte (born in 1652) who became, in 1671, the second wife of the Duke Philippe d’Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV. This French connection is, as we shall see later, significant in the context of Philotheus’ emblem book because of the two known editions of the second French version of the work, published in Lyons in 1701 and 1717 the first was dedicated to Louis XIV’s grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, and the second to the seven-year old Louis XV, son of the by then dead Duc de Bourgogne, and great-grandson of Louis XIV. And furthermore, in the preliminaries to that second edition great mention is made of the impact, during Louis XV’s minority, of the regency of Philippe II d’Orléans, son of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans to whom Karl’s younger sister had been married - and thus Karl II’s nephew. Having identified the author of this emblem book and the sociopolitical context in which it was written, let us trace the complexities of its printing history as it spread its way across Europe, before going on to look

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at the work itself. It first appeared in the form of a Latin work under the full title Philothei symbola christiana quibus idea hominis christiani exprimitur, published in Frankfurt in 1677 by Johannes Peter Zubrod. Interestingly Zubrod produced not just one, but two versions in that same year (Fig. 11.1). In addition to a quarto version, he also produced some copies in a more extravagantly laid out folio version, possibly intended as presentation copies, using the same engravings, but more spaced out on the page, and with the typography leaded to make the text similarly expand to fit more proportionately into the larger folio pages.8 Other than the difference of format, the two versions are identical and both are extremely elegant pieces of printing. The text is wholly in Latin, and comprises a lengthy address to the reader by Karl II’s former tutor, Paul Hachenberg, followed by a series of one hundred emblems, numbered Symbolum 1 to Symbolum 100, each comprising a large circular engraved figure, encased in a roundel containing the Latin motto, followed by a Latin prose discourse headed again by the Latin motto of the engraving, and followed by either one or two eight- or ten-line Latin verses. Two years later, in 1679, Zubrod produced—again in Frankfurt—a German version of the work, but this time using a much smaller 12° format. Because of the smaller format he had to procure a new set of smaller engravings, which are carefully copied mirror-images of the original larger ones used in his folio and quarto Latin editions, but less detailed and less elegant as a result of being so much smaller. The work includes an engraved title page which retains the original Latin title, Philothei symbola christiana, but the typographic title page gives a German version of the title, Philothei christliche Sinnebilder auss dem lateinischen ins Teutsch gebracht. Hachenberg’s Latin preface is replaced by a German Vorrede together with German and Latin liminary verses signed by J. Gerlacus Wilhelm, Rector of Heidelberg Gymnasium. The emblems follow the same order as that of the original Latin version, and again each engraving includes a Latin motto within a roundel, but to this is now added a typographic German couplet. Thereafter, each emblem includes a loose translation into German of the original Latin prose discourse, plus a series of German verses, of which the first in each case is signed “Philoth”, and offers what seems to be a very loose rendering of one or other of the Latin verses which accompanied each emblem in the earlier Latin editions. The identity of the translator is not indicated, though it may well be J. Gerlacus Wilhelm whose name appears in the preliminaries, but this can only be surmise.9 Three years later we find the work being published for the first time outside Germany. In 1682 a new edition of the Latin text was published in

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the Netherlands—in Leiden—by the Widow Johannis à Gelder, and for this 12° edition yet another new set of engravings was procured, the same size as the smaller ones used by Zubrod in Frankfurt for his 12° German edition, and closely copied in mirror-image from Zubrod’s set, and including again the Latin mottoes in roundels around each engraving. The Latin text of this Leiden edition (including both prose and verses) and the layout and order of the emblems replicates that of the earlier Frankfurt folio and quarto editions, and Hachenberg’s preface (which was omitted from the Frankfurt edition of the German version) is again included. This new set of engravings (the third to be made for this work within five years) earned its living very well thereafter, being regularly used again in a number of 12° and 8° editions of different versions of the work which were published subsequently in various parts of the Netherlands. The first of these was a French version of the work (the first of two quite different French versions) published in Utrecht in 1697 by Antoine Schouten as a 12° volume under the title Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes, with no indication on the title page or elsewhere of the identity of the translator, and—for the first time—with no mention at all of the name of Philotheus as original author of the work. Although the order of the emblems here follows that of all the earlier editions, there is a significant difference between this first French version and the previous Latin and German versions in that here although the French prose discourses accompanying each engraving are quite close translations of the original Latin discourses of Philotheus, there are no verses. Instead of offering a combination of verse and prose discourse, as had hitherto been the case, here each emblem simply comprises an engraved figure and a prose discourse (Figs. 11.2-11.4). The preliminaries are also different. Certainly the work begins with a preface Au lecteur which, initially at least, offers a fairly faithful translation of Hachenberg’s preface, although Hachenberg’s signature is removed from the end. But curiously the last two and a half pages of Hachenberg’s preface—which contain the section in which he refers to Philotheus by name, and describes his own contribution to the production of the work—are excised, and replaced by a very short paragraph in which the author is referred to very briefly and not very helpfully as “un homme de la première qualité”, but interestingly the author of the preface does imply that he has obtained the permission of the original author to publish these emblems: Je vous ai voulu advertir de ceci, cher Lecteur, & de ce que l’Auteur, est un homme de la premiere qualité, duquel j’ai obtenu, aprés de trésgrandes instances, de mettre ces Emblémes en lumiere, & que connoissant la

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Fifteen years later, in 1712, a further vernacular version of the work was published in the Netherlands. This was a Dutch version entitled Zederyke Zinnebeelden, Vertoont in Konstplaten, door kraktige Redeneeringen en Maat-Digt ten nutte van het menschelyke leven toegepast door E. Verrkyke which was first published as an 8° edition by Isaac Trojel in Amsterdam. It must have proved very popular, since this first edition was followed by a second edition, the following year, 1713, again published in Amsterdam but with the imprint of J. Strander and J. Ratelband, and then again by a third edition in 1717, published in Amsterdam under the imprint of Hendrick Bosch, and in Leiden under the imprint of Gillis Knotter, but retaining the engraved title page with the names of Strander and Ratelband.10 Even as late as 1779 a last edition of this Dutch version was published in Amsterdam.11 All these editions of this Dutch version published in the Netherlands use the same engraved plates which had been used for the first time in the Leiden Latin edition of 1682, and then again for the Utrecht French edition in 1697. The order of the emblems again follows that of earlier editions, but the organisation within each emblem is somewhat changed. The verses which had been excised from the French version produced in Utrecht a decade and a half earlier are reinstated in this new Dutch version, but whereas the earlier Latin and German versions had included more than one verse per emblem, in this Dutch version each engraving is followed by just one six-line Dutch verse and a two-page Dutch prose discourse. Although the Dutch prose discourses do echo Philotheus’ original Latin text, the Dutch verses do not.12 In the case of this Dutch version, unlike the earlier German and French versions in which the name of the author is not revealed, the title page does identify the author as being the Dutch writer, E. Verryke. But this obviously very popular version by Verryke was not the only Dutch version of the work to be produced. In 1722 a quite different Dutch version was published in Amsterdam by Hendrick Bosch. 13 Here, however, the only debt to Philotheus is for the engraved figures—the same ones which were used in the various other editions published in the Netherlands—and for the order in which the emblems appear. But in this 1722 8° version the familiar set of engraved figures is accompanied by a new set of Dutch verses created afresh by Claas Bruin, which have no resemblance to the original Latin verses of Philotheus, and there are no prose discourses. This is effectively a “new” emblem book, rather than an adaptation, as had been the case hitherto, created presumably to cash in on

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the popularity of the Philotheus engraved figures which had already been used five years previously by the Amsterdam publisher, Hendrick Bosch for his 1717 edition of the Verryke Dutch translation of Philotheus. In this new Dutch version there is no ambiguity about authorship. It is given a completely new title attributing the work clearly to Claas Bruin, and Philotheus’ name is nowhere mentioned. Having thus begun its long publishing history in Germany in 1677, appearing first in its original Latin form, and shortly thereafter in a German version, within five years Philotheus’ emblem book was taken over by publishers in the Netherlands, where for nearly a hundred years from 1682 until 1779 it continued to be made available in additional vernacular languages (French and Dutch), as well as in Latin. As well as spreading to the Netherlands, however, it also spread to France. Within four years of the first French version of the work being published in Utrecht by Antoine Schouten, a quite different French vernacular version was also published in France in 1701 and then again in 1717. The first of these two 12o editions was published in Lyons by the widow of Claude Chavance and her son Mathieu Chavance, and the second, sixteen years later in 1717, by Mathieu Chavance alone.14 For these Lyonnese editions yet another new set of engravings was created, the fourth set to have been produced to illustrate this work. As with the earlier sets of engravings, these new engravings (which are mirror images of the Leiden set) are also modelled on the preceding set, but this time less slavishly so. An innovation here, also, is that the Latin mottoes which were formerly encased in a roundel are now contained in a banderole. Again indicating clearly the extraordinarily enduring interest of these vernacular versions of Philotheus’ work, just as Verryke’s Dutch version, first published in Amsterdam in 1712, was still being published in Amsterdam as late as 1779, so also was the Chavance French version. The Bibliothèque municipale in Lyons possesses a very rare copy of what is essentially the 1717 edition, but with a new, and clearly much later eighteenth-century title page bearing the name of the Lyons bookseller Etienne Rusand.15 Rusand was born in 1725, and died in 1783, and was responsible for a number of devotional and edifying works which appeared from the 1760s onwards. Judging by the typography of the title page this edition would probably date from the latter part of his publishing career, sometime in the 1770s or early 1780s – much the same date, therefore, as the late Amsterdam edition of the Dutch version. In this early eighteenth-century French reworking of Philotheus’ emblem book, produced nearly a quarter of a century after the work first appeared in its original Latin form in Frankfurt in 1677 and nearly two

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decades after the death of the original author, we see a number of significant changes. Many of the Latin mottoes are different from the original Philotheus mottoes which elsewhere are handed down faithfully from version to version. The order of the emblems is for the first time changed, 16 and for no obviously discernible reason five of Philotheus’ original emblems are removed and replaced by five new ones. 17 The structure of the work is also changed, so that for each emblem the engraved figure with Latin motto is followed by a French version of that motto, and a simplified four-line French verse describing the scene and explaining the moral lesson to be derived. Thereafter follows a French prose discourse which is interspersed by further passages of verse (Figs 11.5-11.7). These prose discourses are quite different from those of the earlier French version published in Utrecht in 1697, which were quite faithful renderings of Philotheus’ original Latin text. However, just occasionally we find an echo of a particular phrase used in the earlier French translation of Philotheus’ original Latin, which would suggest that despite the fact that it is overall so different, nevertheless whoever produced this second French version (very possibly Mathieu Chavance himself) must have been aware either of the original Latin or of the earlier Utrecht French version.18 As with the earlier French version published in Utrecht, Philotheus’ name does not appear anywhere in this French version published in Lyons, and Hachenberg’s preface is not included. It is replaced in the 1701 edition and in the 1717 edition by two quite different prefaces, both signed by the publisher, Mathieu Chavance, who in both clearly claims responsibility for the production of the work. In both prefaces he situates the work very clearly in a French context, dedicating it to the highest members of the French royal family. In his preface to the 1701 edition Chavance dedicates the work to the Duc de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV, and son of the Grand Dauphin, and at that date second in succession to the French throne. However, by 1717, when the second edition was produced, this original dedication could no longer be used, since the monarchic picture in France had changed significantly. Louis XIV had died (in 1715), as had also the Grand Dauphin (in 1711) and also the Duc de Bourgogne (in 1712). The second edition, therefore, is dedicated to the ten-year old Louis XV, son of the Duc de Bourgogne to whom the first edition had been dedicated, who had succeeded his great-grandfather two years previously in 1715. Both prefaces are interesting. In the first, addressed to the Duc de Bourgogne, presumed ultimate heir to the throne, Chavance stresses the great Christian virtue and piety of Louis XIV, and points to his restoration of piety to his country as being his most important achievement, and notes

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that already the Duc de Bourgogne is following his excellent example of what a Christian prince should be: Monseigneur La plus solide gloire de LOUIS LE GRAND, n’est point d’avoir rendu la France Victorieuse, Polie, et Savante, mais c’est de l’avoir rendue Pieuse. Ce sage monarque a pris un soin extreme de faire en sorte que ses Descendans heritassent de Lui cette Pieté, sans laquelle les plus grandes actions des Rois sont inutiles devant Dieu. Vous avez parfaitement secondé son dessein, MONSEIGNEUR, en montrant dès vos plus tendres années un attachement inviolable pour cette Reine des Vertus. Il semble meme que le Ciel Vous ait destiné pour conserver les Lis dans cette pureté que cet Auguste monarque leur a donnée, en déracinant les vices de son Royaume (1701 ed., A3r-v).

To help him further in this role Chavance offers him the work as an edifying work in which “les principaux points de la Religion, et de la Morale Chrétienne sont mis au jour par des Simboles ingenieux” (1701 ed, A3v). In the second, dedicated to the very youthful Louis XV, Chavance explains how this dedication is particularly appropriate in view of the fact that the earlier edition had been dedicated to Louis XV’s father, the Duc de Bourgogne. But very interesting also in this dedication is the even more heavy emphasis on the importance of the work as an educational tool for a young Christian prince: Au Roy Sire, La première Edition de ce Livre ayant eu le bonheur de paroître sous le nom de Vostre Auguste Pere, j’ay crû que Vostre Majesté trouveroit bon que la seconde parût sous le sien. Ces fleurs, cüeillies dans le sein de la Religion Chrêtienne, ne pouvoient tomber dans de meilleures mains que dans celles d’un Jeune Roy très-Chrêtien. La Royale Education qu’elle reçoit de son Illustre et Sage Gouverneur ne nous permet pas de douter qu’elle ne suive les glorieuses traces du GRAND MONARQUE auquel elle a succédé (1717 ed., A2r)

a point which is further reiterated in an Ode sur l’Education du Roy which follows, in the preliminaries, an eight-line verse also praising the beneficent effects on the country of the sage Regency of Philippe d’Orléans during the young king’s minority (that Philippe d’Orléans being the nephew of Karl II, the original author of the work). And, indeed, this second French reworking of Philotheus’ emblem book is very “educational” in both content and presentation, and in this respect also, as well as in purely structural terms, it is very different from

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the earlier French version published in Utrecht. Structurally the earlier French version published in Utrecht is, as we saw, rather different from the Latin original in that unlike Philotheus’ original Latin version it does not include verses. But in terms of content, its prose discourses do accord fairly closely with the original Latin discourses. However this is no longer the case with the later French version published in Lyons. It is interesting, therefore to look at these two very different French versions of Philotheus’ emblem book, the one following fairly faithfully an original Latin text written by a highly committed Calvinist prince, and the other published by a Catholic publisher (and very possibly also written by him) in a Catholic country and dedicated to a strongly Catholic monarch, to see not only what sort of changes are effected to make it more obviously “educational”, but to see whether or not the very strong Calvinist vein which runs through the earlier version is suppressed or at least toned down in the later version, and whether or not other changes are made to modify its confessional orientation. Let us look first at the Calvinist character of the work. In the earlier Utrecht French version, phrases like “divine grace”, the “elect”, or the “just” appear very frequently, as might be expected in a strongly Calvinist work. In Emblem 7 of the 1697 French edition the engraved figure depicting a burning candle with the motto Dum splendet et omnia splendent/Tant qu’elle éclaire, les choses qui l’environnent ont de l’éclat is accompanied by a prose discourse in which the opening sentence compares divine grace to the lighted candle (Fig. 11.2): La comparaison de la grace divine ne peut être plus juste qu’avec une chandelle allumée, qui dans le même temps qu’elle repand sa lumiere dans une chambre, donne de l’éclat et de la splendeur aux lustres, aux miroirs, et à tous les riches ornemens qui l’embellissent, sans laquelle l’or ni l’argent ne pourroient briller… Il en est de même de la grace divine, qui communique la beauté et l’éclat à nos actions, lorsqu’elle les éclaire (1697 ed., 19-20).

Divine grace is also the theme of the following emblem, Illustrat quoque vilia/Il rend éclatantes les choses les plus viles, in which the rather more unusual image of the rays of the sun causing the scales of a snake’s skin to sparkle like precious stones is used to represent the effect of God’s grace on mankind: Que devons-nous penser, nous autres mortels, de la vertu que nous tirons de la noblesse ou de la fortune de nos ancêtres? Helas! Sans la grace de Dieu tous les avantages se dissipent comme la fumée, nôtre courage s’abbat, et n’étant plus chargez que d’une infinité de vices et de mauvaises inclinations, nous nous précipitons insensiblement dans un abyme de

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miseres, dont nous ne pouvons nous tirer sans un secours particulier. Si le soleil en répandant ses rayons sur l’écaille des serpens, les fait briller comme les pierres precieuses, pourquoi Dieu très-bon et très-puissant ne pourra-t-il pas parmi les hommes en tirer de la bouɺ et de la poussiere, pour les élever par ses dons au-dessus de ceux que la nature et la fortune semblent avoir plus favorisés. En effet, c’est à quoi se plait souvent la bonté divine, qui fait largesse de ses graces à des sujets fort vil (1697 ed., 21-22).

Emblem 9, the third consecutive emblem on divine grace, exploits an even more ingenious image of a ball being kept in the air by the force of an upward jet of water in a fountain under the motto Sustentat/Elle soûtient (Fig. 11.4): Bien que la grace divine, qui est l’unique support de tout le genre humain, nous comble de mille bienfaits en tout temps et en tout lieu, il faut pourtant avouer qu’elle nous fait particulierement ressentir les effets merveilleux de son secours, lorsqu’elle nous conserve dans nos voyages, qu’elle nous soutient parmi les perils de la guerre, et qu’elle nous met à couvert de tous les accidens et les dangers qui sont presque inevitables dans ces sortes d’occasions. Elle nous soûtient pour lors de même qu’une boule sortie du fonds d’un canal artificiel est supportée au-dessus des eaux d’une fontaine, jusques à ce qu’elles se retirent, et l’obligent à descendre après elles dans le lieu de sa première retraite (1697 ed., 23-24).

In Emblem 48 the image of a lamp is used as another starting point for a reflection on divine grace. The figure depicts a hand filling a lamp with the oil which is necessary to keep the flame alight, accompanied by the motto Illo alitur vivitque/C’est sa nourriture et sa vie, and the text explains that the oil which is fed into the lamp to keep it alight is the symbol of divine grace which gives strength to the just to pursue the path of virtue: Si l’on desire qu’une lampe éclaire longtemps de sa lumiere les tenebres de la nuit, il faut absolument la remplir d’huile… Nous pouvons comparer la grace divine à ceux qui entretiennent ainsi les flambeaux, puisque c’est elle qui nous arrose et nous nourrit de cette huile de douceur et de misericorde, qui nous rend prompts et diligens au service de Dieu et à toutes sortes d’actions vertueuses. C’est ce divin aliment qui nous donne des forces pour resister à nos passions, et c’est de lui seul que nous tenons la victoire que nous ne pouvons attendre ni esperer de nôtre foiblesse (1697 ed., 109110).

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A number of emblems take as their theme the suffering necessarily endured on earth by God’s elect in order that they may achieve salvation. In Emblem 30 another ingenious image is used to convey this point. The figure depicting mighty marble columns lying flat on the ground is accompanied by the motto Iacet dum perficitur/Elle est couchée par terre, lorsqu’on la polit¸ and the discourse explains that just as the roughnesses have to be smoothed off the surface of the stone before it can be raised up, so also do the elect have to undergo hardship and testing before they can be admitted to the heavenly city: Il se trouve des hommes qui s’abusant par de faux principes se retirent de la pratique de la vertu, par la consideration des miseres dont plusieurs justes sont affligez, et des richesses et des plaisirs qui souvent sont le partage des impies. Ils remarqueroient aisément le defaut de leur conduite, s’ils consideroient que les grandes colomnes de marbre, qui sont destinées pour faire l’ornement des plus beaux édifices, sont couchées par terre au milieu de la poussiere, losqu’on les polit, et n’en sont point relevées, pour faire le lustre et la dignité du palais, qu’après que le ciseau en a retranché toutes les superfluʀtez. Dieu agit de même à nôtre égard, et permet que ses Elûs soient chargez de mille calamitez, afin que leur foi étant éprouvée, ils puissent être élevez dans la céleste Jerusalem, et avoir part à la couronne qui n’est promise qu’à ceux qui ont légitimement combattu. (1697 ed., 70-71).

The same point is made in Emblem 20, Laetius ut crescat/Afin qu’elle croisse mieux, in which the figure of long grass being scythed down in order to encourage stronger new growth is explained as representing God causing his elect to suffer short-term earthly hardship in order to enjoy eternal glory: Nous sçavons par une experience journaliere, qu’il est necessaire de faucher l’herbe de la campagne, si nous desirons la voir croitre et pousser avec plus de force qu’auparavant. Il en est de même des justes dans cette vie mortelle, et nous ne devons pas être surpris, si très-souvent Dieu les visite par les maladies, les pertes, et toute sorte d’afflictions: car il n’a point d’autre dessein en éprouvant par ces disgraces temporelles ceux qu’il reconnoit parmi ses Eleus, que de les élever ensuite à un plus haut degré de gloire, et de recompenser par des dons et des presens particuliers la constance et la fermeté de leur foi. Ce n’est donc plus pour les abbattre que le bras du Tout-puissant les frappe, mais plutôt pour les élever (1697 ed., 48-49).

Other emblems focus, conversely, on the peace of mind of the just, as in Emblem 35 depicting a sun shining on the top of a mountain, while the

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lower reaches of the mountain are surrounded by storm clouds, with the motto Satis est favisse suprema/La faveur du ciel lui suffit. The text glosses this as reflecting the just, confident that they are in the lofty heights, safe in the hands of God and untroubled by the earthly turbulence below: On ne peut faire un plus juste parallele de la vie des hommes vertueux, qu’avec ces hautes montagnes qui perçant les nües de leur somme, sont éclairées de la lumiere du Soleil, pendant que les foudres et les orages se forment au dessous d’elles. Ainsi un esprit élevé vers le ciel ne craint point les calamitez qui affligent ceux qui restent dans cette vallée de miseres… il se rit de ce qui fait pleurer les autres, et dit que la faveur du ciel lui suffit. En effet, quand nous nous remettons bien dans les mains de Dieu, et que nous croyons avec confiance qu’il nous soûtient, les querelles, les inimités, les divisions, en un mot toutes les disgraces de la fortune, ne nous ébranlent pas, bien loin de nous pouvoir abbattre (1697 ed., 82-83).

These are only a few representative examples of the Calvinist emphasis of Philotheus’ emblem book which are retained from the original Latin in this 1697 French version published in the Netherlands. But many more could be cited. What, then, happens to this emphasis four years later when a second French version is produced, this time within Catholic France? It might well be expected that such terminology would be removed, but this is not, in fact, the case, as is clearly apparent in the later reworking of two of the emblems cited above. The emblem of the lamp needing to be fed with oil in order to continue to burn brightly, numbered 48 in 1697 (quoted above), reappears in the Chavance editions of 1701 and 1717 as Emblem 84, with a new motto, Illo alitur fulgetque/Je l’entretiens et je la fais briller. The newly created quatrain which immediately follows the engraving and motto strongly emphasises the importance of grace: Une Lampe sans huile est comme un corps sans ame, Elle pert aussi-tôt sa lumiére et ses feux; Sans la Grace un Chrêtien n’a plus ni feu ni flâme Et vit dans un état affreux (1717 ed., 340).

and the prose discourse is specifically entitled De la perte de la Grace, and further develops this point: La Grace est avec juste raison comparée dans cet Emblême à l’huile qui fait briller et entretient la lumiére d’une Lampe car c’est elle qui est la nourriture de l’âme, et qui la fait éclater par les dons spirituels dont elle l’enrichit, mais comme une Lampe faute d’huile pert bientôt toute sa clarté,

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Chapter Eleven de même une âme privée de la Grace pert la vie spirituelle; c’est pourquoy le Chrêtien devroit faire tous ses éforts pour conserver les graces dont Dieu lui a voulu faire part, de peur d’encourir le même malheur des Vierges Folles de l’Evangile, qui n’entrèrent point avec l’Epoux parce qu’elles n’avoient point d’huile dans leurs Lampes; c’est à dire, parce qu’elles avoient laissé perdre la Grace que les Vierges Sages avoient précieusement conservée (1717 ed., 341).

Clearly in this second French reworking no attempt has been made to remove Calvinist terminology; indeed on the contrary, it has been given greater emphasis in the newly introduced quatrain. Similarly in Emblem 90—originally Emblem 35 (cited above)—showing a mountain top enjoying the sun high above the clouds, and here given a new motto, Fulmine altior/Je suis au dessus des foudres, not only does the new prose discourse retain the Calvinist steer of the earlier version, referring again to the peace of mind of the elect, untroubled by earthly considerations, but it is given further emphasis by the addition of a title, De la tranquillité des Justes: Les Elûs prennent si peu de part à tout ce qui se fait sur la terre que les plus grands changemens ne causent aucune alteration dans leur ame; et comme ils ne soûpirent qu’aprés l’autre vie, rien n’est capable de les toucher en celle-cy (1717 ed., 365-366).

The Calvinist terminology is just as strong in the later French version, published in Lyons as it was in the earlier French version published in Utrecht. However in other respects the tenor of the text in the two versions is very different – particularly insofar as the work’s educational character is concerned. Bearing out the emphasis laid on this educational aspect of the work in Chavance’s second preface in the 1717 edition, we do indeed see in the later French version much greater emphasis being laid on didacticism; on explaining the lesson to be learned; and on adding in concrete examples and further evidence to support that lesson. And in this respect it is very different from the earlier version. Certainly the earlier French version, which reflects closely the Latin original of Philotheus, does offer a message which runs through all the emblems, but it is essentially a subjective message, taking the form of a sustained introspective meditation by an unhappy individual on his own life, and an attempt to visualise a happier future life after death. The message that we read is a consistent one - that the world is by and large an unhappy place in which we may well suffer. But nevertheless we must accept this earthly suffering, in the knowledge that it is a necessary prelude to the eternal happiness which will be the reward for the righteous. God tests the

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righteous by making them suffer on earth, and the humble who submit to God’s will are blessed thereafter, whereas those who are proud and overconfident in their own abilities, and who believe that any success which they may have in this world is due to their own efforts rather than to God, will not achieve eternal reward. Such a subjective approach is unusual in an emblem book (unless we think back to Maurice Scève’s very differently expressed, and very differently focussed, but similarly subjective reflection on his sufferings in the much earlier Délie).19 There is little overt didactic moralising in Philotheus’ original Latin work, whose message is fairly faithfully replicated in the Utrecht French version, and in which the reader is not told authoritatively what to do or not to do. But in contrast, in the later French reworking, published in Lyons, not only are the quatrains clearly didactic, but in the prose discourses also the reader (or “Christian”) is given explicit guidance on what should or should not be done in order to achieve salvation, often backed up by authority and illustrated by specific examples, such as were not present in the earlier version. Given the scholarly background of the original author, reference to authority in the earlier versions of Philotheus’ emblem book is surprisingly thin. Although Hachenberg’s preface to the original Latin version stressed the classical erudition which was at the basis of Philotheus’ emblems, in fact very little of this erudition is alluded to directly either in the original Latin of Philotheus or in the Utrecht French version. We find a very rare reference to a specific authority in Emblem 97 (Facilis descensus/La descente est facile): “C’est un mot de Virgile dans son sixiéme livre de l’AEneʀde” (1697 ed., 231), and an occasional unspecified reference to “les Anciens”, as in Emblem 22 (Durabunt/Ils ne craignent point la rigueur des saisons) on the evergreen nature of the cypress tree, in which we are told that “c’est pour cette raison que les Anciens consacrerent cet arbre à Pluton, et qu’ils en ornoient autrefois les sepulcres, pour signifier l’immortalité dont jouʀssoient les defunts” (1697 ed., 52-53). We are also told occasionally what unspecified “Naturalistes” have observed about animal or plant life, as in Emblem 39 (Sufficit ad mortem/Cette absence est mortelle) describing the way in which sheep which eat grass during an eclipse of the sun will be poisoned and die, from which a parallel is drawn with the way in which man likewise can do nothing to save himself in those periods of darkness when God occasionally abandons him temporarily (Fig. 11.3): Quelques Naturalistes rapportent que les herbes des prez dont les brebis se repaissent, sont un poison mortel pour ces animaux, s’ils en mangent dans

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But such examples are rare, and on the whole there is remarkably little display of erudition or naming of sources in Philotheus’ original work or in the 1697 French version of it. Very different, however, is the later French version, in which reference is made to specifically named authorities such as St Paul, St Augustine, and the Church Fathers to strengthen the impact of the lesson given. Thus, for example, whereas in Emblem 70 of the earlier French version on a brightly shining candle (Unius ab luce/De l’éclat d’une seule) the prose discourse described the importance of piety and Christian charity in general terms, in the later French version (now numbered 83) the name of St Paul is introduced to give greater authority.21 Again whereas in Emblem 49 of the earlier French version on the diamond gaining brilliance from the sun (Clarius inde micat/Il en a plus d’éclat) the message that great men become greater when endowed with divine grace is simply expressed with no substantiation by example or authority, in the later French version (now numbered 81) the prose discourse is much more developed. Greater detail is given, and not only St Augustine and St Ambrose, but St Charles Borromeo are introduced – not so much as authorities here, but rather as exempla: Quoy qu’un Diamant poli et mis en oeuvre ait beaucoup d’éclat, il ne laisse pas de briller encor plus lorsqu’il est exposé aux rayons du Soleil. De même les vertus d’un Chrétien éclatent davantage lorsque par la faveur du ciel il est élevé à quelque éminente dignité; c’est ainsi que Saint Ambroise, de bon Chrétien, et de sage Magistrat, devint un grand évêque, et un des doctes de l’Eglise lorsqu’il fut elu pasteur de celle de Milan. Saint Augustin son disciple après s’être converti, menoit une vie aussi chaste que celle qu’il avoit menée auparavant étoit dissolue; mais lorsqu’il fût Evêque d’Hippone, joignant la parole aux actions il édifia l’Eglise par son doctrine, et par ses moeurs, encor plus qu’il ne l’avoit scandalisé par ses erreurs et par ses desordres; c’est ainsi que la Providence éleve et choisit des sujets propres au ministere du Sacerdoce et de l’Episcopat… Si Charles Borromé n’eût été qu’un simple Prêtre, sans doute il eût été un grand saint; mais

il n’eut pas fait briller tous les talens qu’on découvrit en lui lorsqu’il fut assis dans la Chaise de Saint Ambroise, dont il imita parfaitement le zèle Apostolique (1717 ed., 328-330).22 Similarly St Teresa is introduced in Emblem 35 of the later French version to strengthen the lesson to be conveyed. In the earlier version, Illo splendente levabor/Je paroîtrai lorsqu’il m’échauffera (numbered 16) the

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image of the sun of summer causing crops to grow again after the rigours of winter is used to denote divine grace giving renewed life, but in the later version this message is further embellished by reference to St Teresa who was in danger of succumbing to “vanitez mondaines”, but was—like the crops—revived by divine grace. Not only is the didacticism of the message of the earlier, much simpler reflective emblem book made more obvious and authoritative in the later French version by the introduction of such names, but it is also strengthened and made more informative by the introduction of illustrative examples, often from the Bible. This phenomenon is very apparent in the Chavance reworking of the original Emblem 48 (Illo alitur vivitque/C’est sa nourriture et sa vie) as Emblem 84. In the later version, the very basic analysis given in the earlier version of the candle’s need for oil in order to continue to burn is much embellished and fleshed out by reference to the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the prose discourse, and the moral lesson is explained very clearly. As well as the Wise and Foolish Virgins, we also find Adam and Eve, David, Samson, St Peter and Judas all being cited as examples in the later reworking of Emblem 24 of the 1697 earlier French version. In the earlier version we are told how even the strong (like the lion) can be threatened by danger from a small enemy (the scorpion), in order to make the point that man should never be too confident of his strength against “l’ennemi du genre humain”, but this reflection is made in purely general terms (Emblem 24: Non nimium securus/Il n’est pas trop en seureté, (1697 ed., 56). But in the later reworking of this emblem (now numbered 17) this general warning of the essential weakness of human nature and of the need to ask God for help is expanded and much more fully substantiated by the inclusion of all these Biblical examples of individuals who succumbed to temptation (1717 ed., 73). Judas is again introduced as an example of the self-loathing of the sinner in Emblem 37 on the basilisk (formerly 10); and also as an example of a wicked person whose company should be avoided in Emblem 44 on the swallows fleeing in winter, but returning in spring (formerly 43); Adam and Eve are again introduced in Emblem 78 (formerly 53) being tempted by the Devil to know the secrets of God; and Noah is introduced in Emblem 38 on the cypress tree (formerly Emblem 22): just as the evergreen cypress never loses its colour even in the rigours of winter, so the souls of the just will, like Noah, remain pure despite the evil world surrounding them. The Devil, who featured not at all in Philotheus’ original version or in the earlier French version, is frequently referred to in this later French version, as does Jesus Christ, who is frequently cited as a source of redemption.

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All these additions certainly make this later French reworking published in Lyons a much more obviously didactic and educational work than had previously been the case, as Chavance claimed in both his 1701 and his 1717 prefaces, very different from the much more subjective reflection on life of the original version by Philotheus which is echoed in the earlier French version published in Utrecht. But the additions made to the work change its character in another way also, in that they make it much more Catholic in tone. Although, as we have seen, the Calvinist terminology of the original is retained, the introduction of the names of such major figures of the Catholic church as St Augustine, St Ambrose, St Teresa, and Charles Borromeo certainly give the work a different emphasis. And this Catholic emphasis emerges elsewhere in the work also. Emblem 78 of the later version (entitled Se attollendo desinit/En m’elevant je diminue) depicts a lofty bell-tower (see Fig. 11.5), and warns of the dangers of seeking to understand God by means of human reason.23 Where the original Latin, and the first French translation simply pointed to the dangers of even thinking that this could be done, and stressed the necessity for pure faith in God rather in the powers of human reason, the second French version characteristically develops the topic much more fully, describing in the quatrain how the Devil tempted Adam and Eve with the lure of knowledge, but more significantly including in the prose discourse a sustained harangue to theologians not to seek knowledge, citing specific individuals who in doing so have taken up beliefs dangerously contrary to the beliefs of the Catholic church, including among these, together with Tertullian and Origen, the more recent figure of Henry VIII of England: C’est ce qui est arrivé à un grand nombre de Sçavans hommes qui avoient montré beaucoup de capacité, et qui sont ensuite tombez dans des erreurs si grossiéres qu’on ne comprend pas comment ils ont pû s’écarter si fort du sens commun. Tels furent jadis Tertullien, Origene, & Henri VIII, Roy d’Angleterre, qui aprés avoir été d’illustres défenseurs de la Foy, ont ensuite enseigné et protégé des propositions et des maximes les plus contraires aux dogmes de l’Eglise Catholique (1717 ed., 318-319).

Several other emblems refer to schism and heresy within the church, as in Emblem 57, Recta sequitur/Il suit le juste chemin (formerly 88), depicting a traveller finding his path through a forest. In the original version, the emphasis was on the pilgrim through life following the true path and not getting sidetracked from it, but in the later French version the emphasis is laid much more strongly on the importance of following the authority of the church, with an attack on modern heretics who have broken away from the church:

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On ne va au Fils que par la vérité, et on ne trouve la vérité que dans l’Eglise…C’est donc à grand tort que les Heretiques modernes s’en sont séparez sous prétexte qu’ils découvroient des vices dans quelques uns de ses membres…qui est l’enfant assez malheureux pour rénoncer à son père et à sa mère, pour quelque defaut qu’il aura trouvé en eux? Et les Prétendus Réformez n’auroient-ils pas mieux fait de gémir et de prier Dieu qu’il lui plût purifier son Eglise, que de la déchirer eux-mêmes par l’esprit de Schisme et de Division? (1717 ed., 223).

Emblems 60 and 61 likewise both emphasise the authority of the church. In Emblem 61, Ibo quo vertas/Je vais ou l’on me conduit (formerly 65), the image of a horse submitting to the authority of its master is used to point to the need of the Christian to follow God’s direction, again working up, as in Emblem 57, to an attack on those heretics who have threatened the church (see Fig. 11.6): L’Eglise qui est l’Epouse de Jesus Christ… a marqué par l’ordre et la subordination de sa Hiérarchie, combien elle croit l’obéissance necessaire aux Chrétiens qui sont ses enfans. Les Héretiques qui l’ont attaquée et qui l’ont détruite parmi eux font bien voir qu’ils sont entierement éloignez des maximes du Sauveur qui veut que nous soyons tous soûmis les uns aux autres (1717 ed., 250).

But even more forcible in its condemnation of those who threaten the Catholic church is the prose discourse of Emblem 59 on the obelisk balanced on four balls, owing its stability to “art” as the church owes its stability to Christ who is at the centre of the Catholic faith: Mobilibus firmata globis/Je suis élevée sur des globes mobiles (formerly 69). Here the attack is no longer on heretics in general, but specifically on Luther and Calvin: Une des plus grandes marques de la Divinité de la Religion Catholique c’est qu’elle est invariable dans la Foy, selon la promesse que le Fils de Dieu en fit à S. Pierre et en son nom à tous les Fideles. C’est donc avec autant de Folie que de présomption que les derniers Hérétiques se sont séparez du corps de l’Eglise, parce qu’ils ont apperçû quelques variations dans quelqu’un de leurs membres… ne pourroit-on pas dire à Luther et à Calvin, vous avez vû des Papes indignes de la Chaire de S. Pierre? Vous avez vu des Pasteurs dans l’Eglise qui étoient de vrais Loups ravissans? Vous y avez vû des Chrêtiens pires que des Infideles? Mais ce desordre ne devoit point vous obliger à quitter le sein de votre mere, puisqu’il est certain que Jesus Christ a promis qu’il seroit toûjours avec elle et qu’il ne l’abandonneroit pas.

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Chapter Eleven Mais Luther et Calvin par l’orgüeil animez Prétendans au dehors paroître, Réformateurs et Réformez, Du sein de cette Eglise oû le Ciel les fit naître, Se sont follement separez. En quittant JESUS CHRIST leur vrai Seigneur et Maître, Du chemin du salut ils se sont égarez, Et rompans l’union ils ont bien fait connoître, Que par l’esprit de trouble ilz étoient devorez. (1717 ed., pp.241-3)

In all these examples we see a significant transformation taking place in this later French version of Philotheus’ emblem book, giving it a more Catholic tone, appropriate to the Catholic country in which it is now being published. This phenomenon is taken further and made even more clear in Emblem 58, Tantum una supersit/Pourveu qu’elle subsiste (formerly 74), which, using the image of a river in flood destroying buildings including temples, stresses the wretchedness of those who live in a country given over to heresy, but conversely the joy of living in a country governed by a king who supports the true church. In a manner quite unlike the generalised and non-specific reflection on the dangers that the church can face in the earlier French version, the message of this later French version is much more forceful and specific, and although the names of France and Louis XIV are not actually spelt out, this must be read as indirect praise of Louis XIV for his role as protector of the faith in France: Combien voyons-nous de nôtre tems des Royaumes d’où le changement de domination a fait éxiler la véritable Religion? Quel plus grand malheur que de vivre sous l’empire d’un Prince qui est non seulement Schismatique, mais qui est souvent le persecuteur des vrays Croyans. Quel malheur d’être né dans un Royaume oû l’Hérésie domine, et d’être élevé dans une ignorance presque invincible de la vraye Foy, et de se voir damné éternellement pour le peché de ses Pères…Quelle grace n’avons-nous point à rendre au Seigneur, de ce qu’il lui a plû nous faire naître dans un Royaume dont le Prince fait gloire de suivre et de proteger la vraye croyance? (1717 ed., 228-229).

A few emblems later this indirect praise is expressed quite explicitly. In Emblem 66, Laetatur duplice praeda/Il se rejouit de sa double prise (formerly 67), using the image of a fisherman catching both birds and fish in his net simultaneously to demonstrate the blessed state of the Christian favoured by grace, who can enjoy both earthly and heavenly joy (Fig. 11.7), the prose discourse concludes with a eulogy of Louis XIV for his determined suppression of heresy in France:

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Quel plus grand monarque en effet que ce Roy de France, qui après avoir calmé dez sa jeunesse les troubles qui divisoient son Royaume, porta la Terreur de ses armes dans les Etats des Infideles (1717 ed., 271).

This second French reworking of Philotheus’ original Latin emblem book is thus extremely interesting, demonstrating how a work could be transformed from a very subjective reflection on life to a much more moralising and didactic work, and how—while still retaining much of its original Calvinist terminology and concepts—it could nevertheless undergo significant changes which give it an evident Catholic emphasis.24 But this is only one of the many interesting aspects of this emblem book originally published in the 1670s, and still going strong a century later. Focussing until now on the complex international printing history of the work and on the way in which its textual content was modified, we have said little about the images which form the starting point for the emblems, many of which are highly original. If we assume—as I think we must—that, like Montenay, Philotheus (or Karl II to give him his real name) was responsible for the choice of images as well as for the original text, then we see that he must have had a very creative mind. We are well used to seeing emblem after emblem reworking familiar images. But there is very little of that in Philotheus’ emblem book. Of course there are some familiar images—storm-tossed ships (60, 66); rainbows (19); horses (44, 65); candles (7, 14, 70) often seen in relation to the much brighter sun— which is the most recurrent image in this emblem book, usually representing heavenly salvation or the sun of righteousness. 25 But very often even familiar images are put to unusual uses, as for example the snake whose skin is made to shine by the light of the sun, denoting the effect of divine grace on the most vile (Emblem 8, Illustrat quoque vilia/Il rend éclatantes les choses les plus viles); or a column lying on the ground, indicating that in the same way that the column has to be laid flat in order for its imperfections to be smoothed off, so God must prove the just in order to make them fitting to enter Heavenly Jerusalem (Emblem 30, Iacet dum perficitur /Elle est couchée par terre, lorsqu’on la polie). But it is the remarkable number of unusual figures which is most striking in Philotheus’ emblem book: a man lying in a hammock reflecting how God’s grace gives us rest even when the world around us is agitated (Emblem 13, Et in volvendo quiesco/Je trouve le repos dans mon agitation: see Fig 11.8); young myrtle seedlings being tended in a seedling box denoting the importance of gentle nurture and education of the young in order to allow them to put down solid roots of virtue (Emblem 82, Teneras defendo a frigore myrtos/Je garde les myrtes tendres du froid). A large number of the more unusual images are drawn from the world of

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nature - both animals and plants. In Emblem 39 (Sufficit ad mortem/Cette absence est mortelle) the image of sheep dying as a result of grazing while the sun is obscured by an eclipse is used to denote the suffering of the soul when divine grace is absent; in Emblem 20 (Laetius ut crescat/Afin qu’elle croisse mieux) the image of a man scything a meadow in order to encourage a new crop of grass reflects the way in which God inflicts necessary suffering on man to make him worthy of salvation; in Emblem 67 (Non quaero quod capio/Je ne cherche point ce que je prends) a fisherman watching flying fish leaping into his net without any effort on his part is used conversely to denote God’s generous reward to our piety. Many other examples could be cited - oranges and lemons whose skin is as sweet as their flesh (15 - see Fig. 9); the medicinal properties of powdered pearl (79); a ball kept up in the air by the force of a jet of water in a fountain; and (perhaps somewhat incongruously) rutting stags so obsessed with does that they cannot be distracted, denoting the strength of the just person’s love of God, inspired by divine grace (Emblem 62, misnumbered as 52: Nec curat nec sentit amans/Celuy qui aime n’est sensible qu’à l’amour). The degree of originality and imaginative ingenuity in this emblem book created by the twenty-six-year old future Elector Palatine Karl II is truly remarkable, and particularly so for someone so young and inexperienced in literary production. Remarkable in its conception, and in the sophistication and ingenuity of its imagery; remarkable in the evident impact that it exercised across Europe, published in different countries and different languages; remarkable in the way that it was modified from a purely Calvinist text to a text which could be accommodated within a Catholic country and dedicated to a Catholic monarch; and remarkable in that versions of the work were still being published a century after its initial appearance, indicating clearly its enduring interest. In view of all these remarkable aspects of this work, all reflecting its originality and importance, it is the more striking that this “other” Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes, that written by the youthful Karl II, future Elector Palatine under his pseudonym Philotheus, and definitely not by Montenay, despite what the Bibliothèque Nationale de France catalogue continues to state, has fallen completely off the emblematic map. It is to be hoped that this article will do something to put it back on that emblematic map where it deserves to occupy a much more prominent place.

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Fig. 11.1. Title-page, Philothei symbola christiana (Frankfurt am Main, 1677). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.2. Emblem 7: “Dum splendet et omnia splendet”, Emblemes ou devises chréstiennes (Utrecht, 1697). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.3. Emblem 39: “Sufficit ad mortem”, Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes (Utrecht, 1697). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.4. Emblem 9: “Sustentat”, Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes (Utrecht, 1697). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.5. Emblem 78: “Se attollendo desinit”, Emblemes ou devises chréstiennes (Lyon, 1717). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.6. Emblem 61: “Ibo quo vertas”, Emblemes ou devises chréstiennes (Lyon, 1717). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.7. Emblem 66: “Letatur duplice praeda”, Emblemes ou devises chréstiennes (Lyon, 1717). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.8. Emblem 13: “Et in volvendo quiesco”, Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes (Utrecht, 1697). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 11.9. Emblem 15: “Suavis ubique”, Emblemes ou devises chrétiennes (Utrecht, 1697). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library

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Notes 1 G. de Montenay, Emblemes, ou devises chrestiennes, composees par Damoiselle Georgette de Montenay (Lyons: Jean Marcorelle, 1567): Philothei symbola christiana quibus idea hominis christiani exprimitur (Frankfurt am Main: Johannes Peter Zubrod, 1677). See Fig. 1. 2 Praz 1964. 3 Landwehr 1970; Landwehr 1972; Landwehr 1976; Adams, Rawles and Saunders 1999-2002. The other French version falls outside the date parameters of the Bibliography of French Emblem Books; Höpel 1999; and Höpel 2004 4 See Introduction to Quarles 1993, 11; and Höltgen 1995. For the reception of continental Jesuit emblem books in Protestant England more generally see Dimler 1984. Alison Adams discusses this question of the confessional transfer of emblem books in the context of her analysis of the various European translations of Montenay’s emblems in the 1619 polyglot edition in Adams 2003. 5 For biographical details of Karl Ludwig and Karl II respectively see Allgemeine deutsche Bibliographie und Neue deutsche Bibliographie (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1977), Vol. 11, 246-249 and 249-250. 6 Karl Ludwig spent several years in exile in England at the court of Charles I in the 1630s and 1640s where his allegiance in the Civil War was somewhat equivocal, and rather later, after he had returned to the Palatinate (which had been restored to him in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia), he strove to build up relations with France, one outcome of which was the marriage of his daughter, ElizabethCharlotte, the younger sister of Karl II, to the Duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. 7 There is here an interesting further Montenay connection, in that when Esther Kello produced in 1624 a calligraphic manuscript of fifty of Montenay’s emblems, each dedicated to a member of the English aristocracy, and dedicated overall to the future Charles I, she opened the collection with emblems individually addressed to James I and his two children, Charles and Elizabeth. For discussion of this work see Saunders 1992. 8 Glasgow University Library possesses copies of both the folio and the quarto versions, thereby making comparison very easy. 9 Landwehr 1972 (478) cites a 1679 edition of the German version with the same title published by Zubrod in Heidelberg (presumably the same edition but with a variant title page) of which a copy exists in the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Praz (454 and also 379) cites a German version published in an 8ooblong edition by Johannes Stridbeck Jüngern in Augsburg c.1680 under the title Hundert Christ-ergessliche Sinnbilder mit Lateinisch und Teutschen Beyschriften but he gives no location, and I have not been able to find a copy of this. 10 A copy of the rare 1712 edition is held in Cambridge University Library (and an IDC microfiche of this edition is also available), and a copy of the slightly less rare 1713 edition is held in the Getty Institute Library (of which a digitised version is available).

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A copy of this 1779 edition is available in Leiden University Library. Landwehr (Emblem Books in the Low Countries 1554-1949, 497) also cites an edition published in 1730 in Amsterdam by J. Tirion, but I have not located a copy of this. 12 Landwehr 1988 (494) suggests that the Dutch prose passages in this edition are translated from the French prose of the 1697 Utrecht edition, but there seems no particular reason why this should be so. It is much more probable that they are translations into Dutch of the original Latin, rather than third-hand translations into Dutch of the earlier translations into French. 13 Uitbreiding, over honderd leerzaame Zinnebeelden, door Claas Bruin (Amsterdam: Hendrick Bosch, 1722). 14 Emblemes ou devises chretiennes: ouvrage mêlé de prose et de vers, et enrichi de figures en taille-douce (Lyons: The Widow of Claude Chavance and Mathieu Chavance, 1701); Emblemes ou devises chretiennes: ouvrage mêlé de prose et de vers, et enrichi de figures, dédié au Roy. Seconde édition (Lyons: Mathieu Chavance, 1717). Copies of the 1717 edition are not difficult to locate, but the 1701 edition is rare. Copies exist in the Bibliothèque municipale in Lyons and also in Utrecht University Library and the Newberry Library in Chicago. 15 Emblemes ou devises chretiennes, ouvrage mêlé de prose et de vers, et enrichi d’un tres-grand nombre de figures en taille-douce. Dedié au Roy (Lyons: Etienne Rusand, n.d.). The Catalogue collectif de la France also identifies copies of this edition in the Bibliothèques municipales of Besançon and St Etienne, but I know of no other copies. Neither Praz nor Landwehr mention this edition. 16 Even the “death” emblem which had hitherto closed the collection (in manner again reminiscent of Montenay’s concluding emblem) is moved here, so that it no longer appears as Emblem 100 in this new French version, but rather as Emblem 96, where it is followed by a further four emblems on death the equaliser; the Day of Judgement; Hell; and Paradise. 17 The five emblems which are removed are the citrus fruit (15); a hand emerging from a cloud holding a flaming heart (61); a hand reaching to a sword (83); a veiled candle (93); and a globe entwined by a crowned serpent (95). These are replaced by new emblems based on engravings representing the sacraments being kept in a safe place (49); the pelican in her piety (51); the scales and sword of justice (54); Icarus (59); and a serpent casting its skin (93). 18 See, for example the reference in Emblem 67 of the 1697 French version to flying fish found specifically in the Indies: “Certes cet embleme des poissons ailez que l’on void dans les Indes…” which is echoed in the prose discourse of Emblem 66 in the Chavance French version: “Il y a certaine Contrée dans les Indes, où ceux qui pêchent sur la mer prennent en même tems et dans le meme filet des oyseaux et des poissons…” (1697 ed., 152; 1717 ed., 269). 19 Indeed in Emblem 56 (Ab uno/Toutes choses se rapportent à un seul) the prose discourse opens with a first-person philosophical reflection: “J’ai souvent douté en moi-même, s’il étoit plus juste de se mettre en colere contre ceux qui ont la temerité de nier une premiere cause, que d’avoir compassion de leur aveuglement” (1697 ed., 127-128). See also Emblem 66 on the ship being carried along by the wind (Sponte tua feror aura/Je suis poussé par son souffle): “Plusieurs ont crû que

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les decrets que Dieu avoit faits pouvoient ou être prevenuz ou renversez par le conseil des hommes…Mais pour moi, j’ai toûjours crû qu’on pouvoit comparer cette disposition et cette destination éternelle à un navire qui attend le bon vent au port” (1697 ed., 150-151). 20 See also Emblem 42 (Agitante calescimus ille/Son mouvement nous échauffe) on the elephant’s habit of raising its trunk to the sun, associated with the strong gaining their strength from God, in which the authority not only of unspecified “Naturalistes” but also of unspecified “Historiens” is cited (1697 ed., 95 and 97). 21 St Paul is cited again as authority in one of the five “new” emblems which appear for the first time in the later Lyons published French version. This is Emblem 93 (Estote prudentes sicut serpentes/Soyez prudens comme le serpent) on the prudence of the serpent sloughing off its old skin (that is, casting off the old Adam), and embracing the Cross and living in Jesus. This must surely be an echo of Montenay’s earlier Lyons published emblem with the same motto, dating from nearly a century and a half earlier. 22 Both St Paul and St Augustine are also cited in Emblem 6 of the later version on the sun giving life to the vine (formerly Emblem 4, Inde et vita et virtus/Elle tire de là sa vie et sa vertu) again equated with divine grace. 23 Originally numbered 53 and entitled Attenuando desinit/Il diminüe à mesure qu’il s’éleve. 24 It is interesting to observe that the copy of the 1701 Chavance edition and also one of the four copies of the 1717 Chavance edition in the Bibliothèque municipale in Lyons, were formerly in the library of a Jesuit seminary (Les Fontaines). On the face of it this fact should confirm that in its revised form in this later French version the work was indeed made acceptable to a Catholic readership. However, the strength of this argument is slightly weakened by the fact that the Bibliothèque municipale possesses two copies of the 1682 Latin edition of the original fully Calvinist version published in Leiden by the Widow Johannis à Gelder, both of which were also formerly in Jesuit libraries. One copy was formerly in the library at Les Fontaines, but the other is particularly interesting since (as indicated by its bookplate) it was originally in the possession of the notable seventeenth-century Jesuit emblematic theorist, Claude-François Menestrier, who donated it to the library of the Jesuit Collège de la Trinité in Lyons. 25 For clarity, in this section all numbers refer to the original numbering established by Philotheus and used in all editions other than the 1701 French reworking by Mathieu Chavance. The Latin and French titles are those used in the 1697 Utrecht edition.

CHAPTER TWELVE “NON MANUS MAGIS QUAM INGENIA EXERCERE”: IMPERIAL PROPAGANDA ON EMBLEMATIC TARGETS ELISABETH KLECKER

In the first decades of the seventeenth century under the reign of Charles VI shooting competitions were the favourite pastime of the imperial court during the summer months from July to October. The emperor used to spend these months in his summer residence, the Favorita, then outside Vienna’s city walls.1 In the Favorita garden there was an outdoor shooting range; in case of bad weather facilities were also provided in the Hofburg. The events were called Kränzlschießen, though the Kranz or Kränzl, the wreath which had been originally awarded to the champion, was actually substituted by luxury items, for example, fine china. There was a distinction between the Haupt- and OrdinariKränzlschießen: the main shootings were sponsored by the emperor or members of his family; at the ordinary shootings two noblemen of the imperial marksmen’s guild were responsible for the prizes.2 Each event consisted of different competitions, and accordingly discs of different sizes and centres were used. The season featured from ten to fifteen events and was usually opened by three or four days’ shooting sponsored by the emperor and closed by the empress’s counterpart. Though a great many Baroque targets are kept in smaller local museums all over Austria and Bavaria,3 no targets seem to be left of the imperial shooting competitions.4 Fortunately, they are not completely lost. Vienna’s leading newspaper, the Wienerisches Diarium, regularly reported on the events and included descriptions of the discs. Furthermore, firsthand information on the years 1716–1733 is available in fifteen

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manuscripts owned by the Austrian National Library (cod. 7257–7271).5 They were compiled by two secretaries of the imperial marksmen’s guild (so-called “Schützenschreiber”), Matthias Joseph Feuchtenberg (1716– 1727) and Stephan Joseph Mayr (1729–1733). The volumes contain the following pieces of information: the date of events, names of sponsors, number of shots, champions and prizes. Finally, descriptions of the targets are given, with some explanatory remarks increasing in length over the years. In addition to these textual records (which, with minor changes, are identical to the printed version in the Viennese Diarium), the manuscripts reproduce the target images as pen-and-wash drawings of considerable artistic quality. As the descriptions often mention the colours or refer to special techniques of painting, we get a vivid impression of the targets’ appearance, and the number of approximately 900 discs may serve as a solid basis for research into their iconography, even in changing fashions. There is only one further comparable manuscript, the so-called Coburg album, dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century which reproduces the targets of shooting competitions at the court of Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg (1564–1633).6

Political Emblems on Targets Targets as a medium of “emblematics outside the book“7 have already been given due attention to illustrate the omnipresence and multiple functions of emblematic art in early modern times.8 What seems to have been neglected so far, however, is their potential propagandistic value. The political dimension of targets is well evidenced by examples from local collections, for example, a disc from the museum of St Veit an der Glan/Carinthia which is particularly rich in targets dating from the first half of the eighteenth century (Fig. 12.1). The main image in the foreground reproduces Alciato’s emblem “Etiam ferocissimos domari” (Emblematum liber, A3), that is, Mark Anthony on a chariot to which he had yoked lions to indicate that great leaders had to surrender to his military might. The background where a fortress is being bombarded obviously points to a contemporary event.9 The motto “Nihil tam durum quod frangi non posit[o]” (Nothing is too hard to be broken) varies from Alciato’s only slightly. Such an adaptation of a well-known emblem is no isolated instance. If we view the collections, most Baroque targets are designed emblematically, often with Latin mottoes. There is a lot of general moralizing, and a great many discs use current symbolical imagery to commemorate occasions of a private nature, primarily weddings.10 On the other hand, allusions to politics in general and military events in particular were common up to the nineteenth century.

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The imperial discs obviously draw on an existing tradition of target iconography: wine, love, and hunting are recurring subjects. The competitions themselves are displayed; for example, the newly built shooting range in the Favorita garden (13th September, 1733; cod. 7271, fol. 88r). Hardly any target, however, can be regarded as ideologically neutral. The imperial context requires them to be considered within the framework of Baroque festival culture: any festival arranged by the ruler exceeded mere entertainment and was to symbolize the golden age restored by his generosity and munificence.11 As we would expect, this interpretation of the present reign as an age marked by peace and prosperity is prominent at the main shootings. The great bulk of the targets refer to current political matters or are straightforwardly encomiastic, for example, by picturing the imperial couple as the mythical hunting gods, Apollo and Diana. The sponsoring noblemen, in their turn, could take advantage of the targets to allude to their merits in the service of the emperor; they could display their loyalty by praising his virtues and achievements. It is precisely the part targets played in imperial selffashioning and their use for propaganda purposes which seems to have passed unnoticed so far.12 The technique consists in adapting familiar emblematic imagery to suit special occasions. The manuscripts, as well as the records published in the Viennese Diarium, use to point to this application. To congratulate the empress when she had recovered from an illness serious enough to be reported by the Viennese Diarium,13 Alciato’s “Obdurandum adversus urgentia” (Emblematum liber, B3) offered an appropriate compliment: as the wood of the palm-tree counteracts a heavy weight, the empress has been ennobled by hardship and become even “more sublime” (“Sublimior inde”; 22nd-24th October, 1725; cod. 7265, fol. 18r). It does not come as a surprise that the Favorita targets profited from political emblematics, for example, Isselburg’s engravings of the emblematic decoration in the Nuremberg townhall:14 Emblem 19, “His nititur orbis”, with a sword and a book of law on the globe, was used twice (“His nititur orbis”, 10th August, 1721; cod. 7262, fol. 88r; and “His fulcris nititur orbis” 16th August, 1729; cod. 7268, fol. 66r). The 1729 disc combines book and sword with the caduceus as a symbol of peace and welfare and the club for military strength. The new details are not only meant to add weight to the political message (and to shift it slightly towards Arte et Marte), but to bring in an element of personal flattery. Hercules was generally regarded as the benefactor of mankind and appropriate model of the ruler, but Charles VI’s specific attachment to the mythic hero was closely connected to his thwarted Spanish ambitions: Hercules’ labours in the West served as a chiffre for the Spanish War of Succession.15 Consequently, on the targets

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the hero himself or his typical attributes, the lion skin and the club, are pictured in various combinations. Herculean iconography is central to the thirteenth Ordinari-Kränzlschießen in 1720 (13th October, 1720; cod. 7261, fol. 135–136; Figs. 12.2a and 12.2b). The lion skin (“Tessera certaminis”, that is, “Watchword in battle”) is followed by Hercules fighting the hydra with the motto, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito” (Yield not to ills, but go forth all the bolder to face them - taken from Virgil, Aeneid 6, 95). Finally, Hercules is standing upright on the funeral pyre, with the motto referring to his apotheosis obtained by virtue: “Sibimet pulcherrima merces” (Virtue is indeed its own noblest reward taken from Silius Italicus, Punica 13, 663: Ipsa quidem virtus sibimet pulcherrima merces). With the Pillars of Hercules, another Herculean subject is present on targets. Charles VI had adopted the columnar device of his ancestor Charles V, interpreting the columns to denote his personal motto Constantia et fortitudine. At the emperor’s Hauptschießen in 1729 (30th July, 1729; cod. 7268, fol. 10r; Fig. 12.3) the third disc displays two columns inscribed C (for constantia) and F (for fortitudo) on their bases. They are intertwined in the manner of the snakes around the caduceus and the composition is topped by two horns of plenty, implying that the emperor’s virtues guarantee peace and welfare: “Sapientia prosperat orbem” (Wisdom prospers the world). At the empress’ main shooting in 1727 (22nd -24th October, 1727; cod. 7267, fol. 37r) the columns are multiplied to denote a set of four virtues (constantia, fortitudo, prudentia and iustitia, according to the inscriptions on the shafts), evidently meant to be an analogue to the four cardinal virtues giving support to the crown (Haec fulcra coronae). An exceptionally interesting hieroglyphic composition occurs at the empress’s main shooting in 1729 (Ordo et felicitas “Order and happiness”; 5th-7th October, 1729; cod. 7268, fol. 20r; Fig. 12.4). A rudder and a wand with a snake winding around it are crossed in front of the globe serving as the black centre. According to the description in the manuscript and in the Viennese Diarium, the rudder symbolizes the fortunate government of the empire, the wand and the snake the ruler’s political wisdom and providence.16 The combination was to be displayed in a central position on one of the most ambitious imperial building projects, the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire (Reichskanzlei). In a drawing by Salomon Kleiner (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. min. 9, fol. 5) it can be viewed above the main doorway. Thus, the target might be seen as the ephemeral counterpart of a very prominent piece of sculptural decoration. The motto of the target, as well as the description published in the Viennese Diarium, could offer guidelines for interpreting the enigmatic

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image; the presence of the same concetto in various media would increase the perception and impact of propagandistic iconography in the public sphere. As to modern research, the target exemplifies the difficulties of a systematic approach: apart from the emblematic sources, the interrelation between different media of imperial self-representation has to be taken into account. Specific iconographic traditions existed for two of the competitions: the disc of the last competition, the “Ritter”, used to pun on unskilled marksmen, and Fortune’s disc (a competition limited to the main shootings) was expected to picture the goddess to symbolize that even the most skilled marksman is subject to luck.17 Whereas the Viennese targets mostly respect the humorous character of the Ritter, Fortune’s disc is usually exploited to depict the felicitas temporum, the happiness of the age. By virtue of the emperor’s accomplishments, Fortune’s instability and capriciousness have come to an end. At the empress’ main shooting in 1729 (5th-7th October) this idea is visualized in a mythic scene: Mercury is nailing Fortune to the globe to prevent her rolling away (“Tenor et stabilitas” [Continuity and stability], cod. 7268, fol. 21r). When the daughters of the imperial couple, Archduchess Maria Theresia, Maria Anna and Maria Magdalena, girls in their teens, acted as sponsors of shooting events, the targets usually featured gendered images such as flowers and gardens. This may seem a strategy to encourage faith and confidence in the dynasty. By the mid 1720s it had become unrealistic to hope for an archduke: the estates of the Austrian lands accepted the Pragmatic Sanction and the succession of the female line to all Habsburg dominions. As a consequence, the public appearances of Charles’s daughters were carefully styled to emphasize their beauty and charms, promising future fertility. A unique feature of the Viennese targets which is evidenced by the manuscript and newspaper records consists in the composition of coordinates. In more than fifty per cent of the events three or four discs are related to each other, either by subject or motto. The unifying concept of such a programme may be the praise of a specific virtue, for example, the emperor’s love of justice at the occasion of his main shooting in 1719 (11th-13th July, 1719; cod. 7260, fol. 21–22): read one after the other, the mottoes offer a comprehensive characterization of Lady Justice: “Neminem videt”; “Audit utrumque”; “Proemiat”; “Et punit”; “Nec fato ducitur ullo” (Justice is blind; She lends her ear to both parties; She rewards and punishes; and is not subject to fate’s arbitrariness). In 1730 a comparable programme celebrating his military strength was dedicated to the Roman god of war (6th August, 1730; cod. 7269, fol. 51–52): “Mars ultor”; “Marti victori”; “Marti pacifero”; on the Ritter’s disc “Marti

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jocoso” - the shooting events are styled as a kind of wargame and training exercise. Target programmes could utilize traditional sets of four, for example, the four seasons and their specific gifts, or the four times of the day. Such a traditional foursome could also be exploited for eulogy: at the occasion of the empress’ main shooting in 1726 (2nd November, 1726; cod. 7266, fol. 38–39) personifications of the four continents were depicted on targets numbered one to four according to their stereotyped appearance.18 The motto of the last disc brings out the link with imperial ideology: “Virtutum fama fortuna dominantium” (Virtue’s glory is the rulers’ fortune). Programmes like this embracing the complete set of discs are often designed in a way to reveal their message step by step, proceeding from one competition to the next, with the last disc summarizing the essential idea. At the emperor’s main shooting in 1721 (14th-16th July, 1721; cod. 7262, fol. 16–17; Figs. 12.5a-12.5c) his virtues are visualized by four symbolical animals under the headings Prudentis, Justi, Vigilis, Fortisque: the elephant stands for prudentia, the eagle carrying Jove’s lightning bolt represents justice, the crane vigilance, and the lion fortitudo. Fortune’s disc with the motto (“Überschrifftcontinuation”) Perennis est fortuna comes completes the syntax (Fortune is the prudent, just, vigilant and brave man’s steady companion) and ties the pictures together in a narrative structure. The animals painted on targets one to four are now harnessed to Fortune’s chariot, whose way is led by virtue.19 Thus, with the last target of the event, all five targets turn out to form an elaborate programme illustrating the common saying Duce virtute, comite fortuna. The dynamism of this programme is emphasized with intentional playfulness. The first disc is devoted to the biggest animal, which is inscribed into the black centre on an otherwise blank disc, whereas the following discs bear full-size images. The proportions are deliberately ignored to create the impression of a series of pictures emanating from one tiny black spot. The mottoes could lend themselves to similar subtle play. Even where the pictures are not related to each other, the technique remains essentially the same: step by step, target by target, complementary aspects of Charles’ blissful reign unfold. A programme might be built by a sequence of identically structured mottoes (“Ordo et felicitas” [Order and happiness]; “Decor et hilaritas” [Beauty and cheerfulness]; “Honor et integritas” [Honour and integrity]; “Tenor et stabilitas” [Continuity and stability]; “Labor et ubertas” [Toil and abundance]; 5th-7th October, 1729; cod. 7268, fol. 20r), or the mottoes could be quotations from one and the same Latin poem, which the participants were expected to know at full length and to supplement the context. Thus, with a minimum of text a maximum message could be conveyed. Four well-known quotations from Virgil’s fourth

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Eclogue (14th September, 1727; cod. 7267, fol. 129–130) would suffice to evoke the Augustan age (after a period of civil war) and its renewal under Charles VI (after the defeat of the Ottomans): Magnus nascitur ordo (Eclogue 4, 5: “Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo” [The great line of the centuries begins anew]; Eclogue 4, 6: “Redeunt Saturnia regna” [Saturn’s reign returns]; Eclogue 4, 10: “Iam regnat Apollo” [Apollo reigns]; Eclogue 4, 13: “Solvit formidine terras” [He freed the earth from fear]). At a later event (10th September, 1730; cod. 7269, fol. 88–89) a similar effect is achieved by splitting the introductory address of Horace’s Epistle to Augustus (Epistle 2, 1) into four mottoes: “Cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus”; “Res Italas armis tuteris”; “Moribus ornes”; “Legibus emendes” (Since you bear the weight of such great affairs, guarding Italy with armies, raising its morals, reforming its laws).

Targets and Medals The circular shape of the targets relates them closely to a well-known medium of propaganda in the Baroque era: medals created to commemorate events of political or dynastic importance. Such medals served as presents for courtiers of merit or were distributed at coronations. Frequently they were published in engravings, and, together with short notes on their historical background, they could form an illustrated survey of a dynasty or a single ruler’s achievments. Charles VI took vivid interest in the medium; he encouraged collecting medals of former members of the Habsburg family and employed artists for a historia metallica of his own reign, rivalling a similar enterprise for the French king Louis XIV.20 A practical link between targets and medals consisted in the custom of reproducing the target image on prize medals awarded to the champions. On the targets the parallelism of the two media was brought out by deliberately drawing on the same ancient tradition as contemporary medals. A considerable number of targets are modelled on Roman coins, which are explicitly referred to in the descriptions. For a Kränzlschießen in 1729 (13th October, 1729; cod. 7268, fol. 108–109; Figs. 12.6a and 12.6b), an entire programme comprising of four discs was based on coins (“von alten Denk-Müntzen”). The ancient models are easily identified for two of them: the third target, “Genius populi Romani”, seems to be inspired by the reverse of a coin issued under Titus, but the image remained current in the later Empire.21 The Genius of the Roman People, with modius on his head and cornucopia in his left hand, is sacrificing over a lighted altar from a patera in his right hand. On the target the patera is replaced by the wreath (serving as the centre). The second disc celebrates Charles’s care for commerce and transportation: all over Austria old roads were improved,

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and new roads were constructed in the former Ottoman territories.22 The target refers to a denarius of Trajan commemorating the completion of the Via Traiana from Rome to Benevent.23 On its reverse the goddess of the road is reclining on rocks and holding a wheel balanced on her knee. The target accurately reproduces the image, as well as the arrangement of the textual parts, the dedicatory legend Optimo principi, and the subscriptio commemorating the achievement. The very first disc pretends to represent the temple of Janus according to an Augustan coin; the actual source, however, must have been a Neronian sestertius with the identical legend (“Pace populi Romani terra marique parta Janum clausit” [When peace was established by land and sea he shut the temple of Janus]).24 It is obvious that Nero could not serve as an appropriate predecessor to the Habsburg emperor, and as a consequence the commentary refers to the more famous closure of the temple by Augustus. For the Ritter’s disc the description explicitly mentions a coin struck under Commodus, but the model seems to have been followed less closely than on numbers one to three.25 Besides ancient coins, sources of inspiration included contemporary medals. When the empress returned from Karlsbad/Bohemia in the autumn of 1721, a programme of three targets frankly expresses the public hope that the cure would result in pregnancy and male offspring (“Nova spes” [New hope]; “Parenti Gratiarum” [To the mother of the Graces]; “Veneri Augustae reduce” [To Venus Augusta on her return]; 7th September, 1721; cod. 7262, fol. 108–9). On the first disc the genius of the longed-for archduke is seated on the heraldic Habsburg lion. The invention seems reminiscent of the golden medal, which the estates of Anterior Austria had offered as a birthday present in 1716, when the empress had given birth to Charles’s only son, Archduke Leopold, who died the same year.26 On the reverse of this medal (an engraving of which had been published with a commentary in 1717) Cybele, interpreted as the personification of the world empire, places the baby archduke on the back of the Habsburg lion (Fig. 12.7).27 An essential advantage of targets over medals as media of imperial propaganda may be seen in the lesser costs of production, as well as in the regularity and rapid succession of shooting events. From July to October political and dynastic issues could be reflected almost immediately on symbolical and allegorical discs. This allowed a kind of dialogue to be opened up. By referring to targets of former competitions, different aspects of one and the same event could be discussed in the course of the shooting season. We may guess that there was a kind of backstage designing competition among the target authors, which resulted in an increasingly sophisticated allusiveness of the targets.

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A fine example of such a dialogue, as well as of interaction between targets and medals, is provided in 1725, when several targets celebrated the Peace of Vienna (signed 30th April and 1st May), a treaty negotiated between the Habsburg emperor Charles VI and the Bourbon king of Spain Philip V by the latter’s special envoy Johan Willem Ripperda (1680– 1737).28 At the third Kränzlschießen of the year, by obvious distortion of the historical facts, the peace is celebrated as an achievement of the emperor’s arms. The first disc “Tranquilla potestas” (Calm power) (29th July, 1725; cod. 7265, fol. 77r; Fig. 12.8) displays two Herculean clubs between two fasces standing upside down as a sign of peace. As the globe forming the centre is supported by the crossed clubs, the security of the empire rests on the emperor’s Herculean bravery and military strength. A target one month later (26th August, 1725; cod. 7265, fol. 108r; Fig. 12.9) takes over the club, combining it with the lightning bolt and the labarum. The Roman fasces are now replaced by the two columns of the imperial device. The inscription “Iber pacatus et Ister” (Peace in Iberia and along the Ister [Danube]) refers to Prince Eugene of Savoy’s successful campaigns against the Ottomans; the labarum focuses on the defence of Christianity and the pietas Austriaca. The favourable interpretation of the peace-treaty is maintained, but set forward in a more subtle way by combining it with undisputed military accomplishments in the East. On the same occasion a medal was designed (though it does not seem to have been produced), an engraved sketch of which was published with a dedication to Ripperda (Fig. 12.10): it is clearly related to the concetto of the second target, expanding on the very same idea of peace brought about in the East and West (Oriens occidensque pacati).29 Rich in details, it assembles symbols of peace and government around a central altar and two Minervae symbolizing the mutual agreement of the rulers. Once more the scene is framed by the imperial columns. Finally, the concetto of the medal was slightly simplified to form a target in 1730 (“Concordia sospitat orbem” [Harmony preserves the world]; 3rd September, 1730; cod. 7269, fol. 80r; Fig. 12.11).

Target Authors and their Public Designing targets was a demanding task for specialists. It required familiarity with the symbolical language and stock imagery of hieroglyphics and emblematics, with numismatics, as well as classical literature. The author of a target concetto had to be aware of the tradition of the single disc, and he had to remember the targets of former competitions. What was even more important in the case of the Favorita events, was that he needed well-informed networks, as political allusions

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required particular delicacy. Generally, any invention had to fit into the framework of political imagery promoted by the emperor’s main enterprises in the fields of art and architecture. Last but not least, the visibility of the black centre should not be obstructed by overloaded compositions. The authors’ names do not get a fixed place among the items contained in the manuscript records, and they are completely silent about the painters. We may assume that the noblemen organizing an event turned to scholars they used to consult over matters of art, for example, for allegorical decorations of their palaces. At the present stage of research only two authors can be identified; they fully come up to the demands outlined above and seem to have set standards followed by their now unknown colleagues. A scholar of European renown involved in designing targets was the court antiquarian Carl Gustav Heraeus (1671–1725). Heraeus was in charge of the imperial coin collection and was employed in designing medals and composing inscriptions.30 When he published an anthology of his works in 1721 he included three medals commissioned as prizes by the Czech Court Chancellor Count Leopold Schlick when he organized a Kränzlschießen together with Ferdinand Marquard Harrach. According to the Viennese Diarium (7th August, 1720, no. 1776, and cod. 7261) the event can be dated 4th August, 1720.31 The records are explicit about the fact that the medals reproduce the target images, which is confirmed when we compare the engravings in Heraeus’ book and the drawings in codex 7261, fol. 50r and 51r. The only other author evidenced by our sources is the court poet Johann Carl Newen (1683–1767): his full name is given for the second Kränzlschießen in 1727 (27th July, 1727; cod. 7267, fol. 59r), where it is stated that the targets were designed by Newen to illustrate the blissful happiness of Charles’s reign: “durch den allhiesigen Hof-Poeten Herrn Johann Carl Newen auf unsere glückselige Zeiten fordersamst angetragen”.32 Newen, who was crowned poet laureate (or at least received a diploma) in 1714, came out with Latin eulogies as early as 1711, when Charles was elected emperor in Frankfurt. Most of his occasional poetry celebrating the emperor and members of his court was published in the Viennese Diarium. Newen was an extremely prolific writer who was responsible for the textual and emblematic elements of festival architecture and of funeral decorations, the so-called castra doloris. He was in charge of nearly all (epigraphic) Latin needed at official occasions, and continued to be employed in this field during the reign of Maria Theresia, notably for the illuminations to celebrate the birth of Archduke Joseph in 1741.33 Inscriptions by Newen can be traced up to the 1760s; his classisizing style

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was omnipresent in the public space and indubitably exercised a considerable influence on contemporary authors. His involvement in shooting events dates back to 1716, when the Viennese newspaper by introducing him as “Scheiben=Uberschriften =Verfasser” (Wienerisches Diarium, no. 1362) acknowledges his authorship of the mottoes on the occasion of a shooting arranged by the citizens’ marksmen guild (Wienerisch-Burgerliches Haupt- und FreySchießen, 23rd-25th August, 1716). When Charles VI sponsored a shooting event at the same range four weeks later, Newen published a booklet congratulating the two noblemen who were in charge of the organization.34 The poems were reprinted in a commemorative volume, and we may conclude with a high degree of probability that he was responsible for the discs too.35 The fact that targets could be the job of the court-poet and were not thought below an antiquarian of Heraeus’ rank clearly indicates the importance accorded to the medium. The quality of the concetti implied an equally high level of learning and reading on the part of the participants and spectators, who were the immediate addressees of sometimes rather complex programmes. A sufficient command of Latin was necessary to appreciate the concise mottoes, and mythological and antiquarian knowledge far beyond the basics was required to decipher the coded message. We may wonder whether the members of the imperial marksmen’s guild were offered any additional explanation, perhaps by leaflets distributed at the event. In his introduction to the prize medals mentioned above, Heraeus emphasizes the intellectual challenge: “Solet (sc. Caesarea maiestas) scoporum symbolis ac praemiorum varietate certantium non manus magis, quam ingenia exercere” (His Majesty uses to train the competitors’ skills no less than their intellectual capacity by symbolical targets and a variety of prizes). Though we lack contemporary testimonies apart from the newspaper reports, the emblematic game must have proved successful indeed. The propagandistic significance of emblematic targets seems to have been beyond question, as they continued to be in use throughout the reign of Charles VI’s daughter, Maria Theresia.

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Fig. 12.1. Nihil tam duram quod frangi non posit[o], shooting target, oil on wood. Courtesy of St Viet an der Glan, Schützenscheibermuseum.

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Fig. 12.2a. Drawing of target for 13th October, 1720. Codex 7261, fol. 135r-136r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.2b. Drawing of target for 13th October, 1720. Codex 7261, fol. 135r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.3. Drawing of target for 30th July, 1729. Codex 7268, fol. 10r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.4. Drawing of target for 5th – 7th October, 1729. Codex 7268, fol. 20r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.5a. Drawing of target for 14th-16th July, 1721. Codex 7262, fols. 16r, 17r17v. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.5b. Drawing of target for 14th – 16th July, 1721. Codex 7262, fols. 16r, 17r-17v. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.5c. Drawing of target for 14th – 16th July, 1721. Codex 7262, fols. 16r, 17r, 17v. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.6a. Drawing of target for 13th October, 1729. Codex 7268, fol. 108r, 109r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.6b. Drawing of target for 13th October, 1729. Codex 7268, fol. 108r, 109r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.7. Design for a medal of Cybele with the Archduke Leopold, 1717. Courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.8. Drawing of target for 29th July, 1725. Codex 7265, fol. 77r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.9. Drawing of target for 26th August, 1725. Codex 7265, fol. 108r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.10. Design for a medal, from Numisma ob concordiam regum catholicam vulgatum (Vienna, 1725). Courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek, Vienna.

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Fig. 12.11. Drawing of target for 3rd September, 1730. Codex 7269, fol. 80r. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

Notes 1 The range was modernized in the early 1730s and the new building is attributed to the court architect Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach: see Zacharias 1960), 135–136; and Schwarz 1898), 82–85. 2 For the shooting competitions held in the Favorita, see Goja 1963, 127–147. 3 For an overview of the most important collections see Förg 1976. I owe special thanks to the museum of St Veit an der Glan/Carinthia for digitized pictures of the complete collection. 4 I am obliged to Reingard Witzmann/Wien Museum and Christian BeaufortSpontin/Kunsthistorisches Museum, Hofjagd und Rüstkammer for checking their inventories. 5 There are no records for the years 1723, 1728 and 1732, when the emperor spent the shooting season in Bohemia, Styria, and Upper Austria respectively.

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6 Kramer 1989. Single sketches of discs surviving here and there must be set apart from these comprehensive records of shooting competitions at a ruler’s court; see, for example, Egg 1977, no. 74, fig. 13. 7 Schilling 1986, 149–174. 8 Three emblematic targets were shown in the 1999 Munich exhibition: Wolfgang Harms, Günter Heß and Dietmar Peil, SinnBilderWelten. Emblematische Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit. Katalog der Ausstellung in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München 11. 8. – 1. 10. 1999 (München 1999), 109–110, no. 164–166. For the Oberbozen targets emblematic elements are discussed by Walther 1994, no. 10), 151–152. 9 As we lack any background information concerning the shooting event, it seems impossible to decipher the allusion. We may suspect that Alciato’s Anthony was identified as Mars, a mistake equally occurring in a modern description of the target: Förg 1963, no. 3, 227. 10 This applies to the targets of the Oberbozen range, the great bulk of which are wedding discs: see Walther 1994. 11 The importance of these events as part of festival culture has been emphasized for the early modern period: see Kratzke 2005, Vol. 1, 525–531; Vol. 2, 144–147. 12 They are absent from the most comprehensive study of political iconography under Charles VI: Matsche 1981. 13 Wienerisches Diarium 27th June 27, no. 51; and 30th June, no. 52; 1st August, no. 61. 14 Isselburg and Rem 1982. 15 See Bruck 1953; and Polleroß 1998. 16 Wienerisches Diarium, 12th October, 1729, no. 82 “bildete das ur=alte Ehren=Zeichen einer hoch=weisen/und glücklichen Beherrschung vor/nemlich den mit der Schlangen umwundenen Heer=Stab und das Staats=Ruder; zwischen welchen beeden die Erd=Kugel/die zum Ziele gedienet/gleichfals in ihrer ordentlichen Grund=Feste/und Angelen lege.” 17 See Meyer-Landrut 1997. 18 See Poeschel 1985. 19 See Erffa 1957, 286–308. In the manuscript the order of the drawings has been reversed, the mottos of Ritter and Fortune’s disc have been mixed up. 20 See Winter 2009. 21 Sear, no. 2548. 22 Helmedach 2002, 119–166. 23 Sear (no. 21) no. 3173; Seaby, Vol. 2, no. 648. 24 Fuchs 1969, 46; plate 11, 123–26. By conforming to the shape of the target the temple bears resemblance to the temple of Vesta with its characteristically doomed roof, as it can be viewed, for example, on a Neronian denarius: Seaby (n. 23) no. 335. 25 We may compare the Pharos of Alexandria on the reverse of Sear (n. 21) no. 5927. 26 See Rommel 1996.

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27 Joachim Negelein, Thesaurus numismatum modernorum huius seculi, sive numismata mnemonica et iconica (Norimbergae: Endteri haeredes, 1717), supplementa. 28 See Koopmans “Die politische Haltung von Johan Willem Ripperda (1682 1737)”, in de Boer, Gleba and Holbach, 163–204 http://oops.unioldenburg.de/volltexte/2001/646/pdf/aktivitaeten.pdf (accessed 30th October, 2009). 29 Numisma ob concordiam regum catholicam vulgatum, (Vienna: Ghelen, 1725). 30 For Heraeus and his historia metallica see Ritter von Bergmann 1844-1857, Vol. 2, 394–424; Hammarlund 2003, 202–227. 31 Inscriptiones et Symbola varii argumenti (Noribergae: Peter Conrad Monath, 1721) 64a–d. The pages were evidently added when printing was already under way; they are missing in some copies; a complete one is owned by the Austrian National Library (BE.12.Q.26). 32 Wilhelm Wilmanns, “Johann Karl Newen, Reichsritter v. Newenstein”, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 23 (1886), 565–566; Flood 2006, Vol. 3, 1430– 1432. 33 Wiennerische Beleuchtungen oder Beschreibung aller deren Triumph- und Ehren-Gerüsten, Sinn-Bildern und anderen sowol herzlich als kostbar und annoch nie so prächtig gesehenen Auszierungen ... zusammen getragen u. verlegt von Johann Peter v. Ghelen, Nachdruck Wien 1978 (Jahresgabe der Wiener Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft 1978). 34 Carmen excellentiss. Duumviris Julio Sac. Rom. Imp. Comiti De et in Hardegg, etc. ac Joan. Jacobo Sac. Rom. Imp. Lib. Baroni De Kriechbaum etc. campi jaculatorii agonothetis cum munificentiss. brabeuta Carolus VI. Imp. Caes. Aug. in reparato a consule et senatu intra Viennens Agrum stadio auspicatissima majestatis suae praesentia cives dignaretur dicatum a J.C. Newen, Colon. Caes. Aul. Poet. Laur. An. D.N. MDCCXVI, pridie Kalend. Octob. 35 Beschreibung des Haubt= und Frey=Schiessen Welches von Ihro Kayser=und Königl. Catholischen Majestät Carolo Sexto, Wegen erfreulicher Geburt / Leopoldi Dero Erst=Gebohrnen Ertz=Hertzogens zu Oesterreich und Printzens von Asturien der Wiennerischen Burgerschaft gegeben worden. ConsVLe reM gerente LaVrentIo De GVttenberg (Vienna: Andreas Heyinger, 1716).

PART III: THE EMBLEM GOES GLOBAL: THE MIGRATION OF THE SIGN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE RECEPTION OF DUTCH EMBLEMS IN JAPAN: SHIBA KÔKAN (1747-1818) AND JAN AND KAPSAR LUYKEN’S HET MENSELYK BEDRYF HIROAKI ITO

Shiba Kôkan and his Interest in Western Painting In the sixteenth century, Japan was a distant unknown land for Europeans. According to surviving documents, the Portuguese arrived on the island of Tanegashima, located on the southern edge of Japan, in 1543. They introduced firearms and other technology into Japan, and with the arrival of the Jesuit priest Francisco de Xavier in 1549, Christianity was introduced. Many Japanese lords admired the advancement of western technology and hoped to trade with Europeans, and some lords even accepted Christianity and became sincere believers. In 1582, the Italian Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano reported to the Roman Curia that there were 150,000 Christians and 200 churches in Japan, which resulted in the Buddhist authorities being extremely worried about the success of Christianity and condemning the spread of it. Around this time, in the field of visual arts, many paintings were produced under the influence of a western style, some of which represented Christian religious subjects. Meanwhile, in 1623, the Tokugawa government decided to limit trade with foreign countries for the fear of being invaded from abroad. Finally, in 1641, only Dutch, Chinese and Korean envoys were allowed to stay and trade on a small, artificial island called Dejima in Nagasaki. Japanese rulers were also afraid of Christianity, and persecuted Christians by violent methods. In 1720, Shôgun Tokugawa Yoshimune eased restrictions on the imports of western literature except those related to Christianity. This

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policy greatly assisted in advancing the study of the natural sciences in Japan. With the increased import of many different books, prints, and paintings, some painters in Japan came to appreciate the western artistic rationale with regard to composition and expression that stressed texture and three-dimensional effects. Japanese artists learned these western art techniques mainly from illustrations or prints in Dutch books, and not from theoretical studies. Shiba Kôkan was born in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1747.1 He was trained from the age of twelve under a master of Ukiyoe, a traditional type of Japanese painting which was current in his time. When Kôkan was about twenty-five years old, he became a pupil of So Shiseki, who was famous for his Chinese style of painting. Kôkan painted in a unique manner in which various aspects of nature were represented in a simple composition. As an ambitious artist he tried to combine different styles of pictorial traditions in his own works, and he succeeded in creating a unique method of painting in which Chinese realism was combined with a Japanese ornamental character. In the meantime, Kôkan took an interest in western painting and came to admire its realism in particular. He wrote in Seiyoga Dan (A Discussion of Western Painting) in 1799: A picture which does not truly represent reality is not well executed. There is far more to realistic painting than the mere drawing of perspective. Eastern pictures have no accuracy of details, and without such accuracy, a picture is not really a picture at all. To paint reality is to paint all objects, landscape, birds, flowers, cows, sheep, trees, rocks or insects, exactly as the original objects appear, thereby actually animating the drawing. No technique other than that of the west can achieve this feeling of reality. When a western painter looks at the work of an eastern artist, he surely must see it as the mere scribbling of a child, hardly worthy of being called a painting.2

One of Kôkan’s works, “Portrait of Kensu” (a Chinese Zen priest), which he painted with oils on paper, shows that he was able to learn quickly the western way of painting, that is, how to represent objects more accurately and realistically (Fig. 13.1). In addition, Kôkan was a pioneer of western etching in Japan. He studied its methods solely by reading an article in the Dutch encyclopaedia, Woorden-Boek (1768-1777), edited by Noel Shomel; and in 1783, he succeeded in producing the first etching in Japan. His “View of Ryôgoku-Bashi” (Two Countries Bridge) is a representative work of this genre, in which the sight of central Edo (now Tokyo) is engraved in wide perspective and its title is written in Dutch: “Tweelandbruk”, that is “Twee-land-Brug” (Fig. 13.2).

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The Influence of Jan and Kaspar Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryf on the Works of Shiba Kôkan Kôkan’s interest in western culture seems to have led him to read a Dutch book with illustrations. A famous scholar in Kyoto, Tsuji Ranshitsu (1756-1835), remarks in his Rango Hassen (Essay on the Dutch Language) of 1795, “Kôkan has a book, which is named Syokunin Hukku (A Book of Craftsmen)”.3 Scholars of Japanese art history have attempted to identify this “Book of Craftsmen” for years, and now they agree that it was Jan and Kaspar Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryf (The Human Trades)4 which was first published in Amsterdam in 1694, or possibly their Spiegel van’t Menselyk Bedryf5 of the same place and year, although Kôkan does not mention the title explicitly.6 As is well known, this famous Dutch emblem book contains 100 emblems on various professions or activities, each of which is accompanied by a Christian moral verse. For example, Number 94 “De Zeeman” (The Sailor) shows a sailor standing on the edge of a wharf facing the harbour (Fig. 13.3). His right hand is clenched behind his back, his other arm is extended and he uses his finger to point towards a barge. The motto reads, “The man who wishes to reach the east must approach from the west”.7 The epigram reads, “Oh sailor, the man who so far ploughs a high wave with good hope and starts to journey towards the Saviour, must also sail upon a wild sea. But let his way stay straight, then in any case he will not be prevented from making a good journey”.8 It is true that more than ten works produced by Shiba Kôkan were borrowed or inspired by Luyken’s etchings, and Kôkan’s “The Sailors” (1785) is one of the earliest works influenced by Luyken (Fig. 13.4). This work, painted with Sumi ink on silk, is almost an exact replica of Luyken’s “De Zeeman”, with even the Dutch words “De Zee Man” inscribed upon it. In contrast with the model of Luyken, Kôkan extends the depth backwards and tries to create a wider and deeper space in his work. Kôkan’s “Leather Craftsman” (1785) is also a replica of Luyken’s “De Leerbereider” (The Tanner) (see Figs. 13.5 and 13.6). In this etching, Kôkan’s linear perspective is more natural than that in his earlier works. For Kôkan, Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryf was not only a valuable source for acquiring knowledge about western objects and events, but as a solid model from which to learn the western way of painting. His “Barrel Craftsman” is another example, which corresponds to Luyken’s “De Kupier” (The Cooper) (see Figs. 13.7 and 13.8). In this work, Kôkan adds some edifices in the background to emphasise a sense of depth. Some years later, he once again painted “European Barrel

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Craftsmen” (1789-1801), and this time, Kôkan took up the challenge to add colour to the original monochrome print and paint it with oils (Fig. 13.9). Kôkan’s “Factory in a Foreign Country” is loosely based on Luyken’s “De Tinnegieter” (The Pewterer), and it is very interesting because Kôkan transcribes the motto of “De Tinnegieter” upon his painting: “De Tinne gieter. Soeckt in uselfs den Schat, van’t allee schoonste vat” (The Pewterer. Search the treasure in yourself, the most beautiful vessel) (see Figs. 13.10 and 13.11). Whether Kôkan could fully understand the Christian moral in Luyken’s emblems is open to debate. He may not have been proficient enough in his ability to read Dutch texts, and it seems probable that his knowledge of Christianity was limited. However, even if Kôkan did have that ability, it would have been impossible for him to express a Christian viewpoint openly under the conditions of the official prohibition of Christianity. In any case, it can be said that Kôkan quite likely acknowledged the moral nature of Luyken’s emblems.

Kôkan’s Creation of an Emblem Book Perhaps inspired by Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryf, Kôkan planned to create his own emblem book at some later point in his life. His Kunmo Gakai Syû (Illustrated Moral Book) of 1814 consists of ninety-three sketches and fables, followed by an appendix containing an additional twenty-five sketches and fables. Even though the original manuscript has never been published, it is extant and housed at the Tokyo National Library. In the book’s preface, Kôkan says, In that country [The Netherlands], there is a word “Sinneberu” [Zinnebeeld], which means “teaching through allegory”. It signifies the same as the moral teachings by our wise men. Therefore, now and here, I collect dozens of verses from ancient wise men, with Japanese transcriptions and illustrations, and I have named this collection Kunmo Gakai Syû to enlighten our citizens.9

Most of the fables are rooted in the ancient writings of Chinese wise men and scholars. For example, in the sixth emblem, a tiger and a dog are illustrated (Fig. 13.12), and written above them in old Chinese characters is the saying of the Chinese jurist Kanbishi (3rd century BC): “A tiger defeats a dog because a tiger has claws and fangs. If a tiger were deprived of its claws and fangs and a dog could use them, the dog would conquer the tiger”. Kôkan then paraphrases Kanbishi’s saying and comments on it in Japanese: “Because of having claws and fangs, a tiger defeats a dog. A

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dog with claws and fangs will certainly conquer a tiger. A lord without dignity is despised by his subjects. A man who has neither wisdom nor wealth is the same as a tiger that has neither claws nor fangs”.10 It is very interesting that of 118 emblems in total, we can find at least five that Kôkan drew from Aesop’s Fables, which was the first title of western secular literature to be translated into Japanese, and which was published as Isopo no Haburasu by the Japanese Jesuit community in 1592. This translation is considered to be based on a variant of Steinhowel’s Aesop (first edition, c.1480), and the Japanese translator selected sixty-seven fables from it. Kôkan refers to this translation in his essay, Shunparô Hikki (Shunparô Essays) of 1811: I found an original copy of the book Isoho Monogatari (Aesop’s Fables), which is a translation of the European literature at the library of the Lord of Kii [a region of southern Japan] … On examining the book, I found that it was written entirely in allegories and translated into Japanese more than two hundred years ago. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to read, even for somebody who has studied Dutch. It is important to note, however, that western studies have been pursued in my country for more than two hundred years.11

Kôkan seems not to have seen the Renaissance Latin version, but a seventeenth-century Dutch version of Aesop’s Fables, such as Joost van den Vondel’s Vorsteliicke Warande der Dieren (Amsterdam, 1671) (Fig. 13.13). This illustrated book in the form of an emblem book seems to have been transported into Japan by the publication of Kôkan’s Shunparô Hikki, because we have some fragments that were accurately copied from the pages of the original in 1792.12 On the other hand, Kôkan read Isoho Monogatari, that is, another Japanese translation from the same source, and summed up some of Aesop’s Fables for use in his Kunmo Gakai Syû. For example, Appendix 22 of Kôkan’s Kunmo Gakai Syû is based upon Book 2, Fable 39 of Isoho Monogatari: “The affair between apes and men”.13 In this emblem, an ape is seen dancing with a Japanese fan in his right hand, while other apes applaud him (Fig. 13.14). The text begins with the following words, written in old Chinese characters: “There was an ape in the group who was dancing very well. All the apes praised him in a loud voice, but a man watching the scene pointed out that his dancing was not good. This angered all the apes, who then proceeded to kill the man”. Next, a moral explanation is added in Japanese characters: “Be he ever so wise, a man also has his own faults, and others should not indiscriminately point them out. Only a virtuous

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man can listen to others’ advice, but a humble one cannot. The latter becomes indignant when he hears something moral from others”.14 Although we have only been able to examine two examples from the Illustrated Moral Book, it must be concluded that Shiba Kôkan certainly created the first emblem book in Japan, and we must emphasise the fact that he conceived it, directly inspired by Jan and Kaspar Luyken’s Het Menselyk Bedryf, and possibly influenced by an illustrated Aesop’s Fables in a Dutch version.

Fig. 13.1. “Portrait of Kensu”, Shina Kôkan, oil on paper, c.1781-1789. 78.7 x 36.8cm. Courtesy of Kôbe City Museum.

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Fig. 13.2. “View of Ryôgoku Bridge”, Shiba Kôkan, etching with hand-colouring, 1787. 27.1 x 40.7cm. Courtesy of Kôbe City Museum.

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Fig. 13.3. “De Zeeman”, Jan and Kaspar Luyken, Het Menselyk Bedryf (Amsterdam, 1694). Private collection.

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Fig. 13.4. collection.

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“Sailors”, Shiba Kôkan, ink on silk, 1785. 25 x 26.3cm. Private

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Fig. 13.5. “Leather Craftsmen”, Shiba Kôkan, etching with hand-colouring, 1785. 10.7 x 14.6cm. Private collection.

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Fig. 13.6. “De Leerberieder”, Jan and Kaspar Luyken, Het Menselyk Bedryf (Amsterdam, 1694). Private collection.

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Fig. 13.7. “Barrel Craftsman”, Shiba Kôkan, ink on silk, c.1785. 35.1 x 22.8cm. Private collection.

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Fig. 13.8. “De Kupier”, Jan and Kaspar Luyken, Het Menselyk Bedryf (Amsterdam, 1694). Private collection.

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Fig. 13.9. “European Barrel Craftsmen”, Shiba Kôkan, oil on silk, c.1790. 47.2 x 60cm. Private collection.

Fig. 13.10. “Factory in a Foreign Country”, colour on silk, c.1800. 64 x 120cm. Courtesy of Kôbe City Museum.

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Fig. 13.11. “De Tinnegieter”, Jan and Kaspar Luyken, Het Menselyk Bedryf (Amsterdam, 1694). Private collection.

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Fig. 13.12. Emblem 17, from Kunmo Gakai Syû, Shiba Kôkan. Courtesy of Tokyo National Library.

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Fig. 13.13. Fable illustration from Joost van den Vondel, Vorstelicke Warande der Dieren (Amsterdam, 1671).

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Fig. 13.14. Appendix 17 to Kunmo Gakai Syû, Shiba Kôkan. Courtesy of Tokyo National Library

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Notes 1

The main studies recently published on Kôkan are Naruse 1995; Naruse, et al, 1994; Shiba Kôkan Hyakka Jiten 1996; Shina Kôkan no Kaiga 2001. The only proper study written in English is French 1974. See also Japanese Amazement Shiba Kôkan 2000. 2 Kôkan 1993, Vol. 3, 141. 3 See Naruse 1995, Vol. 1, 130. 4 See Praz 1975, 406; Landwehr 1988, 190-191; Van’t Veld 2000, 489-490. See also Barnes 1995. 5 See Praz, 1975, 406; Landweher 1988, 191-192; Van’t Veld 2000, 490-491. 6 See Naruse 1995, Vol. 1, 130-134, 155-157, 264-368; Isozaki 2004, 396-438. 7 “Die’t Oosten wil beryken, Moet van vet Weste wyke”. 8 “Ô Seeman, die woeste baaren,/Op geode hoop soo veer doorploegd,/Die sich op reis, naa’t Heilland voegd,/Moet oock een wilde Zee bevaaren/Maar houd hy streek, daar’s geen geval,/Dat hem goe reis beletten sal.” 9 Kôkan 1993, Vol. 2, 170; Kôkan 1977, 75, 174-175. 10 Kôkan 1993, Vol. 2, 239, 315-316; Kôkan 1977, 75, 174-175. 11 Kôkan 1993, Vol. 2, 90-91. 12 See Shinmura 1973. 13 Originally Fable 68 in Steinhovel’s edition, with a trope taken from Phaedrus Book 4, 13: “Simius tyrannus”. 14 Kôkan 1993, Vol. 2, 295, 330; Kôkan 1977, 131, 202.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN PRIVILEGES OF THE “OTHERS”: THE COATS OF ARMS GRANTED TO INDIGENOUS CONQUISTADORS* MARÍA CASTAÑEDA DE LA PAZ AND MIGUEL LUQUE-TALAVÁN

Until relatively recently, the image held of the conquest of Mexico was that it was effected by Spanish troops backed by a group of indigenous conquistadors from the city-state of Tlaxcala. In the traditional literature on the conquest this participation by the Tlaxcalteca has been justified and legitimated by their difficult political and military position, cornered as they were by the increasingly powerful Triple Alliance led by Tenochtitlan.1 This historical view is changing, however, due to the efforts of a group of scholars which, using written and pictorial archival documents, has shown the fundamental role played by other indigenous groups besides the Tlaxcalteca.2 This revisionist view of the so-called “Spanish” conquest is a collaborative effort of which the historiographical consequences are not yet entirely understood. It has become clear, nonetheless, that it is legitimate to ask whether the conquest of Mesoamerica was really a Spanish undertaking or rather an indigenous one. In following the process of conquest, a pattern of incorporating native troops into the allied armies emerged. As communities and regions were conquered, people from these very same areas allied themselves with the ever-growing army in which the relative number of Spaniards was increasingly small.3 In fact, once the city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco was conquered, its people joined in subsequent conquests led by Spanish conquerors like Cortés, Alvarado, Sandoval and Viceroy Mendoza.4 They principally participated in conquests to the north of New Spain, but there are also reports of military campaigns to the regions of Guatemala and Honduras.

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As irrefutable proof of the indigenous participation in these conquests, there exists a series of coats of arms granted by the Spanish crown to certain noblemen and their communities as a reward for their involvement in the aforementioned campaigns.5 The descendants of these indigenous conquistadors bear witness to this participation in letters to the king in which they reiterate the exploits of their forebears as well as their own service.6 Of course, such letters have to be analyzed with great care, for indigenous lords understood how to exaggerate, manipulate and alter history for their own benefit. For example, from the historical record it is known that during the siege of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, Totoquihuaztli, ruler of the city of Tlacopan, fought on the side of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. Nonetheless, in numerous letters to the king, his son emphasizes the crucial help that Tlacopan provided for the Spaniards in the Noche Triste, when they were almost wiped out by the people and army of the two city-states. In this essay we will apply an iconographic analysis to some of the finest examples of blazons granted to the indigenous nobility from central Mexico during the sixteenth century. This analysis shows how iconographic elements suggestive of the pre-Hispanic world fused with iconographic elements from European heraldry. Additionally, we look at each of the indigenous conquistadors’ contributions to the conquest in order to understand why the particular blazons were requested, how they were to be used, what they may have meant to the owners and, finally, the message these shields transmitted through their iconography. First, we will analyze two shields that were granted to the Spanish conquistadors Juan Tirado (1527) and Fernando Burgueño (1531), as these can be regarded as precedents of the blazons that were requested later by the indigenous elite. This will be followed by analysis of the first indigenous examples, those of the Moctezuma family (1536) and Don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin (1546), gobernador, or governor, of Tenochtitlan and descendant of the great pre-Hispanic rulers of that city. In this particular case it is important to note that the sketch of the shield made by Don Diego in his request still exists and therefore can be compared to that which was actually granted to him.7 The last two blazons are astonishing for their iconographic contents of an indigenous nature; these are the coats of arms of the town of Coyoacan (1561) and Don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli, governor of Tlacopan (1564).8

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The Request for a Coat of Arms: Arguments, Interests and Particularities The first group of people to ask for a coat of arms was, obviously, the Spanish conquistadors. In general, these were people from a humble background, with little education and profound Christian beliefs. Their main objective in New Spain was to obtain gold and glory; those who moved to the Indies during the sixteenth century continuously aspired to belong to the Spanish nobility.9 To obtain an encomienda, or the right to receive tribute in a certain territory, was one of the most coveted privileges among conquistadors; it bestowed opportunities to obtain the luxuries associated with high status in colonial society. But although having an encomienda carried social and economic importance and placed those who held them in the class of landlords, the title of encomendero did not confer nobility in the Indies.10 Those who sought a grant of a coat of arms were therefore motivated by considerations of prestige. Among the honorary grants, those of coats of arms were most sought after by Spanish conquistadors as they perpetuated their exploits in the memory of their descendants and in the eyes of the wider world. The earliest known concessions of blazons were given to Juan de Burgos (12th April, 1527), Juan Tirado (12th April, 1527), Gutierre de Badajoz (15th November, 1527) and Fernando Burgueño (25th September, 1531). They were granted as a result of these men’s direct participation in the conquest and their pacification and settling of various places in the new Viceroyalty of New Spain. The indigenous conquistadors, seeing the shields with which their Spanish brothers-in-arms were compensated for their efforts, rapidly began to write requests themselves. Unlike their Spanish counterparts, however, the indigenous petitioners were not from humble backgrounds at all. On the contrary, they belonged to the highest Mesoamerican nobility. As the allied army of Spanish and indigenous men swept through Mesoamerica, more and more indigenous troops joined it. This reflected a typical Mesoamerican pattern of joining the army by which one was conquered, and was based on the need to regain social and economic status. Just as one could lose land and privileges through war, one could also receive exemption from the obligations of tribute and personal service, and, of course, claim other land through conquest.11 However, once the conquests were over, these indigenous conquistadors, as they called themselves, became aware that a new reality was taking shape, with new rules and new ways of behaving. Soon, both town governments and individual elites alike familiarized

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themselves with Spanish legal procedures, which resulted in a steady flow of wide-ranging petitions to the king and his council. According to Gibson, in the case of the Tlaxcalteca, the grants were awarded because the indigenous lords personally asked for them.12 Without their petition, the crown would not have troubled to issue any. He also notes that these indigenous petitions were made possible by having an organized government and, above all, by having a solid knowledge of the Spanish forms of law on the part of the petitioners. Now, although there is little doubt about the shrewd ability of the Tlaxcalteca in using history in their petitions, it has recently become clear that in fact it was the Tenochca who first wrote petitions.13 Already in 1536 the members of the Moctezuma family related to the huey tlatoani, or great lord, Moctezuma II obtained a coat of arms. From that moment on, petitions arrived at the Spanish court in a continuous stream, though the majority—like the Tlaxcaltec petitions— was written in the 1560s. The indigenous conquistadors who wrote petitions for coats of arms presented their case on three basic issues: 1) that a certain lord or his town participated directly in the conquest, pacification, and settling of different places in New Spain. As such, and contrary to concessions to Spaniards, coats of arms were granted to both indigenous conquistador individuals and to towns; 2) that “indigenous nobles”, being true Christians, “facilitated the spread of Christianity and guided the preservation of its memory in drama, paintings, and texts”, which explains why so many shields contain biblical phrases and numerous Christian symbols;14 and 3) their noble descent. The second argument was not employed by Spanish conquistadors, since their Christian beliefs were not in doubt, and if they had already been noblemen with a coat of arms, they probably would have asked for an augmentation to their shields. Now, it may be surprising to see the mechanisms of argumentation employed in these petitions. Letters, sometimes written in Latin, show the king the indigenous elite’s biblical and philosophical knowledge. In their discourses these elites and towns refer to their magnificent pre-contact past only to ask immediately for an exemption of tribute payments and the restitution of lands and communities that supposedly had been subject to them from time immemorial.

The Iconography of the Coats of Arms Petitions for coats of arms varied widely. While some petitioners simply wrote a request and left it to the king to decide the kind of shield he would grant, others gave a detailed description as to what they wanted, sometimes

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even including a sketch.15 Given that the privilege of possessing a coat of arms implied little more than the right to show it in public, the crown was quite willing to fulfil the wishes expressed in the petitions.16 It has to be confessed that although an attempt has been made to analyze the symbols used in the shields discussed here—for which the accompanying royal grants have been of great value—in some of the New Spanish cases the meaning remains unclear. The use of European or Mesoamerican symbols seems rather capricious at times, often following aesthetic criteria instead of iconographical semiotics. However, there is little doubt that in order for the painter at the Spanish court to include Mesoamerican iconographic elements of which he obviously had no knowledge, it was necessary for the indigenous petitioners to send along a sketch. How else do we explain the perfect rendition of macanas, or indigenous swords, the attire of preHispanic gods, or jaguars and eagles shouting “War!” in some of the blazons?17 It is important to note that the interest in coats of arms within indigenous societies was not something introduced by the Spaniards. Shields and banners were not unknown in Mesoamerica before the Spanish arrival. The shields of warriors, for example, showed “emblems indicating geographic origin, ethnic affiliation, and the like”.18 Indigenous warriors also carried a series of banners into war, as testified by the representations of the Cuauhquecholteca with such banners in the Lienzo de Cuauhquechollan as Asselbergs has pointed out.19 Similarly, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (1979) and the Relación Geográfica de Tlaxcala (1984) depict the Tlaxcaltec banners that were eventually incorporated into the European-style shields of the Tlaxcaltec nobility.20 Don Jerónimo del Águila (see below) also explicitly wanted to incorporate into his new blazon “the banners which I inherited from my ancestors”, while Don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli asked for the inclusion of the shield that “they used to own”.21 Indeed, two distinct terms existed in pre-Hispanic times in order to distinguish the shields or banners of the lords from those of the community or altepetl: tlatocatlauiztli and altepetlauiztli, respectively.22 In the colonial period the main objective of a petition for an altepetlauiztli, or shield of an altepetl, was the change of status from “town” to “city.” As Lockhart points out, the Spaniards primarily used the term pueblo, or town, to refer to larger settlements.23 This usage often coincided with the indigenous concept of altepetl, but it was also used for settlements that may have been a constituent part of an altepetl. However, in documents that were written in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, the term pueblo is very rarely used. So it seems that while the Spaniards never fully understood the structure of the indigenous altepetl, the indigenous population did

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understand the Spanish distinction between a town and a city, using it for their own benefit and to distinguish themselves from other altepetl. As is confirmed by Haskett, the communities that had the right to possess a coat of arms were considered to be superior to those that did not.24 This explains why towns like Coyoacan and Tlacopan sought to obtain them.25 While it is relatively easy to explain why the European coats of arms were adopted by the indigenous population, it is more difficult to explain how they obtained the format they have. The fact that colonial indigenous coats of arms do not always follow the rigid norms of European heraldic composition may be a reflection of a society that takes from another society that which it considers useful. From the perspective of European heraldry, the indigenous shields show deviations from European norms, like the use and combination of disparate elements (indigenous iconographic elements), alterations in the enamels (placing colour over colour or metal over metal), and the infrequent use of colour. Furthermore, contrary to European norms, we see the profuse use of so-called “compositions of vignettes” or realistic representations in the form of pictures. These aspects make the description of indigenous blazons according to European heraldry particularly difficult but more interesting from the point of view of Mesoamerican iconography. Just as Spaniards asked for shields before the indigenous elite did, we first deal with two shields of Spanish conquistadors before analyzing the indigenous ones.

Early Coats of Arms for Spanish Conquistadors One of the characteristics of the early blazons for Spanish conquistadors is the reference, often in the form of vignettes, to feats of war in which the petitioners took part during the conquests. These shields, therefore, contain some of the first examples of ethnography from the American continent. Juan Tirado’s and Fernando Burgueño’s blazons will serve as examples of this group.

The Conquistador Juan Tirado After the Noche Triste, Juan Tirado took part in the conquest of the city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco and of Almería or Nauhtla on the coast of Veracruz where he was wounded and lost his right hand.26 These feats were highly valued by the crown, and thus Juan Tirado received in encomienda the towns of Cuicatlan and Tututepec, both in present-day Oaxaca (Fig. 14.1). On 12th April, 1527 he was granted a coat of arms. According to the description, the shield shows three white stars with five yellow scallop

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shells beneath them and, in the other part, the Lake of Mexico with two roads. As a banner, the shield shows a coloured Jerusalem cross and, in the border, five heads of indigenous noblemen who were captured and killed by Juan Tirado.27 As is the case with many shields granted in New Spain, not all elements can be interpreted. The meaning of the white stars is not exactly clear, but it may refer to the noble character of the owner of the shield. The scallop shells on the blazon are symbols that refer to the Way of St James (Camino de Santiago) the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela where the remains of St James, or Santiago, are buried.28 The red cross is a Jerusalem cross or crusader’s cross, although the grant refers to it as a cross of the Holy Sepulchre. This is probably an attempt to equate the conquests of Mexico with the Crusades, which attempted to free Jerusalem from the Muslims. The waves in the third and fourth field are representative of the lake that surrounded Mexico-Tenochtitlan and the causeways that connected it to the mainland (although these have not been represented). What stands out though are five trophy heads of indigenous noblemen, identified as such by their lip and nose plugs and the earrings of the two heads in the bottom part. One is the head of a Huastec nobleman from the state of Veracruz, who can be recognized by his pierced nose. He is further identified by a red leather band on his head.

Fernando Burgueño Fernando Burgueño witnessed the imprisonment and death of Moctezuma II and, like Juan Tirado, survived the Noche Triste to return and conquer the city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco.29 For this and other conquests he was granted an augmentation of his shield on 25th September, 1531 together with an encomienda. The grant does not provide information on Burgueño’s original shield, but it does specify why some of the changes were made (Fig. 14.2).30 The blazon is divided into four fields: the first shows a black eagle, the second an image of an indigenous cacique with a chain around his neck, the third field holds a castle, and the last an arm with a coloured arrow.31 The grant explains that the eight heads in the border refer to some of the “indios” killed on the battlefield by Burgueño. Contrary to Juan Tirado’s shield, these heads do not show any kind of decorative elements that identify them as belonging to particular indigenous groups. The crest shows a closed helmet and an arm with a sword, signs of the effort and courage this conquistador showed in the conquest. The meaning of the eagle is not clear, but there can be little doubt that the cacique is none other than the

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huey tlatoani Moctezuma II. Since Burgueño witnessed Moctezuma’s imprisonment and death, he most likely wanted to immortalize it on his shield. According to the historical record, Moctezuma II was taken as a prisoner to the palace of Axayacatl where the Spaniards were being lodged. Cortés then had to go to the coast, leaving Tenochtitlan in the hands of his captain Pedro de Alvarado. It was at this time that Alvarado decided to eliminate the indigenous elite, provoking the famous Noche Triste. Indigenous anger reached such a level that the Spaniards asked Moctezuma to go to the terrace of the palace in order to calm his people down. But during this attempt he was stoned, causing his death a few days later.32 No other document refers explicitly to Moctezuma being chained. It seems, therefore, that this 1531 shield is the first to represent the death of Moctezuma in this way. It was subsequently depicted on page 42 of the Relación geográfica de Tlaxcala from 1580 and again in the Códice Moctezuma, a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century document of the techialoyan genre, which shows Moctezuma with a rope around his neck.33 The castle in the third field seems to be a reference to the kingdom of Castile. Although there are various representations of Mexico-Tenochtitlan as a castle, it is always surrounded by the waters of the lake. The arm with the coloured arrow may be related to one of Burgueño’s exploits in war. It may represent the arm of an indigenous warrior with an arrow, or the arm of Burgueño himself with a trophy of one of his enemies. It may also be a reference to the wounds caused to the Spanish conquistador’s arm by an indigenous warrior during the conquest.

The Coat of Arms of the Moctezuma Family As we noted above, it is likely that the descendants of Moctezuma II, seeing the coats of arms granted to Spanish conquistadors, began to write petitions for such shields. Curiously, these early blazons are very European in their format and contents, while later coats of arms for the indigenous elite include elements of the pre-Hispanic pictographic tradition from central Mexico. For this reason it seems possible that in these early cases the king or his administrators decided which elements were to be incorporated. Two of Moctezuma II’s relatives received coats of arms: Don Martín Cortés Moctezuma Nezahualtecolotzin, Moctezuma’s firstborn son, and Don Francisco de Alvarado Matlaccohuatzin, a first cousin of Don Martín (his father was a brother of Moctezuma II).34 Don Martín and Don Francisco both travelled to Spain in 1532 where they stayed for three years in order to “personally kiss your hands as Your Kings and natural lords”,

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and to request, among other things, a coat of arms.35 These blazons were granted on 16th February, 1536. With some minor variations, the shields are very similar, indicating that these were the blazons granted to the Moctezuma family generally. The royal grant states that Don Martin Nezahualtecolotzin received the coat of arms for the services of his father, who in the name of the crown of Castile conquered and pacified the provinces of New Spain and died in the process. His son Don Martin then continued his mission.36 If the history was not so well known, one might think that Moctezuma II had gone with Cortés to pacify the land that he controlled. Yet it is well known that this ruler was Cortés’s prisoner from the moment the Spaniards entered the city. Nothing is known of the feats of Don Martin, though the sources tell us that he was closely associated with the Spanish conquistadors and their world. López de Meneses has shown that Don Martin travelled to Spain for the first time in 1524, where he received religious training in the convent of Talavera de la Reina.37 Although it is unknown how long he stayed in Spain, we do know he went there again in 1532 when he married a Spanish woman. He returned to Mexico in 1536.38 Don Francisco on the other hand, travelled to Spain for the first time in 1527 and returned in 1530.39 He crossed the ocean again in 1532 to make his request for the coat of arms. Don Francisco received the grant for his noble descent and his participation in the conquest and pacification of New Spain, of which no further information is given.40 As mentioned above, both shields are very similar. Don Martin’s (Fig. 14.3) depicts a black eagle crossed by two red bars. Inside the first bar are written the letters K and I with, according to the grant, a rose between them. The second bar contains the letter F with a rose on either side. These are the initials of Charles V (Karolus), his mother Juana (Iuana) and their son and grandson Philip II (Felipe). The meaning of the roses is unknown. The border reads “Ave Maria,” each letter alternating with waves, while the timbre represents a closed helmet with two black wings and a hand holding a device with the motto “In Domino confido” (I trust in God). Both texts are public manifestations of the “true” conversion of the person who bore the coat of arms. This was a crucial argument in the request for the shield.41 In Don Francisco Matlaccohuatzin’s shield (Fig. 14.4), the same K and F appear but this time associated with a fleur de lis the meaning of which in this context is unknown. Neither is it clear why the eagle has changed colour from black to white. Another difference is the border, which contains two palm leaves and two red roses, again with no clear meaning. The timbre is very similar to that of Don Martin’s shield and shows a closed helmet with two black wings, but this time there is no device or motto.42

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There is a third blazon of the Moctezuma family, that of Don Pedro de Moctezuma (see footnote 28). However, this shield was not granted until 11th September, 1570, the day Don Pedro died. Sadly, we only have a black and white drawing made by Villar Villamil who does not give any information as to the whereabouts of the original.43 His drawing shows a coat of arms very similar to those of Don Martin and Don Francisco.

The Coat of Arms of Don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin Don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin was the Tlatoanigovernor of Tenochtitlan from 1541 to 1554.44 From 1532 onwards he took part in the conquest of Honduras with Cortés and later, coinciding with his inauguration in 1541, he participated in the pacification of New Galicia and in the well-known Mixton War with Viceroy Mendoza.45 Auh zan níman ipanin in omoteneuh in 10 Calli xíhuitl in motlatocatlallli in tlacatl Dn. Diego de Sn. Francisco Tehuetzquitítzin tlatohuani Tenochtitlan, inin ipiltzin in Tezcatlpopocatzin tlatocapilli Tenochtitlan, inin ipiltzin in Tizocicatzin tlatohuani, auh zanno iquac ipan in xihuitl huilohuac in Xochipillan, iquac poliuhque in Xochipilteca ompa motlatocapacato in Dn. Diego Tehuitzquititzin (Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica Mexicayotl 1992, 171-172). (in this aforementioned year of 10-House, when the person of Don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquitzin, King of Tenochtitlan, being the son of Tezcatl Popocatzin, Prince of Tenochtitlan, and [grand]son of Tizocicatzin, King [of Tenochtitlan] and also when in this year everyone left to Xochipillan, when the Xochipilteca lost, there he went to wash as a ruler, he, Don Diego Tehuetzquititzin).46

According to the chronicler Tezozomoc, the 1541 campaign was a continuation of pre-Hispanic patterns of enthronement. The phrase “he went to wash as a ruler” is given in the Nahuatl text as “motlatocapacato” and should be translated as “he washed himself as ruler of the land.” This is a reference to a ritual act that indigenous rulers, in this case Don Diego, performed upon taking office and consisted of going to war in order to take prisoners that were to be sacrificed.47 This is an extraordinary example of the pre-Hispanic motivations of indigenous nobles to participate in the conquest. Once indigenous nobles assimilated into the colonial way of life, this pattern of conduct inherited from their ancestors would abruptly disappear. Still, it is interesting to see how a term with such important precontact connotations persisted in a colonial document.

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After Don Diego had been governing a number of years in Tenochtitlan, on 26th February, 1546, he wrote a probanza, or proof.48 Again, the main issue was his direct participation in the conquest with his people, his arms and his own horses, which he continued to make available to the king in case he needed them. According to this text, Don Diego left with Cortés on the two-and-a-half year conquest of Hibueras, or Honduras. Furthermore, he took part in campaigns to Pánuco and to put down its subsequent uprising, and to Xochipila where he was wounded and his son died.49 In addition to emphasizing his unconditional support in the conquests, Don Diego also thought it important to point out that he was a good Christian and of noble descent.50 A drawing of a coat of arms (Fig. 14.5) is included on the last page of Don Diego’s probanza (fol. 18r). The Tenochtitlan ruler made sure to include the glyphic representation of the city, which, according to the description in the cédula, is represented by a stone (in the white and blue waters of the lake) from which a prickly pear cactus grows. These elements undoubtedly reflect the survival of Tenochca history in the memory of its nobility.51 This glyph was replaced in 1523 by a shield with prevailing Spanish heraldic elements granted to the city by Emperor Charles V. From that time on, the old Tenochtitlan—now called Mexico—was represented by a lion-flanked tower on top of an aqueduct and ten prickly pear fruits (tuna) along the border. This decision provoked continuous disagreement about the inclusion or exclusion of certain elements.52 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the water, the stone, the prickly pear cactus, and the eagle were used continuously in insignia and banners.53 They eventually reappeared in the Mexican flag in 1812, with the eagle representing Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica’s patron deity and an element seemingly disregarded by Don Diego. The eagle is not represented on top of the cactus in Don Diego’s shield, perhaps in order to avoid any suspicion of the continuation of pre-Hispanic religious practices. An eagle and a castle are depicted in the fields situated above the Tenochtitlan place glyph. The shield also contains the name “Felipe” in reference to the Spanish monarch Philip II. The eagle and the castle alternate in the border. In Spanish heraldry, a castle generally accompanies a lion to symbolize Castile and León, the two kingdoms that supported the Spanish conquest. In this case, however, the lion has been replaced by an eagle. The displayed eagle, that is, with its wings elevated, is common in European heraldry, and although the shield contains a typical European eagle, the Tenochca likely interpreted this eagle as the patron god Huitzilopochtli—who is also represented by the sun—and would thus be a clear continuation of pre-Hispanic iconography.54 Don Diego may have

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considered this a way to include the image of Huitzilopochtli in his coat of arms and explains why he did not include the eagle or the prickly pear cactus. In any case, the objective seems to have been to represent the two great kingdoms, Castile and Mexico-Tenochtitlan, though Don Diego naturally gave more importance to his own kingdom, depicting it as larger and in a central position. For the feats indicated above and the arguments put forth, Don Diego was granted a coat of arms in Madrid on 23rd December, 1546.55 Surprisingly, the shield he received was very different in style from the one he included for consideration in his probanza (Fig. 14.6). The castle was eliminated from one of the fields, probably because the king did not like the idea of putting Tenochtitlan on the same level as the kingdom of Castile. The castles and eagles were also eliminated from the border and replaced by white stars, which may refer to Don Diego’s noble character.

The Coat of Arms of Don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli of Tlacopan Don Antonio Cortés was the son of Totoquihuaztli, ruler of the town of Tlacopan when Cortés arrived in 1519. He wrote a letter to Emperor Charles V on 6th January, 155256 in which he requested two coats of arms, one for himself and the other for his town.57 In order to persuade the emperor, Don Antonio stated that he was a descendant of the rulers that had always governed Tlacopan and, above all, that he and his father participated in the siege and conquest of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco.58 Impatient at having no word from Spain, Don Antonio wrote again to Charles V on 1st December, 1552 extolling even more his role in the conquest of Tenochtitlan and exalting that of his father Totoquihuaztli, who met Cortés when he arrived in his town.59 He goes so far as to point out that it was Totoquihuaztli who offered an alliance with Cortés, not the other way around, and even gives the very words spoken by his father.60 Still Don Antonio received no answer, and so he tried again years later when Philip II was in power using the very same arguments.61 He finally received a grant for the requested privileges in 1564, twelve years after his first letter. Don Antonio’s blazon presents iconography related to war and religious conversion (Fig. 14.7). First, we shall discuss the central part of the shield, which is divided into six fields, followed by the border, divided into more sections. A large palace, identified as such by the small black circles in the lintel above the door, is represented in the first and fourth fields. Above it are three smaller houses crowned by a xiuhtzolli, a royal diadem only worn by the tlatoque, or principal rulers. This is a reference to the cities of the

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Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan), and a reminder that Tlacopan was a member of this important pre-Hispanic alliance that controlled most of Mesoamerica at the time of the conquest. The second and third fields, though slightly different from each other, have a religious theme. The second field refers to the arrival of Christianity (represented by a globe) in the New World or “Mundo Me[n]or.” The star can be viewed in both European and Mesoamerican terms; it may represent the light of faith brought by Catholicism, but it could also be Venus announcing the arrival of the sun indicating the beginning of a new era. The third field also deals with religion; a tlatoani with his xiuhhuitzolli embraces the Catholic faith through baptism, represented by a naked torso in the water.62 This is probably don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli, showing the king his acceptance of the new religion. The fifth and sixth fields can be read thanks to a description by Don Jerónimo del Águila, a lord of Tlacopan, who in his request for a coat of arms also asked for the incorporation of a river of blood and fire and a river of blood and water. These rivers symbolize the Lagoon of Primordial Blood, a mythical place of origin.63 As Don Jerónimo affirmed in his petition, these were “the banners that I inherited from my ancestors”.64 The fifth field contains representations of flames, but there is no sign of blood. Similarly, only the water appears in the sixth field while the blood is again left out. The fact that both coats of arms from Tlacopan contain these elements suggests that such elements existed in the local historical tradition. Places of origin, as elements of local identity, are also present in the coats of arms of Tzintzuntzan where Chicomoztoc, or Seven Caves, the Chichimec place of origin, is represented.65 The glyph of the city is represented in the central field of the upper part of the shield (second field). It is comprised of a hill (the altepetl), a tree with water flowing from its roots, a flaming lion embracing a tree, and some flowers. The meaning of the flaming lion embracing the tree is unclear, although according to European norms it is associated with force and power. Its position on top of the hill with water flowing from its roots, and consequently from within the hill, may symbolize a primordial tree.66 Even though there are only two, the flowers must be a reference to the preHispanic glyph of Tlacopan, which consists of three tlacotl, a kind of flower.67 The fields on either side of the toponym (first and third fields) express military conquest with representations of the two main military orders in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, that of the Eagle and the Jaguar. In this case they are both shouting “War!” using the pre-Hispanic convention of atl tlachinolli or “water-burned land”, which is clearly represented by the colour blue for water and red for fire. The eagle is depicted on top of a

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precious hill. It can be qualified as “precious” because of the shape of the elements in the eagle’s claws, which appear to be precious stones (called xihuitl in Nahuatl), typically turquoise. This interpretation is corroborated by the stones’ blue colour and the presence of a bunch of green grass or leaves, since the word for “grass” in Nahuatl is homophonous (xihuitl).68 The jaguar, identified by its spots, stands next to a steep hill with a burning temple on top. In Mesoamerican pictography a burning temple is a common convention for the conquest of a town (see for example the Codex Mendoza 1991). The building, or tecpan, to its right may allude to Tlacopan. The fourth and fifth fields show arrows and a shield or chimalli.69 However, this is not just any shield, but rather one associated with the god Xipe Totec as can be corroborated by fol. 30r of the Codex Maglibechiano and fol. 12r of the Codex Tudela.70 These codices depict the feast of tlacaxipehualiztli, associated with Xipe Totec, during which warriors carry shields that are the same in colour and decorative design (Fig. 14.8). Furthermore, the pink colour of the coat of arms also seems to be related to this deity. Since Xipe was also incorporated into the shield of the city of Tlacopan, it is probable that this deity was protector of the ruling lineage and of the altepetl. The sixth and seventh fields depict shells and the eighth field contains a hill with a double peak and a macana, or indigenous sword, on top. This weapon, like the chimalli and the arrows, may be related to Don Diego’s feats of war during the conquest.71 The meaning of the shells is unknown, as is the motto “Águila pequeño Blanca”, or “Small white eagle”, which is held precisely by an eagle that tops the shield.72

The Coat of Arms of Coyoacan The coat of arms of Coyoacan was granted after a petition by its governor, Don Juan de Guzmán Itztlolinqui the Younger, and was signed in Madrid on 24th June, 1561.73 The term “the Younger” indicates that Don Juan was a son of Don Juan de Guzmán Itztlolinqui. In order to distinguish between the two men, the colonial documents refer to them as “the Younger” for the son and “the Elder” for the father. We do not have the transcription of the royal cédula that accompanied the blazon and in which the petition is argued and justified. However, the other examples of such petitions, like those of Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan, make clear that the central argument was always the participation of the town and/or its lords in the conquest of Tenochtitlan. Furthermore, a 1536 petition by Don Juan de Guzmán Itztlolinqui the Elder enumerates the sacrifices he had made in order to conquer, pacify, and colonize Mesoamerica.74 This document includes the testimony of Don Juan and

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three witnesses, who all corroborate the services rendered to the Spaniards by Quauhpopocatl, father of Don Juan de Guzmán the Elder. Quauhpopocatl received Cortés and his men by order of Moctezuma II. He supposedly guided Cortés to Mexico-Tenochtitlan, protecting him and his men against all the towns that sought to wage war against them. Quauhpopocatl furthermore claims to have been of crucial importance in the escape from Tenochtitlan during the Noche Triste. Finally, in the conquest of Hibueras, another son of Quauhpopocatl accompanied Cortés and brought 400 warriors with him, all of whom died during the campaign. At present, two identical coats of arms of Coyoacan are known to exist, though with stylistic variations. The first is incorporated into a legal file from Coyoacan that does not mention the shield (Fig. 14.9), while the second is accompanied by a royal grant (Fig. 14.10).75 The shield from Coyoacan combines clear Hispanic iconographic elements of a religious nature with those of indigenous traditions of war, two of the main arguments in the concession of privileges. Three aspects of the shield merit attention. First, in the coyote’s headdress, converted into a lion in the second shield from Coyoacan, we recognize the pre-Hispanic god Otontecuhtli in the form of paper butterflies. Such iconography is similar to that used in relation to the feast of Xocotl Huetzi or “falling fruits”, which links it to Otontecuhtli (Fig. 14.11). This deity guided the Tepanec people, and thus also the Coyoaque, during their migration before settling in the Valley of Mexico. It seems probable that Otontecuhtli was taken as the patron god once Coyoacan was founded, and it was consequently important to incorporate him iconographically into the shield. The deity is represented here to show the Chichimec origin of the Tepaneca and their association with war and conquest. Prisoners of war would be sacrificed to Otontecuhtli by throwing them into a fire, then taking them out before they died in order to remove their hearts.76 The inner part of the shield is characterized by a combination of both sacred and bellicose elements. In the first and fourth fields the Dominican cross stands out in clear allusion to the Dominican Order that founded a house in Coyoacan.77 The cross rises from the mouth of a coyote, the animal from which the city took its name (coyotl). This could symbolize the installation and acceptance of the Catholic religion in the city. However, the cross is also a decorative element of the chimalli or shield that is accompanied by arrows. According to pre-Hispanic iconography the shield and arrows must be read as symbols of war. In our opinion, it is an allusion to the conquests undertaken by Coyoacan while accompanying the Spaniards. For lack of information, it is not possible to interpret the

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symbolism of the other fields of the shield, which depict a jaguar and a coyote embracing a tree. The coat of arms of Coyoacan includes another element of symbolic value used frequently in the shields: a bow and arrows. Many of the elements used in the shields concern the indigenous concepts of “Chichimec” and “Toltec”. Chichimec descent is associated with groups coming from the north—nomads and hunters—which explains the depiction of the bow and arrows if a particular group wanted to show such descent. However, sedentary groups that lived in cities developed art and writing, and other cultural forms: that is, they were civilized, calling themselves Toltecs. They claimed to have come from Tollan, the centre of civilization, and were heirs to the tradition of Quetzalcoatl, the great Mesoamerican cultural hero. These two concepts may seem to us to be opposites, but in fact they were not to the peoples living in pre-Hispanic central Mexico. Many who claimed Chichimec descent became imbued with culture and civilization and acquired a double identity that, depending on the goal of a specific document or time in which they lived, could be used in either way. At a time of conquest like the first half of the sixteenth century, the Chichimec values were of great importance. They were not only associated with the hunt and nomadic living, but also, and maybe particularly, with warring peoples who were respected and feared.78

Conclusions In many ways the Conquest of Mexico was possible due to the massive participation of indigenous conquistadors and the continuation of preHispanic patterns of war and conduct.79 Part of this conduct was the presumption that after the battles were over, the participants would receive privileges, land and people to work it. However, after the conquests and as time passed, indigenous conquistadors became aware that what they had expected to receive was not forthcoming. At the same time they saw how their Tenochca neighbours received striking coats of arms from the Spanish crown, which were similar to those granted to their brothers-in-arms, the Spanish conquistadors. Soon enough they learned the ins and outs of the Spanish legal system, how to write petitions, and the mechanisms of argumentation. In these petitions the indigenous conquistadors emphasized their noble descent, their true conversion to Christianity, the greatness of their people and city-states and, above all, the crucial importance of their participation in the conquest of New Spain. But what did it mean to them to have a European-style coat of arms? Why did they incorporate particular iconographic elements into their

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shields? It seems that with their newly obtained tlatocatlahuiztli, or “shields of the lineage”, the indigenous nobility tried to put themselves on par with the Spanish conquistadors and, as such, enjoy the same benefits. But they probably also wanted to hold a coat of arms because it implied a social privilege through which the king, the new authority in Mesoamerica and New Spain, recognized indigenous nobility. Furthermore, in the petitions for the altepetlahuiztli, or “shields of the altepetl”, one perceives a “battle of prestige” between one altepetl and another, particularly between neighbours. Indigenous society understood perfectly well the distinction Spanish society made between a city and a town and, thus, obtaining this elevated status in relation to one’s neighbouring communities was an important catalyst for the production of petitions in the colonial era. In regard to the iconographic elements that were chosen by the cabildo to be included in their coats of arms, it is evident that these had great value for the petitioners and their towns, but, more importantly, their symbolic meanings continued to be recognized by the indigenous population. It must therefore be concluded that the iconographic elements that were to be incorporated into the shields were carefully chosen and did not at all represent some vague, meaningless memory. If correct, these observations would suggest that coats of arms contained both obvious and subliminal messages for the indigenous population. It should be remembered that shields were placed on façades of houses and shown in public ceremonies. The people would not only regard coats of arms as recognition by the Spanish crown of the legitimacy of the indigenous lords and their feats in the conquest, but they would recognize the ancient symbols boosting the identity of their altepetl. This explains the inclusion of the attributes of Otontecuhtli, the patron deity of Coyoacan, in its shield, or the chimalli related with Xipe and the representation of the Lagoon of Primordial Blood in that of Tlacopan. It can only be supposed that the Spaniards were not aware of what these symbols meant to the Mesoamerican towns and people, otherwise it would have been unlikely that they would have allowed them to be used in this way. Nonetheless, in order to obtain their particular objectives the indigenous nobility combined arguments of their crucial participation in the conquest with their true conversion to Christianity. Chichimec war elements associated with brave warriors appear alongside elements of European religious iconography. The indigenous coats of arms are the results of societies that took from one world or the other what was necessary to reach their goals. These shields show that the indigenous people did not reject their ancient roots, but rather embraced the new ones introduced by the Spanish arrival and

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merged them to give rise to the Indo-Hispanic society that characterized New Spain.

Fig. 14.1. The coat of arms of the conquistador Juan Tirado. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.2. The coat of arms of Fernando Bugueño. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.3. Coat of arms of Don Martin Nezahualtecolotzin. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.4. Coat of arms of Don Francisco Matlaccohuatzin. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.5. Coat of arms of Don Diego Tehuetzquititzin. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias.

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Fig. 14.6. Coat of arms of Don Diego Tehuetzquititzin. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.7. Coat of arms of Don Antonio Totoquihuaztli. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.8. Shield of Xipe. Codex Tudela, fol. 12r. Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid.

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Fig. 14.9. Coat of arms of Coyoacan. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias.

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Fig. 14.10. Coat of arms of Coyoacan. Courtesy of the Archivo Ducal de Alba.

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Fig. 14.11. The feast of Xocotl Huetzi. Codex Tudelo, fol. 20r. Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid.

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Fig. 14.12. territories.

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Map of the region with position of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco

Notes * We want to thank Michel Oudijk for his translation of this article and Brad Benton for further corrections. The following abbreviations are observed in the notes: Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville; AGI, Audiencia de México 204, N.20; AGI, Audiencia de México, 95, exp, 24; AGI, Mapas y planos, Escudos, 202; Archivo Ducal de Alba (ADA), Madrid; ADA, Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 1; ADA, Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 5; ADA, Carpeta 238, legajo 2, doc. 19; ADA, Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 21; ADA, Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 50; ADA, Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 74. 1 In the sixteenth century the territory that today constitutes Mexico was largely controlled by the so-called Triple Alliance that was formed by the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan (see the map). 2 Restall 1998 documents Mayan participation in the conquest of Yucatan, while in 2003 he deconstructs the “history” of the conquest. Asselbergs 2004, particularly Chapter 5, demonstrates the important role of the Quauhquecholteca in the conquest of Guatemala. Matthew and Oudijk (2007) offer a collection of essays demonstrating the essential and structural role of the indigenous conquistadors. Castañeda de la Paz and Luque-Talaván (in press) deal with the participation of the Tepaneca in various campaigns in different parts of Mesoamerica for which they received coats of arms. Oudijk and Restall 2008 evaluate the role of Don Gonzalo Mazatzin Moctezuma in the conquest of Southern Puebla and the Mixteca. 3 See Oudijk and Restall 2007, 28-64; Asselbergs 2004, 90-91, 96; Gibson 1991, 154:156; Hassig 1988, 21.

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The city-states of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were both “Mexica” since they lived on the island called Mexico. At the time of the Spanish arrival these twin cities formed what was in many ways one city although they continued to be autonomous. It is illustrative that the final battle of Tenochtitlan was in fact fought in Tlatelolco with a Mexica army led by a ruler of Tenochca and Tlatelolca descent. 5 We use the terms coat of arms, blazon, and shield as synonyms. 6 For example, various letters of different native groups (Xochimilca, Tlacopaneca, Tenochca, Azcapotzalca, etc.) have been published which affirm their participation in the process of the conquest (Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000). 7 The shield granted to Don Diego has been published before (Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 140-143), but on that occasion I had not yet found the probanza or proof that was presented with the request. This text explains in great detail the exploits of this conquistador as well as the design of the blazon that was requested. This material is published here for the first time. 8 The blazon of the city of Tlacopan has been published before (Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 135-138), but not the one granted to its ruler Don Antonio which is published here for the first time. 9 The majority of the settlers came from a poor economic background, which was probably one of the main motives for crossing the Atlantic to the Americas (Lafaye 1970, 19; Levillier 1919, xii- lxv). 10 Konetzke 1951, 352-353; Konetzke 1984, Vol. 2, 171. Larios Martín 1958, (17-20) also maintains this opinion, while Cadenas Allende 1986, (67-75); and Lira Montt 1977, (81) maintain that the title ennobled the holder and his descendants. 11 For a detailed analysis see Asselbergs 2004, 95-99, 106-112. As the author explains, these groups often did not have any choice but to participate due to Spanish pressure. See Barlow 1989, 419-440 for the documents in the AGN-HJ about the Tenochca distribution of lands in the Valley of Toluca, and that of the Tlatelolca during the reign of Axayacatl. Durán 1995, Vol. 1, Chapter 9, 129-130; Chapter 11, 151; Chapter 13, 165 refer to distributions in Azcapotzalco, Coyoacan and Xochimilco during the reign of Itzcoatl. 12 Gibson 1991, 156-157. 13 Gibson 1991, (159-160) has shown that the Tlaxcalteca travelled to Spain very soon after the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. There is, however, no register of any grants for coats of arms issued to the nobility at this early time, which is not to say that they were not given. For example, on 22nd April, 1535 the king granted Tlaxcala the title of “Loyal City” together with a blazon. 14 See Wood 2003, 4. 15 Sanchíz Ochoa 1976, 51, 58. 16 The crown was always suspicious of the intentions of the conquistadors to gain noble status as they tried to put themselves on a level with the nobility in Spain. The king feared the creation of a noble class of conquistadors in a region so far away which might endanger the interests of the crown (Céspedes del Castillo 1997, Vol. 2, 23-30). It is important to remember that apart from some very rare

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exceptions, a coat of arms did not constitute proof of nobility, and its possession was not restricted to those with noble status. For a discussion of this matter, see Cadenas y Vicent 1969, Letter A, 8, and 5-12. 17 Based on Gibson’s analysis (Gibson 1991, 161-163) it can be deduced that four copies existed of each coat of arms: 1) the sketch made by the painter of the cabildo which would serve as a model for the painter of the royal court; 2) the painter of the court’s coat of arms, which would be incorporated into the royal cédula; 3) the copy that this same painter would make to be kept in Spain; and 4) the copy the cabildo would make. This explains why on various occasions different representations of the same coat of arms with slight variations exist in different repositories. See also Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 128-129. 18 Haskett 2005, 222. 19 Asselbergs 2004, 118-121. 20 See Luque Talaván and Castañeda de la Paz 2006, 68-73. 21 See Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 288, 162. 22 Tlatocatlauiztli designates the “armas de caualleros” or “armas o insignias de grandes señores”, and altepetlauiztli are “armas de ciudad” (Molina 2001, fols. 140v, 13v, 4r). See also the word tlahuiztli in the Códice Florentino (1979, Book 8, fol. 54r) about when these recognitions were given to indigenous lords. I would like to thank Michael Swanton for this important information. 23 Lockhart 1992, 55-56. 24 Haskett 1996, 104; Haskett 2005, 221. 25 Despite this, Coyoacan received the title of “villa”, a term applied only to settlements of Spaniards. And although the status of villa was less than that of city, it was greater than that of pueblo. Coyoacan received the title of villa because it is the place where the Spaniards first established their council before moving to Tenochtitlan. 26 ADA (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 74, fol. 1r). 27 ADA (Carpeta 238, legajo 2, doc. 74, fol. 1v-2r). The text of the grant was published in Paz y Meliá 1892, 127, no. 2. 28 See http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_de_Santiago 29 ADA, (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 5, fol. 1r). 30 ADA (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 5, fols. 1r–1v). The text was published by Paz y Meliá 1892, 97, lám. XLVIII, no. 2). 31 The term cacique originates in the Antilles and was used to refer to the nobility throughout the Americas during the colonial period. 32 Sahagún 2000, Book 12, Chapters 19-21, (1193-1196) is the only source that mentions Moctezuma II’s meddling during Cortés’ absence from MexicoTenochtitlan. See also Cortés 1992, 79 and the accounts of the conquistadors Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia 1988, (145); Francisco de Aguilar 1988, (189, 191) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo 1992, Chapter 126, 253. For an analysis of the contradictory accounts in the historical sources about the imprisonment and death of Moctezuma, see the excellent work in Graulich 2001. As he notes (5-7), the testimonies of various Spanish conquistadors who were eyewitnesses to events coincide in the essential issues and tend to favour stoning as the cause of death.

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Other sources, particularly those written by the conquered and their protectors the friars, “are discouragingly contradictory”. 33 The Techialoyans are mixed documents in that they combine pictographs and written texts in Nahuatl. They are characterized by a uniform style and kind of letter and were produced at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. 34 Chimalpahin 1998, 183. 35 “[…] personalmente a […] nos besar las manos como a v[uest]ros Reyes y señores naturales […]”, ADA (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 50, fol. 1r y doc. 21, fol. 1r). 36 See Paz y Mélia 1892, 267. 37 López de Meneses 1954, 69-91. Gibson 1991, (159) claims this trip took place in 1526. 38 Once back, he was poisoned “because of envy” (Crónica Mexicayotl 1992, 151). 39 Chimalpahin 1998, 183. On this trip Don Francisco went with Don Pedro Moctezuma, another son of Moctezuma II and half-brother of Don Martin. 40 Paz y Mélia 1892, 256. 41 ADA (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 50, fol. 1r-1v.). See also Paz y Mélia 1892, 267-268, no. 4. 42 ADA (Carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 21, fol. 1r). See also Paz y Mélia 1892, 256, no. 4. 43 Villar Villamil 1933, cédula 141. 44 Don Diego was not a descendant of Moctezuma but of Tizoc, a Mexica ruler of a different branch of the ruling family. His father was Tezcatlpopocatzin (Crónica Mexicayotl 1992, 171-172). Concerning his conquest with Cortés, see AGI (Audiencia de México, 95, 24, fol. 209v). The document was also transcribed in Pérez Rocha and Tena 2000, 100; for information on his campaign with Mendoza, see Chimalpahin, Séptima Relación 1998, 201; the Crónica Mexicayotl 1992, (172) specifies that he went to Xochipillan. 46 I would like to thank Michael Swanton for the English translation. The emphasis is mine. 47 This observation was made by Reyes García in his commentary on the Anales de Juan Bautista 2001, 155, footnote 48. He further states that once the Spanish system had been installed, this act of inauguration was substituted by the payment of the expenses of the tree that was used in the ritual of the voladores. See Sahagún 2000, Book 8, Chapter 18, paragraphs 3 and 5, (773-775), for a description of the ritual of enthronement and the related necessity of going to war to take prisoners. 48 (AGI, Audiencia de México 204, N.20). 49 AGI, Audiencia de Mexico 204, N. 20, fol. 13v). The information about this participation can be found in questions 9, 10 and 11, which were confirmed by all the witnesses (AGI, Audiencia de Mexico, 204, N.20, fol. 3r-3v). 50 AGI (Audiencia de Mexico, ibidem, fols. 2r-3v, 18r).

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According to these accounts, the city of Tenochtitlan had to be founded where the Mexica, on their migration in search of the place predestined by their patron god Huitzilopochtli, would encounter an eagle on top of a prickly pear cactus growing out of a stone. An abundant bibliography exists on the theme of the foundation of Tenochtitlan. See, among others, Duverger 1987, 364-368; Graulich 1990, 258-262; Castañeda de la Paz 2005a, 129-134; and Castañeda de la Paz 2005b, Vol. 2, 31-42. 52 Regarding this coat of arms and its poor reception among the indigenous and Spanish population, see Florescano 1998, (37-50), who states that, in order to improve its reception while not offending the Spanish king, the shield was adorned with indigenous iconography. The indigenous iconography eventually became more prominent than the Spanish iconography, and, in 1642 this representation of the shield was prohibited. By 1663, however, the prohibition was largely ignored. 53 See Alberro 1997, 393-414 and the illustration in Codex Osuna 1976, fol. 8r. 54 Haskett agrees with such an identification and adds that the eagle, “as ‘king of birds,’ represented politician supremacy”: see Haskett 2005, 233. In his discussion of the coats of arms in the Lienzo de Patzcuaro and that of Tzintzuntzan, Roskamp points out that the eagle “was a highly venerated animal in Central Mexico and generally associated with the sun or other deities”: see Roskamp 2001, 14, figs. 2-3. 55 ADA (Carpeta 238, legajo 2, doc. 19; Villar Villamil 1933, no. 130; and Paz y Mélia 1892, 257, no. 4. 56 “Carta de don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli al emperador Carlos V: en español, Tlacopan, 6 enero 1552”. The letter was published in Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 161-162. Apart from the request for the shield, he also asked for an exemption from tribute payment. 57 The coat of arms given to Tlacopan was published with a detailed analysis in Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 135-138. 58 Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 161-162. 59 “Carta de don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli al emperador Carlos V: en latín, Tlacopan 1 de diciembre 1552”: see Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 167-178. 60 See Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 176. 61 “Carta de don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli y de los alcaldes y regidores de Tlacopan al rey Felipe II: en español, Tlacopan, 20 febrero 1561”: see PérezRocha and Tena 2000, 245-247. 62 This identification has been confirmed by Guilhem Olivier (personal communication). 63 Oudijk 2008. 64 See Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 287. It is thus no accident that this conceptual place was incorporated in his blazon and in that of Tlacopan. Don Jerónimo del Águila’s shield and that of Tlacopan were published and analyzed in Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 143-147. 65 See Roskamp 2001, 15, fig. 1.

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See López Austin 1999, 191-193, 225-226 for a discussion of the primordial tree and the concept of hills as containers of water. 67 See fol. 5v in Codex Mendoza 1991, 16. The name Tlacopan comes from the Nahuatl word tlacotl, “rod, stick, stalk, thin stick” and the relational noun -pan, “above, on top of”: see Molina 2001, fol. 116r. 68 Xihuitl or xiuitl means “precious stone” in Nahuatl, and by extension “precious”. The homophonous xihuitl means “year, comet, turquoise, herb”, and is apparently functioning as a phonetic complement to clarify the previous interpretation: see Molina 2001, fol. 159v. 69 The blazon of the town of Tlacopan also includes these arrows but the shield was replaced by a face. Given the similarity between both coats of arms, it seems likely that the face is that of Xipe Totec. 70 See Batalla 2002, 175-176, figs. 16 and 17. Thanks are due to Guilhem Olivier for confirming this identification. 71 As mentioned in the introduction, it was quite normal for conquistadors to include their weapons in their coats of arms. Such is the case for the indigenous conquistador Don Jerónimo del Aguila, who includes in his blazon his actual shield decorated with the five wounds of Christ and the lance and sword he used to destroy temples and places of “idolatry”: see Pérez Rocha and Tena, 2000, 288; and Castañeda de la Paz 2009, 144-145. 72 The shells belong to the family of Olividae and more precisely to that of the Oliva kinsmen. I would like to thank Dr Adrián Velázquez (Museo del Templo Mayor, INAH) and the biologist Norma Valentín (Subdirección de Laboratorios y Apoyo Académico, INAH) for this information and Leonardo López Luján for putting me in contact with both scholars. 73 ADA, carpeta 238, legajo 2, doc. 1. 74 The document was published in Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000, 103-122. See also in the same work Genealogy No. 10 in relation to Coyoacan. 75 The first is in the ADA (carpeta 238, leg. 2, doc. 1), and the second in the AGI (Mapas y planos, Escudos, 202). 76 See Garibay 1979, 40-41. Although he calls the god Ocotecutli, modern investigations have shown that it really is Otontecuhtli. Regarding the feast of Xocotl Uetzin see Durán 1995, Vol. 2, Chapter 12, 125-130; Codex Borbonico 1991, 28; Graulich 1999, 409-422. See the commentary by Noguez on the Tira de Tepechpan 1996, Vol. 1, (79-80) for a reference to a number of people with this attire. 77 This information has been confirmed by Berenice Alcántara (personal communication). 78 These themes are dealt with more fully in Castañeda de la Paz 2005a, 135-142. See also Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca 1989, (158-159) where the Cholulteca look for Chichimec warriors to help them expel the allies of the Olmeca-Xicalanca from Cholula. 79 Matthew and Oudijk 2008.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE INVENTION OF TRADITION AND AN INDIGENOUS COAT OF ARMS MICHEL R. OUDIJK

On 20th September, 1740 Francisco López presented himself before the Spanish authorities of the town of San Felipe Ixtlahuaca in the Valley of Toluca with a so-called comprobación or verification of his nobility in order to have a copy made. Only four months earlier this verification had been checked and confirmed by the chief authority of his district, Don Juan del Castillejo. Based on this document Francisco López wanted to be recognized as a nobleman and, as a consequence, be exempted from paying tribute. The documents presented consisted of three alphabetical texts in Spanish and two coats of arms which today are held in the Colección Antigua of the National Library of Anthropology and History (BNAH) in Mexico City. The first document is a transcription of a 1588 petition by Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate, cacique or local ruler of San Felipe Ixtlahuaca, asking for transcriptions to be made of grants that were given to his grandfathers for their participation in the conquest and other services to the king. In the petition Don Domingo explains how he is related to a Don Francisco Ruis Lospe Encate, a Spanish conquistador, and to Don Juan Bautista Queeexochil, a cacique from the town of Colohuacan. His genealogical tree is set out in Figure 15.1. Several aspects of the information from this petition are problematic. Most important of these are the names of the people involved. The first part of the Nahuatl name “Queee-xochil” does not mean anything and, in fact, does not seem to be Nahuatl at all. While the family name “Escalona” does exist, it certainly is not common; but “Encate” is simply unknown from the historical record and it is not even clear whether it is Spanish or Nahuatl. It seems likely that “Lospe” is an unusual way of spelling “López”, while “Palpos” may be Pablo and Antonio is written as “Atonio” or even “tonio”. This tendency of an odd orthography continues in the

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place names as Culhuacan is spelled “Coloacan” and San Felipe is given as “San Felispe”. But Don Domingo also has problems with the genealogical relationships as he identifies Don Antonio Ruis as his brother but then assures that Don Antonio is a son of Don Francisco Ruis, as is his father Don Palplos. Finally, the wife of Don Francisco is given as a Don Juan Gonzalo, a man! A search through the historical record could not identify any of the people mentioned in the petition, even though the Spanish conquistadors have been investigated extensively, as has the indigenous city of Texcoco where Don Domingo’s grandmother was said to originate. The second and third texts that were presented by Don Domingo concern grants for coats of arms given by Charles V. The first grant was issued to Francisco Ruis Lospe Encate and lists all of the services rendered by this Spanish conqueror. These involve the discovery of Ocara, Lasaro and Chaponton with his uncle Francisco Ruis de Córdoba, after which he returned to Cuba only to board again but this time with Hernán Cortés on his famous campaign that resulted in the conquest of Mexico. Both trips are very famous and well documented. However, the first does not involve Francisco Ruis de Córdoba, but rather Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, who sailed with Lope Ochoa de Caicedo and Cristóbal de Morante and landed on the coast of Yucatan. The further references to the discovery of Lasaro and Chapoton confirms that we are dealing with Francisco Hernández, as in 1517 he indeed landed at the town of Lázaro, or Campeche, and shortly after at the town of Champotón, where on both occasions the conquistadors were met with fierce attacks from the local Maya people.1 The change in the name from “Hernández” to “Ruis” is suspicious as the person who presented the document is Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate. This suggests that he changed the names in the grant in order to have it seem that he was directly related to the conquistador and discoverer of Yucatan and therefore Mexico. Don Domingo is thus inflating his patrimony so he would be recognized as a nobleman and subsequently be exempted from paying tribute. The third text presented by Don Domingo is another grant but this time given on 4th September, 1551 to his grandfather from his mother’s side, Don Juan Bautista Queeexochil, cacique of Colhuacan. The grant is extremely vague as to the merits of Don Juan, and simply mentions that the coat of arms was granted because of his services given to the King of Spain in the conquest of Mexico. Multiple grants to indigenous lords exist as they participated actively in the conquest and colonization of what was to become New Spain.2 Consequently, these rulers followed Mesoamerican and European traditions and asked compensation for their efforts, normally

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implying that they would be recognized as nobility and thus be exempted from paying tribute, as well as receiving the right to certain privileges like mounting a horse, carrying a sword, and using a coat of arms.3 Both grants contain a description of a coat of arms that were bestowed upon Don Francisco and Don Juan, respectively, and two versions of each blazon. Although Don Domingo asked for copies, it is not clear why there are two of each in the file and even less so why the two versions are so different. Figures 15.2a and 15.2b show a blazon of Don Francisco Ruíz which accords with the description given in the grant as a shield with a golden tower on a coloured field and with a lion emerging from the door with a sword in its right paw. The border carries ten golden stars on a blue field and the arms are surmounted with a closed frontal helmet as its crest. The second version is different in style but identical in theme, although the helmet is shown in profile contrary to the description. The mantling, or flowery decoration, does not form part of the shield proper and is therefore often highly varied between one copy and another. It is however interesting to note that in the second version the knight holds the garland of flowers with his two hands. It seems likely that the tower and the armed lion refer to the military services of Don Francisco Ruis Lospe Encate during the conquest of Mexico. The tower may even be a direct reference to the city of MexicoTenochtitlan as its siege and conquest is prominently mentioned in the grant. Several shields that were granted to conquistadors of Tenochtitlan contain such a tower, although normally it is situated on an island as is the case of the city represented in Figure 15.3. The second coat of arms was granted to Don Juan Queeexochil and contains a few more problems. The grant describes it as a shield divided into two parts within one of which is a sphere below a naked arm holding a cross. Around this cross is a sign that reads “Credo in devm paterm” (I believe in God the Father), all on a blue field. On the other part of the shield we see a white tower on a field of gold and in its borders three prickly pears on a white field and ten crossed arrows on a coloured field. On its crest stands a closed helmet. While this description fits fairly well, there are some important differences with the actual shields (Figs. 15.4a and 15.4b). Again there is a tower but this time without the element of war or conquest and, consequently, it is difficult to interpret this particular heraldic charge or element. Formally this tower is very similar to that in the shields of Don Francisco. The arrows in the border are clear references to war which may suggest that the tower is too. In other words, it may refer to the conquest of Tenochtitlan. The other half contains the naked

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arm with the cross, but the sphere is missing in both blazons. Normally the sphere with a cross is related to the Christian world which would have matched nicely with the naked arm which means something like “industrious person”, the cross which means “faith” or “Christianity”, and the banner which affirms that the carrier of the shield is a true Christian. This latter aspect was important to emphasize in the early colonial period as the indigenous population was considered idolatrous by many Spaniards, even though they were baptized and had received some, or even a considerable, Christian education. It would therefore not disadvantage the bearer to include emblems in his coat of arms which could be read as “I, Don Juan, participated in the conquest of Mexico, accepted the Christian faith, and actively helped in the conversion to Christianity of the Mesoamerican world”. This combination of military conquest and the acceptance of Christianity are often combined in indigenous coats of arms, as these were precisely the elements that were stressed before the colonial authorities as qualities of a particular lord or ancestor in petitions for privileges.4 The helmets in the second versions of the shields are peculiar as they iconographically clearly represent Tlaloc, the pre-Hispanic god of rain or lightning. Such incorporations of pictographic elements of the preHispanic Mesoamerican writing tradition into colonial indigenous shields are quite common as was shown by Castañeda de la Paz who argues that the combination of indigenous elements in a European format made it possible for the local rulers to communicate with both worlds.5

The Hernández Documents Recently I have come across another set of documents very similar to those just described. These are held in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City (Ramo Vínculos 272, Tomo 2, ff. 509-516) and consist of a petition and two grants followed by two coats of arms. It is immediately clear that these were written by the very same scribe as those in the BNAH and that the contents are almost identical, up to the point that they must be copies either of each other or of a third unknown document. What is astonishing, however, is that the petition in the AGN was filed by a Domingo Hernández Bautista, cacique of the town of Atlacomulco instead of Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate, cacique of San Felipe Ixtlahuaca, a neighbouring community (see the map, Fig. 15.5). Furthermore, in this case the first grant was given to Cristóbal Hernández, rather than to Francisco Ruiz.6

The Invention of Tradition and an Indigenous Coat of Arms Lord Charles for the divine clemency emperor of the Romans [etc.] Insofar You Francisco Ruis resident of the City of Tenostitlan-Mexico which is in New Spain you made a statement that you with desires served us it may be more than fifteen years ago that you went to these parts with an uncle who was called Francisco Ruis de Cordoua the first Captain of ours who went with people to discover New Spain and with him you were in the discovery of Ocara and Lasaro and of Chapoton where you had fights and many encounters with the people and they killed twenty and some men and left you hurt in the thighs from which you came [close] to death and afterwards you went with the said Captain to the islands of Cuba and entered in the armed company of Don Hernando Cortes our Captain and you crossed with him to New Spain and you were in all the conquests wars and fights he had with the people of the land and the provinces of Taxcalas and the other towns until the conquest and subjection of Mexico and you were also there in the disruption the people of Mexico did to the said general Captain where you left fighting hurt with many wounds and afterwards you returned with the said general Captain to the City of Taxcala and you were in the conquest of the provinces of Teotan and Ocucar and the others that were conquered and with your personal belongings you helped to win and subject and also you went with the said Don Hernando Cortes to conquer the City of Tescoco (11r) and many other towns and the Spaniards and Ôyotepeque and you were in the encounter and battle of the natives and they ran you and the said general Captain out from where you left with many life dangers and afterwards you took on the said general Captain the conquest and siege he laid to the City of Tenoxtitlan Mexico and you were in the said siege until he returned to conquer and take from which you left hurt of many wounds and hits especially an arrow in the face and stone on the head from which you came [close] to death and afterwards you were with the said Don Hernando Cortes in the conquest of Panoco and you helped win and pacify it and it was populated with a town of Christians and afterwards you were with the Captain Gonsales de Santiobal in the conquest and pacification of the province of Metepeque and afterwards with Nuño de Gusman in the conquest of New Galicia where you served with your person and arms and three horses and two Christian servants for the time of one year and more on your own cost you helped to conquer and take all where you went you felt many dangers and works hunger and necessities [...] (BNAH-Colección Antigua, 757). Lord Charles for the divine clemency emperor of the Romans [etc.] Insofar You Xptobal Hernand[e]s resident of the City of Tenostitlan-Mexico which is in New Spain you made a statement that you with desires served us it may be more than fifteen years ago that you went to these parts with an uncle who was called Francisco Hernand[e]s de Cordoua the first Captain of ours who went with people to discover New Spain and with him you were in the discovery of Ocara and Lasaro and of Chapoton where you had fights and many encounters with the people and they killed twenty and

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Chapter Fifteen some men and left you hurt in the thighs from which you came [close] to death and afterwards you went with the said Captain to the islands of Cuba and entered in the armed company of Don Hernando Cortes our Captain and you crossed with him to New Spain and you were in all the conquests wars and fights he had with the people of the land and the provinces of Taxcala and the other towns until the conquest and subjection of Mexico and you were also there in the disruption the people of Mexico did to the said general Captain where you left fighting hurt with many wounds and afterwards you returned with the said general Captain to the City of Taxcala and you were in the conquest of the provinces of Teotan and Ocucar and the others that were conquered and with your personal belonging you helped to win and subject and also you went with the said Don Hernando Cortes to conquer the City of Tescoco (11r) and many other towns and the Peñoles and Ôyotepeque and you were in the encounter and battle of the natives and they ran you and the said general Captain out from where you left with many life dangers and afterwards you took on the said general Captain the conquest and siege he laid to the City of Tenoxtitlan Mexico and you were in the said siege until he returned to conquer and take from which you left hurt of many wounds and hits especially an arrow in the face and stone on the head from which you came [close] to death and afterwards you were with the said Don Hernando Cortes in the conquest of Panoco and you helped win and pacify it and it was populated with a town of Christians and afterwards you were with the Captain Gonsales de Santiobal in the conquest and pacification of the province of Tutepeque and afterwards with Nuño de Gusman in the conquest of New Galicia where you served with your person and arms and three horses and two Christian servants for the time of one year and more on your own cost you helped to conquer and take all where you went you felt many dangers and works hunger and necessities [...] (AGN-Vinculos 272, Vol. 2).

As pointed out above, the grant given to Francisco Ruíz was somewhat problematical as it referred to a Francisco Ruíz de Córdoba while clearly the famous captain Francisco Hernández de Córdoba was intended. This “error” was “corrected” in Cristóbal Hernández’ grant which indeed refers to Francisco Hernández. Both grants continue giving all Cristóbal’s merits in known campaigns like Hernán Cortés’ and Nuño de Guzmán’s conquests. This comparison of the two grants makes clear that Francisco Ruíz’ claim was probably manipulated. In changing the name from Francisco Hernández de Córdoba to Francisco Ruíz de Córdoba, an effort was made to fit it better with that of the 1740 petitioner and, of course, with that of Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate, cacique of San Felipe Ixtlahuaca in 1588 who supposedly had the three texts made. Such manipulation or falsification would also explain the various mistakes in the Spanish of Don Domingo’s texts. This is particularly curious since all these texts in the

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BNAH and AGN were written by the very same scribe, Diego de León, but only the BNAH documents contain such mistakes (Fig. 15.6). For example, in Don Domingo’s texts there is a clear tendency to use plural forms in singular contexts; thus we find “mis padre” or “mis madre” instead of “mi padre”, and “mi madre” or “los qual” and “tierras firme” instead of “lo qual” and “tierra firme”. All this evidence strongly suggests that the documents of Don Domingo Ruíz Lospe Encate are in fact forgeries. Having identified the documents of the Ruíz family as forgeries, it would suggest that those of the Hernández family are originals. We have seen that these seem historically reliable. A comparison of the petitions further suggests that the Hernández documents are authentic: (9v) In the City of Mexico at nine days of the month of July of fifteen hundred and eighty and eight years before Francisco de Solis Alcalde Hordinario of this City was read this petition Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate Casique and nobleman of the town of San Felispe Ystlabanca of the Jurisdiction of Metepeque appear I before Your Honour with Don Lord Atonio Ruis Lospe Encatemy legitimate brother who is of Don Palplos Ruis Lospe Encate my deceased father and resident he was of the town of Atitaloquia who had me from a legitimate matrimony with Doña Juana Bapptista de Gusman y Escalona Casica noble of the town of Coloacan and the said our father and Don Atonio were legitimate sons of Don Francisco Ruis Lospe Encate Spaniards nobleman and native he was of the Kingdoms of Castille of Don Juan Gonzalo also Spaniards and both already deceased residents they were of this City of Mexico where they had the post of Correxidor of the town of Atitaloquios and they stayed to live in it until they died and these Dona Juan my mother was legitimate daughter of Don Juan Bapptista Queeexochil Casique and noble he was of the town of Colohuacan and of Doña Apolonia de Gusman y Escalona Casica Mestisa and very noble of the City of Tescoco and being so the said Don Francisco Ruis Lospe Encate my grandfather for having been one of the first conquistadors and pacifiers of this kingdom and also the said Don Juan Bapptista Queexochil who went in the company of the Spanish soldiers of the general captain Don Hernando Cortes giving record to your majesties in your Royal Council of the Indies of his personal manoeuvres and works in service of God our Lord and of your Royal Crown who honoured his merits with Deeds of privileges, arms and blazons which these Deeds in the testamentary statement which due to the end and death of these Don Palplos my father fell in the possession of Don Nicolas my uncle as his testamentary executor (10r) and holder of possessions named by him which we present with the necessary solemnity and oaths before Your Honour and because I live in a different Jurisdiction and distant to that in which lives my uncle and being as I am married and with some legitimate sons and daughters I need from these deeds of privilege an authorized testimony

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Chapter Fifteen in a form that gives faith so that in the future I and these my sons and daughters and other descendants will enjoy the honours and privileges that the Royal will of your majesties has given and will give us Your Honour I beg please to provide and order that I will be given to what I refer and ask and so done to my uncle Don Nicolas will be returned his originals for his protection and that of my aunts and my brothers who are under his tutelage as the executor which I will receive well and in mercy with the Justice I ask and I swear to God and the Cross in due form that it is without any malice that is in this document Don Francisco de Solis Alcalde Hordinario having seen the Royal Letters and deeds with the testamentary memory to which in this petition is made mention I order that of these is given to Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate the part he asks to be authorized in public manner and once done the originals be returned to Don Tonio Ruis Lospe Encate as he requested […] (BNAH-Colección Antigua, 757). (510r) In the City of Mexico at nine days of the month of July of fifteen hundred and eighty and eight years before Francisco de Solis Alcalde Hordinario of this City was read this petition Don Domingo Hernan[de]s Bapp[tis]ta Casique Mestiso and nobleman of the town of Atlacomulco of the Jurisdiction of Metepeque appear I before Your Honour with Don P[edr]o Hernan[de]s de la Torre y Santeobal my uncle or legitimate brother who is of Don Gabriel Hernan[de]s de la Torre de Santeobal my deceased father Spaniard and resident he was of the town of Atitalaquia who had me from a legitimate matrimony with Doña Juana Bapptista de Gusman y Escalona Casica noble of the town of Coloacan and the said my father and uncle Don P[edr]o were legitimate sons of Don Xpobal Hernan[de]s Spaniard nobleman and native he was of the Kingdoms of Castille of Don Jua[n]a de la Torre y Santeobal also Spaniard and both already deceased residents they were of this City of Mexico where they had the post of Correxidor of the town of Atitalaquia and they stayed to live in it until they died and this Dona Juana my mother was legitimate daughter of Don Juan Bapptista Quaucxochil casique and noble he was of the town of Colohuacan and of Doña Elena de Gusman y Escalona Casica Mestisa and very noble of the City of Tescoco and being so the said Don Xpobal Hernan[de]s my grandfather for having been one of the first conquistadors and pacifiers of this kingdom and also the said Don Juan Bapptista Quaucxochil who went in the company of the Spanish soldiers of the general captain Don Hernando Cortes giving record to your majesties in your Royal Council of the Indies of his personal maneouvres and works in service of God our Lord and of your Royal Crown who honoured his merits with Deeds of privileges, arms and blazons which these Deeds in the testamentary statement which due to the end and death of the Don Gabriel my father fell in the possession of (510v) Don P[edr]o my uncle as his testamentary executor and holder of possessions named by him which we present with the necessary solemnity and oaths before Your Honour and because I live in a different Jurisdiction and distant to that in which

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lives the said my uncle and being as I am married and with some legitimate sons and daughters I need from these deeds of privilege an authorized testimony in a form that gives faith so that in the future I and these my sons and daughters and other descendants will enjoy the honours and privileges that the Royal will of your majesties have given and will give us Your Honour I beg please to provide and order that I will be given to what I refer and ask and so done to my uncle Don P[edr]o will be returned his originals for his protection and that of my uncles and my brothers who are under his tutelage as the executor which I will receive well and in mercy with the Justice I ask and I swear to God and the Cross in due form that it is without any malice that is in this document Don D[o]n Domingo Hernan[de]s Bapp[tis]ta Alcalde having seen the Royal Letters and deeds with the testamentary memory to which in this petition is made mention I order that of these is given to Don Domingo Hernan[de]s Bapp[tis]ta the part he asks to be authorized in public manner and once done the originals be returned to Don P[edr]o Hernan[de]s de la Torre y Santeobal as he requested […] (AGN-Vinculos 272, Vol. 2).

This further comparison leaves no doubt as to the nature of the forgery of the Ruíz papers, as nearly all the names have been systematically changed. Apart from the aforementioned mistakes in the Spanish, which do not show in its English translation, the odd names and their orthography of the people given in the Ruíz document, makes it even clearer that this has to be the forgery. The Hernández petition, as the grant, makes much more sense and leaves no doubts in regard to the genealogical relationships or the gender of Don Domingo’s ancestors as was the problem with the Ruíz papers (Fig. 15.7). Santeobal is an odd name, but the grant had already given us a clue as to how to read it, as it referred to Gonsales de Santiobal who is very well known from the historical record as Gonzalo de Sandoval, a famous Spanish conquistador. However, it is this same Spaniard who gives rise to certain doubts in regard to the authenticity of the Hernández documents. Whereas the Ruíz documents relate him to the conquest of Metepec in the present state of Mexico, the Hernández document claims he was responsible for the campaign against Tututepec, an important and powerful Mixtec kingdom on the coast of the southern state of Oaxaca. As with the rest of the falsified elements in the Ruíz document, the Metepec reference seems to be incorporated in order to associate the text with the region of the petitioner. The Ruíz family comes from the town of San Felipe Ixtlahuaca, also called San Felipe el Grande, which was an important town in the Valley of Toluca in the jurisdiction of Metepec during the colonial period. Although Gonzalo de Sandoval is not particularly known for the conquest of Metepec, he did in the summer of

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1521 put down an uprising of the Matlazinco towns of which San Felipe is one.7 So this information seems so be part of an historical memory in the region. The Hernández document, however, relates De Sandoval with the conquest of Tututepec. Bernal Díaz del Castillo makes repeatedly clear that it in fact was not Tututepec, but rather Tuxtepec that was conquered by De Sandoval.8 This mistake throws doubt on the validity of the Hernández document as it would probably not have been made by descendants of a conquistador who had participated in the actual conquest. According to the petition Cristóbal Hernández had two sons with Doña Juan de la Torre y Santeobal; Don Pedro and Don Gabriel Hernández de la Torre y Santeobal. However, a document from 1586 in the Archivo General de Indias casts serious doubts on this: (3r) Gonçalo Fernandez de Figueroa resident of the City of Mexico son of Christoual de Fernandez deceased one of the first conquerors of New Spain says that the said his father went from the island of Cuba to the said New Spain for the discovery of it in the company of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoua and they discovered de Province of Chanponton that now is called Guatemala and Campeche in which they had many encounters and battles from which the said’s father was left badly hurt reason for which and having stood out a lot on this occasion the said Captain Francisco Hernandez de Cordoua sent him with the news of the event to the island of Cuba where after having delivered it he put together with much brevity a fleet and as captain of it Don Fernando Cortes who later became Marques del Valle and during the navigation until arriving to the said New Spain they suffered great works and bad luck and they entered in it [New Spain] doing what they ought to as good soldiers where they conquered many provinces especially in New Galiçia and the province of Sempual and Tecapaçinga and the province of Tasculeta in which they were involved for forty and four days until they won and pacified it where they suffered hunger and works and the same in the province of Choluca and above all the said his father was in the conquest of Mexico when they killed Moteçuma and he was on the road to Tacuba with a lance where he did much damage detaining the Indians that went after the Spaniards as such his service was considerable and having gathered and recovered the men they went to Tepeaca and the province of Ysucar and Tescuco in the company of the said Don Fernando Cortes and there they returned and came with more people against the City of Mexico where his said father did considerable things standing out as a good soldier a son of somebody until they won the said city [...] (Archivo General de Indias, Patronato 79, N. 1, R. 3, 1586).

The information in this petition is very similar to that given in the grant of Cristóbal Hernández and it clearly concerns one and the same person.

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There is very little, if any, doubt that this document is authentic, as it was written in the original sixteenth-century hand, on original paper, and is kept in a file with other documents from this year, unlike the Ruíz and Hernández documents which are eighteenth-century copies. The main problem is how to reconcile the information that Gonzalo Fernández de Figueroa is the son of Cristóbal de Fernández, while Don Domingo claims that Don Pedro and Don Gabriel, his uncle and father respectively, were sons of this very same Cristóbal de Hernández. It could be, of course, that the three are actually brothers, but this is unlikely considering that in other petitions brothers ask together for privileges, as a group. It seems therefore more likely that the Hernández documents are forgeries too, although of a rather more sophisticated kind than the Ruíz documents. This would mean that the two sets of texts presented in 1740 are falsifications. An historical contextualization may clarify this problem.

Eighteenth-Century Texts from the Toluca Region The Mesoamerican pictographic writing systems endured from the sixteenth to the mid seventeenth century, but were slowly replaced by the alphabetical system. The almost unlimited possibilities of alphabetic writing were fully exploited by the indigenous communities which began to produce a rich variety of documents, ranging from the regular notarial texts like wills, letters of sale and petitions, to historical accounts and religious manuscripts. From the second half of the seventeenth century until the mid eighteenth century this development resulted in the production of a certain type of historical document which in the literature is called “Primordial Titles” with a particular off-shoot known as “Techialoyan”. While the latter consists of some fifty-six known manuscripts, the first is a group of well over a hundred documents with considerable variety of format, extent, and contents. These texts are written in indigenous languages, frequently with illustrations, particularly in the case of the Techialoyan, and have a focus on local history and territory. Orthography, historical events, chronology, and territorial references are often confusing and, from a western perspective, erroneous, which has led some investigators to consider the titles falsifications. More recently, however, it has been exactly this aspect that has caused scholars to reflect on what history and historiography means in different cultural contexts.9 The question of the historical value and authenticity of the titles is complex and multi-faceted. Much of the information can and has been verified by comparative historical research, but this same exercise has also

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shown that many data are diachronic or simply erroneous. Part of this problem can be explained if the origins of these sources are considered. There is little doubt that the titles are part of and a continuum of a strong oral tradition which conserves the memory of historical information, but at the same time changes or structures it to its elemental or essential core. So Viceroy Mendoza may be remembered as an archbishop or king residing in Mexico City in Spain from 1521 onwards, which is, of course, factually incorrect. However, what is important is the memory of the introduction of Spanish ecclesiastical and civil authority embodied by Viceroy Mendoza who, with his Council of the Indies, resided in Mexico City representing the King of Spain, recognized as ultimate authority in all of New Spain since the conquest, exemplified in the year 1521 in which Tenochtitlan fell. At the same time, however, evidence exists of actual falsifications. Stephanie Wood has worked extensively on such material, and more recently Mária Castañeda de la Paz has identified similar practices.10 Wood has identified a Pedro Villafranca as a cacique who produced titles in Spanish for towns in the Valley of Toluca, often based on sixteenthcentury original sources, and Don Diego García de Mendoza Moctezuma as a supposed cacique from Azcapotzalco who was involved in the production of Techialoyan documents. García Castro and Arzate Becerril have continued the investigations of Pedro Villafranca producing titles for various Otomí towns situated to the west of Mexico City.11 Castañeda de la Paz, on the other hand, shows the use and re-use of original sixteenthcentury grants by people from the present states of Mexico and Hidalgo in order to claim privileges. All cases concern the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when the indigenous communities in New Spain needed documents to confirm, or reconfirm, their territories before the colonial authorities, or to reaffirm the identity of the community itself. Where such manuscripts did not exist, new ones were produced, sometimes on the request of the very same authorities. In this process the line between plain registration, invention and falsification proved to be a thin one and was not limited to community documents. Considering the Ruíz and Hernández documents within this context it has to be noted that while several of the titles in Nahuatl come from the Valley of Toluca, the large majority of the Techialoyan documents are from this region, suggesting a preference for pictographic documents over alphabetic ones. The falsifications discussed here are from this very same region. It is thus not strange to encounter two documents from San Felipe Ixtlahuaca and Atlacomulco that show similar characteristics as those of the titles, but in this case it seems the line towards falsification was

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definitely crossed. These documents often became part of the local historical memory in which it was no longer clear what piece of information was authentic or false, so creating a new history.12

Conclusions Two sets of eighteenth-century historical documents were explored. While one set could be identified as a forgery, the second seemed more authentic, but in the end had to be recognized as a forgery too. The production of fake documents in order to obtain certain rights and privileges is as old as man has produced documents. In this particular case, these documents can be contextualized as dating from a time when Mexican indigenous towns and people had to present documentation in order to protect their lands and status against a growing population. While many of these new documents are amalgamations of earlier documents and local oral traditions, rendering important if not the only historical information about certain communities or peoples, in some cases straightforward forgeries were produced. The Ruíz and Hernández papers presented here are in this second category, even though the latter are a bit more sophisticated. Such a conclusion does not invalidate the documents. On the contrary, it makes them more interesting as new issues arise. For example, it has to be investigated how these people in the eighteenth century had access to historical information about the sixteenth century; the “invented” names in these documents may actually represent certain local historical personages who were knitted into these accounts; the mere construction of this documentation may have had consequences for the local historical memory as the persons and events attributed to them may have become “real” as is the case in other places in Mexico.13 What started as a forgery may, therefore, have become history.

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Fig. 15.1. Genealogical tree of Don Domingo Ruis Lospe Encate.

Fig. 15.2a. Coat of arms of Francisco Ruis de Córdoba (National Library of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Colección Antigua, No. 757, Exp. 3).

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Fig. 15.2b. Coat of arms of Francisco Ruis de Córdoba (National Library of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Colección Antigua, No. 757, Exp. 3).

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Fig. 15.3. Coat of arms showing towers on an island.

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Fig. 15.4a. Coat of arms of Don Juan Queeexochil (National Library of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Colección Antigua, No. 757, Exp. 3).

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Fig. 15.4b. Coat of arms of Don Juan Queeexochil (National Library of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Colección Antigua, No. 757, Exp. 3).

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Fig. 15.5. Map of Atlacomulco and San Felipe Ixtlahuaca region.

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Fig. 15.6. Comparison of the handwriting and signatures of Diego de León. (National Library of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Colección Antigua, No. 757, Exp. 3 and General Archive of the Nation, Ramo Vínculos 272, Tomo 2).

Fig. 15.7. Genealogical tree of Don Domingo Hernandez Bapptista (Atlacomulco).

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Notes 1

See Díaz del Castillo 1992, Chapters 2-4; Thomas 1994, Chapter 7. See Matthew and Oudijk 2008. 3 These conventions are explored in Luque-Talaván and Castañeda de la Paz 2006; and Castañeda de la Paz 2009. 4 See Castañeda de la Paz 2009. 5 Ibid. 6 The translations are by the author. I have tidied up oddities of orthography to aid clarity. 7 See Díaz del Castillo 1992, 155, 362-363. 8 Ibid., 158, 380, 160, 390. 9 See, for example, Wood 1998a; and Wood 1988b. 10 Wood 1987; Wood 1989; Castañeda de la Paz 2008. 11 Castro and Becerril 2003. 12 See Oudijk 2000; and Oudijk 2003. 13 Ibid. 2

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE LAUGHING LION: FROM “SILENCE” TO THE GESTURE, TO THE EMBLEM ANNA MARANINI

… IJò ȝóȞȠȞ ȖİȜĮ IJȦȞ ȗȦĮȦȞ ĮȞșȡȦʌȠȞ —Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, 673a

According to Plutarch (46-120 AD), in the fifth century BC the philosopher Zeno bit off his tongue and spat it at the face of a tyrant to avoid informing on his fellow conspirators. 1 According to Pliny (23-79 AD), Leaena, courtesan of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, rather than betray her friends who were conspiring against Hipparchus (513-514 BC), 2 remained silent even under torture; for this, the Athenians dedicated a bronze statue of a tongueless lioness to her. 3 The statue was without human semblance and bore no inscription, as the icon was “parlante” and the chosen animal had moral significances traditionally linked to both the world of the gods and the world of men. The frontal position of the statue, opposite the Acropolis, added sanctity to traditional allegory. Pliny is said to have noted that the most suitable predicate for defining her behaviour was “invincible obstinacy”, and the bronze lioness was soon to become the metaphor for patientia corporis, the endurance of physical pain, which was also much esteemed in the Christian age.4 The Christian Tertullian (160-c.220 AD) dedicated a paragraph of his De patientia to this kind of courage and endurance.5 The feat of the Leaena meretrix was long remembered because it was of use in fortifying the faith of princes, statesmen and common mortals, according to the admonition of the Apostle Paul, who said that anyone called to a form of vocation must persevere in it.6 When exempla such as these were combined with the confutations of some of the opiniones

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Machiavelli and united with passages from Tertullian—the German Jesuit Adam Contzen (1575-1635) is said to have done this in 1629—they could be launched against opinions of conventional moral standards (sententiae), including that by which the Christian religion renders men vile (Christianam institutionem facere imbelles).7 They were helpful advice to princes, statesmen and even common mortals, because qui mori paratus est, qui tormenta ridet, non est ille bello inidoneo, anyone who is ready to die and laughs at torments is not unfit for war.8 Iconologically, the transmission of the ancient gesture was based on celebrated representations. 9 The 1531 edition of Alciato’s Emblemata presented its readers with the icon that centuries of literary treatment had described only in words: the lioness standing on three legs with the front left one curled in heraldic attitude, jaws open wide showing an empty mouth.10 Pliny had already explained the reasons for such a singular choice of icon. The statue commemorated a courageous woman who could not appear as what she really was, a prostitute. The symbolic image, therefore, was the coming together of moral and social justifications safeguarded by an ancient set of ethical and philosophical elements, amongst which were the definitions of “statue” and “bronze” which, in Aristotle (384–322 BC), exemplified the concepts of “power” and “action”.11 Moreover, images of this kind were able to conceal the ethically less honourable part of the tale, veiling the actual event and, at the same time, surrounding it with both the protective symbology of an animal of great ethical impact, the lion, and the mysterious atmosphere of the myth. In literature, the leonine symbol had already been an attribute of female characters, such as in the literature of Greek tragedy, in Aeschylus for example (525–456 BC), and in the mystery religions. 12 Lions and lionesses were some of the richest polygenetic, polymorphic and polysemic symbols of all, stemming from both sacred and profane ancient tradition.13 Having survived up to ancient times, they were then ferried into the Christian Middle Ages and from there on to Renaissance tradition.14 In addition, the ancient figure could also personify Silence.15 In literature, the symbology linked to Leaena was abounding with symbols and had acquired different meanings, not the least of these being used to date the 64th Olympiad (in Jerome’s Chronicon). Tertullian㻃 too had used it as a positive example of resistance to suffering, describing the Attica meretrix as she spat her tongue into the face of the tyrant, in a passage brought to light in De honesta disciplina by Pietro Riccio (Petrus Crinitus, 1465-1505). 16 Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558) dedicated two chapters of his Hieroglyphica to Leaena, in the part dedicated to the lion,

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under the titles of Meretrix and Taciturnitas (chapters 21, 22).17 Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) dedicated a passage of his De institutione foeminae Christianae (1523) to Leaena, in order to teach the virtus of silence. 18 Despite Jean Tixier de Ravisy (Joannes Ravisius Textor, 1480-1522) lessening the value of the heroic act in his Officina, where Leaena merely imitated the courage of others, the evocative power of these traditions (Leaena and Lactance’s Lupa meretrix) carried characters and symbols right up to the seventeenth century in Hofmann’s Lexicon universale.19 In the 1621 edition of Alciato (1492-1550) there appears the curious figure of a lioness in frontal position, almost vulgarly, mouth open in a grimace with corners raised as if in a full-throated laugh.20 The text of the epigram is presented in the form of a funerary inscription and is addressed to a passing stranger with the use of rhetorical interrogation; the illustration is heavily laden with symbols. The owl above the door is the symbol of the city of Athens, the posture of the lioness on the doorway brings to mind the topos of the sacred boundary of the threshold, and the brick tower—symbol of the Acropolis—has echoes of the myth of Danae, the virgin locked away in an inaccessible place for the preservation of her chastity but seduced by Zeus in the form of golden rain according to Horace (65-8 BC),㻃 Hyginus (c.64 BC-17 AD) and the mythographers (eleventh and twelfth centuries AD).21 In fact, the prison of Danae, which is a bronze tower in Horace (turris aenea), becomes a simple tower in The Mythographus Vaticanus 3, 5 (turre inclusa).22 It is referred to as such by Raffaele Regio (c.1440-1520) in his commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it appears as a stony wall in Hyginus (in muro lapideo㻌. 23 The illustration in the 1621 edition dates back to Lorenzo Pignoria (1571-1631), who had depicted the animal almost seated, like a human being, to better emphasise the genre, the sex and the absence of the tongue. The drawing is extraordinarily similar to a surviving image on an Etruscan chariot plaque dating back to the sixth century BC.24 In a single individual, it has the characteristic traits of two bogey characters, Gorgo and Baubo (the latter being the old woman who made Demeter and the baby Iacchus laugh by exposing herself indecently). 25 The violent disfiguring grimace on the muzzle thus acquired great evocative force and held sway over previous representations, where the lioness had tended to be more heraldic with its mouth closed, thus moving away from the original symbolism. This can be seen in the figures in some editions of Alciato’s Emblemata, such as those of 1531, 1534, 1536, 1539, 1542, 1549, 1550, 1551, 1584, 1556, 1558, 1566-1567, 1591, and 1615. The figurative representation as the female of the lion, the strongest and bravest animal of all, was held to be a great honour. The tongue

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related the lioness to animals and man, but as the tool of the word it took on a specific symbolism, as only man possesses an articulate voice. Its absence was intended as the sign of a positive value, as it clearly rendered the impossibility of betrayal and steadfastness of character. The icon was deprived of its tongue for the purposes of the story, but, as far as the symbolism was concerned, the loss of the tongue was the consequence of a form of inverse and double translatio. The animal had a human quality missing after the completion of its symbolic humanisation process. One of the most important characteristics, the tongue, was emphasised and then eliminated, as if taking into account the analogy with the concept of the true animal, considered as dumb, and the virtue linked to the tongue took on a double value per contrarium. The positive value was thus assumed “by negation”. And so, although the tongue was a physical element common to both man and animals, the virtue connected to it—and brought to mind by its absence—was of man alone. The “articulated” word belonged to the human genre alone, and was granted to animals for the very purpose of humanising them. The fable tradition abounds with animals endowed with the word and even animals that laugh or smile, as Avianus (fifth century AD) wrote in the prologue to his fables, insisting on the moral value of these literary metamorphoses. 26 Also in Phaedrus (c.15 BC-c.55 AD), the lion laughed. The humanisation, too, of the king of the animals could thus have been made perfect by the predicate of “laughter”, as found in classical antiquity, in the Middle Ages27 and even in Arabic culture.28 It was the most singular predicate of all, having been an attribute of the dignity of man since Aristotle’s Categories and Parts of Animals.29 In his Isagoge, Porphyry (c.233-305 AD), a disciple of Plotinus (205-270 AD), illustrates the doctrine of the five Aristotelian “predicables” (genus, species, difference, property and accident), offering the formula “capacity to laugh” as a property of man in his definition of “property”. Porphyry’s work became a source for medieval commentators through the Latin translation proposed by Boethius (476-525 AD: Porphyrii introductio in Aristotelis Categorias a Boethio translata), and the laughter of man as a category of “property” was brought through to the Renaissance. Laughter was thus carried along on the symbology of the lion thanks to its humanisation; a contribution was also given, however, by an ancient uniconic form of medieval, historical and scholastic tradition referred to by Thucydides (460–440 BC). Evidence of this remains in the Commentaria symbolica by the humanist Antonio Ricciardi (1591), where the lion acquires the capacity of “laughter” in a quotation of a passage

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from Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica: “89 leonem ridere sig(nificat) rarum hilaritatis exemplum Valer. f. 8.” 30 Valeriano had interpreted the image of the “laughing lion” not as a grimace of the type to be found on the muzzle of Alciato’s lioness of 1621, but in the sense of the exceptional nature of a rarely produced event:31 (Valeriano Hieroglyphica 1, 7) Hinc animal [leo] hilaritatis est maxime febri obnoxium. Febrem vero nihil aliud esse, quam superantem totius corporis calorem Medicorum omnium consensu manifestum est. Febri denique nomen ab igne Graecum ʌȣȡİIJȩȢ à fervore [mg dx: Servius in Virgil.] Latinum est: quo morbo Leones toto vitae tempore cruciari feruntur, eaque de causa Lucretius triste Leonum seminium appellavit [Lucr. 3,741s.]. Sane proverbium hinc emanavit, İȖİȜĮıİȣ Ƞ ȜİȦȣ, quotiens rarum aliquod hilaritatis [mg dx: fAt potius Leonis rictus, quam risus.] exemplum intuemur. Thucididis id dictum est in Cylonio scelere subnotando, cum scilicet indoluisset demum Atheniensis populus, Cylonem per factiosissimas factiones quietum Reip. Statum interturbare, et quasi post diuturnam moestitiam ad hilaritatem demum respexisset, ut impetu in homine facto, eum ad inviolabilis Deae templum aufugientem persecuti sint plerique, distractumque inde magno totius civitatis gaudio trucidarint.

In the behavioural tristitia (melancholic) situation that tradition had attributed to it, it was a rare thing for the lion to laugh.32 According to the medical categories most in favour, these, too, traceable to very ancient sources, it was stricken by recurrent febrile episodes due to an excess of heat that made it humourally “sad”; hence, according to Valeriano, the proverb ԚȗȒȝįIJıȤ Ս ȝȒȧȤ
(The lion has laughed) that the medieval tradition has used to annotate the passage of Cylon handed down by Thucydides.33 The polysemia of relations and meanings grafted on to the sources by Valeriano followed the custom of the time, which was to transform ancient sayings into proverbs with a different meaning by changing traditions and content. It can also be seen that a note printed in the margin on the page of his edition (at potius Leonis rictus, quam risus) insinuated the doubt that risus (or rather the concept of “laughter”) was a mistaken reading of rictus (the opening of the jaws). It was a doubt in which there was a trace, perhaps, of the wish to realign the lion with its traditional positive symbology (strength, power and bravery), or to recall the “defence of the house” (or the native land), given that another entry by Ricciardi (taken from Valeriano), explained that the significance of the opening of the lion’s jaws (or rather pointing the head towards enemies)

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was the guarding of the domus. 34 Evidence of this famous laugh in medieval times exists to this day, such as in the bilingual version (Latin and Greek) of the Glossaria (Fragmentum Parisinum) with no signs of accentuation and an abundance of long vowels: “et leo ridens Ƞ įȘ ȜȘȦȣ ȖȘȜȦȣ”,
(Glossaria 3, 20).35 In realigning the symbologies of the lion with tradition, there was no need to hypothesise a transmission error; it was sufficient to recall the philosophical and symbolic antecedents. Evidence of this famous laugh exists in the scholia to Thucydides too. The “laugh”, in fact, was to be interpreted as a metaphor of Thucydides, and not of the Athenian Cylon, Olympic hero-turned-politician (ĮȣȘȡ ȠȜȣȝʌȚȠȣȚțȘȢ, c.636-632 BC). 36 Valeriano too wrote this, although he confused the interpretative signals, having the Athenians (and not Thucydides) go from a state of sadness to a state of hilarity, after the killing of the supporters of Cylon. The laugh of the lion was Thucydides himself, “the lion that rarely laughs”, according to an animal metaphor that critical literature first relates to the “alluring clearness” of his style (the recounting of the exploits of Cylon was as astounding as the image of a laughing lion), then to a sign of the desire to diversify from the style of his master Herodotus: but, perhaps, here the “lion” did laugh (or smile), “but the humour was not frivolous”. 37 Subsequent scholars and orators have felt such admiration for the Thucydidean style as to point it out to their pupils by means of an imagesymbol of a situation fixed per gestum, a lion that does not talk but that sometimes, albeit rarely, laughs. Let us now return to the passage from Plutarch on the philosopher Zeno that began this essay and to one of the guarantees of silence, the absence of the tongue. Plutarch used this exemplum to express the concept of the “divinity of silence”, for mystical and philosophical ends, writing that the spoken word has never brought as many rewards as the unspoken word, because “men teach us the word but the gods silence” (IJȠȣ ȝİȣ ȜİȖİȚȣ ĮȣșȡȦʌȠȣȢ, IJȠȣ įİ ıȚȦʌĮȣ șİȠȣȢ įȚįĮıțȐȜȠȣȢ İȤȠȝİȣ).38 This is a maxim that tradition has made its own together with that of Socrates, according to whom the “articulated word” is one of the divine characteristics of the human being, carrying both of them through into medieval tradition (cf. monastic preaching, Neoplatonic thought and the tradition of Dionysius the Areopagita), where the two contrasting forms of “human” divinity, articulated word and unsaid word (silence), come to be included amongst the necessary virtues for the faculty of contemplation, and amongst the precepts of the theologia mystica.39 To conclude “[…] un réseau extrêmement serré réunit […] chez les contemplatifs, qualifiés aussi de ‘silencieuses’, les ténèbres et la lumière, la parole et le silence”.40

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Now, if silence really is this, we ask ourselves how we can know what it underlies. A solution may come from the concepts of signum and gestum, forms of verbal or non-verbal manifestations realised by referring to images even in the silence of the word. An unsaid word reveals itself and makes itself known through a concrete image that may become a simulacrum that personifies the implicit and mnemonic relationship with a thought image. The latter has something to do with what medieval tradition defined as intelligentia spiritalis, that is, with the symbol. The gesture objectively fixes a symbol and becomes an image thanks to a procedure which, as explained many centuries later by the Jesuit Jacob Masen in his Speculum imaginum veritatis occultae (1681),3 consists in permeating the image itself with a certain fictio, that is, with physical, natural and moral elements that constitute it rhetorically as a symbol.41 To take on an ontological statute, a gesture that manifests itself in images that are of use in making it understood, must, like the signum, draw on a collective memory that conserves memories of concepts, gestures and images either analogous or opposite to the ideas to be portrayed.42 The gesture has a cognitive value and even when its purpose is only to support mystical intuition, it lives on in the typical forms of a rhetorical alphabet of communication: signs, gestures and icons nourish the memory which in turn nourishes a form of mutual and reciprocal support.43 The icon can contain a gestum of ethical impact, mnemonically repeatable and graphically fixed. But, before arriving at the non-verbal maxim, that is, at total silence, made visible by an image fixed in a gesture (for example, the three open fingers in the portrayals of Christ), the concept that lies at the basis of gnome, silence and image first of all makes itself more restricted, proverbial and codified in order to rely subsequently on a mute signum that represents the visible form by which it will be understood. The image can remain either mental, like an imaginary pictura, or concretised into a visible pictura, but it will really talk to us, tacitly, having been created by the procedure at the basis of which lies the concept of the “divinity” of silence. The gesture is the word of silence. If the image remains mental only, it comes even nearer to one of the numerous meanings of the Greek word gnome, ȖȣȦȝȘ, that of mens, animus or spirit. In fact, thanks to the image, one understands the “thinking spirit”, because it remains enclosed within the image itself, according to a modern definition that reconnects itself to the Platonic thought of the Philebus and the Theetetus and to the Aristotelian thought of the De anima and the De interpretatione.44 This is really “l’esprit pense par images et l’idée est conçue comme une forme visible”, in accordance

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with a philosophical thought bringing us straight from ancient times to Descartes.45 The Greek word “gnome” (ȖȣȦȝȘ) has thus been able to keep its meaning as “sign of recognition” (ȖȣȦȡȚıȝĮ, indicium) as well. In a passage from Aristotle’s Historia animalium, ȖȣȦȝȘ
means “sign of recognition” of the age of animals.46 The human ȖȣȦȝȘ could thus be understood as the mark of recognition of the workings of the mens, including the formulation of concepts, whilst also keeping the meaning of maxima, or proverb. Aristotelian Rhetoric clearly explains the functioning of the human mind, which creates maxims using general sense, recognisable to all, and defines the maxims as “sententious statements of a general character”. They are the expression of a common thinking and it is for this reason that one believes them to be just and created for unanimous consensus. 47 Some may be visualised through objects. Creating maxims is thus one of the activities of the human mind when it produces generalizing abstractions. It is a product of its divine faculties and becomes visible only when accompanied by the action, the “doing” (objects, simulacrums, images, coats-of-arms, emblems). A passage from Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride underlines the virtue of silence and demonstrates to us the gestum that creates the mental image of silence that has become a simulacrum. It is the statue of the god Harpocrates with a finger to his mouth as a sign of silence, “symbole de discrétion et de silence”, regarding the forbidding of divulging a theological discourse to men.48 In complete silence, and thanks only to his gesture, the god makes recognisable (and instils) the order “Be quiet!”, transforming it into the prohibition of divulging the secrets of the gods. St Benedict was represented with the same gesture in the Abbey of Monte Oliveto, with his forefinger and middle finger on his closed lips, a gestum that referred back directly to the sens of the icon. The gesture is a sign that time has laden with history and is founded on the common memory that transforms it into a symbol.49 The virtue of silence is at the origin of mystery and the need for interpretation, but also of maxims, proverbs and all short forms born from the “opposite” of the word: word and silence—these alone—possess the guarantee of the divine. Besides, Leaena too, in her life, had been part of this dimension, as Plutarch describes her as intent on celebrating the mysteries around the crater of the god of Love, knowing the secret revealed to the initiated (the conspirators’ plot). For all these countless reasons, both spiritual and symbolic, a courageous prostitute could become an animal symbol and immortalised in a gestum that gave a signum, a leonine mouth, open and tongueless, a

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representation of the virtue of silence (the Divinity, Plutarch wrote, also used statues and animals to give signs).50 In the same way, Thucydides could be represented by the sonorous image of the rare laugh of a lion, which also makes his style acquire something of the divine. The mute sign of the simulacrum, the silent gestum that the leonine grin of a late Alciatian representation showed in all the wide-open yet repressed force of its roar, paradoxically became “parlante”: its voice was the silence that passed through the icon as if visible.

Notes 1

Plutarch, Moralia, 35, 505. The story is told in Thucidydes, Historia, 6, 54-59, Aristotle, Athenaiǀn Politeia, 18, 2. 3 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia. 34, 72. See for different traditions, Pausanius, 1, 23, 1, Polyaenus, Stratagematum liber, 8, 45. Harmodius and Aristogeiton conspired to kill Hipparchus, the brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias. Harmodius was killed, Aristogeiton arrested and tortured. Also tortured was Leaena, a courtesan, as she too was suspected of being part of the conspiracy. However, she revealed nothing. After the fall of Hippias, the two men were heralded as tyrannicides and bronze statues were erected in their honour (509 BC). To avoid appearing to honour a courtesan, the Athenians had Leaena represented by Iphicrates (or Amphicrates) as a lioness without a tongue, stating both her name and the reason for commemorating her. 4 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, 7, 87. 5 Tertullian, De patientia, 1,13,3. 6 st 1 Corinthians 7, 20. 7 Contzen 1629, 54 (1, 23, 6 “[...] Atticae meretrix carnifice iam fatigato, postremo linguam suam comestam in faciem tyranni expuit, ut expueret et vocem, ne coniuratos confiteri posset, si etiam victa uoluisset”). 8 Contzen 1629, 56. 9 For the use of Plutarch by the concettisti, see Pérez Jiménez 2003, 375-401; 377 (Leaena: 378, and fig. 1536). 10 The illustration is in http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/facsimile.php?id=sm18-D3r: see Henkel and Schone 1996, cols. 374-375; Alciato 1531, D3r. The pictura was cut by Jörg Breu the Elder (c.1475-1537) with the motto, “Nec questioni quidem cedendum” and epigram, “Cecropia effictam quam cernis in arce leaena,/Harmodii an nescis hospes, amica fuit?/Sic animum placuit monstrare viraginis acrem,/More ferae, nomen vel quia tale fuit.”. 11 Aristotle, Metaphysics 8, 3 (1029a: “I mean, as matter, something like the bronze, and as form, the scheme of its structure, and I mean as the result of both, something like the whole statue”). 2

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12 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1258 (because of her ferocity, Clytemnestra was called the “bipedal lioness”: see Theocritus, Idylls, 3, 15 on this subject, 23, 19); the priestess consecrated to Mithras was called “lioness”, as was the goddess Ecate (Porphyry, De abstinentia, 4, 16, ȜȑȦȣ 6). 13 In ancient Greece, Leaena was a synonym for prostitute,; see, for example, the proverb by Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 231-232: Ȇ՘ IJսijIJȡȞįț ȝջįțȤį Ԛʍվ ijȤȢȡȜȤսIJijțİȡȣ (Erasmus, Adagia, 2, 9, 82). 14 Pastoureau 2007, 40-55. 15 Waddington 1970, 248-263. 16 Tertullian, Apologeticus pro christianis, 7, 50, 8 (Leaena); Crinitus, De honesta disciplina, 9, 8 (“Historia de Leaenae meretricis constantia in tormentis, ac Tertulliani verba exposita, tum de Theodoro etiam, quam firmo et constanti animo fuerit”). 17 http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/valeriano/valeriano1/jpg/bs012 .html. 18 Vives 1561, 98. 19 Ravisius Textor 1560, Vol. 1, 229: “Autorum monumentis celebratur Leaena meretrix, quae nullis tormentis cogi potuit, ut Armodium et Aristogitonem tyrannicidas proderet: in hoc Anaxarchum imitata, qui quum simili de causa torqueretur, praecisam dentibus linguam in tortores expuit. Autores Plinius et Lactantius et Crinitus libro 9 capite 8”). On Ravisius, see Cherchi 1980, 210-219; and Quondam 2003, 316-335. See also Lactantius, Divinarum institutionum, Book 1, 20: “Venio nunc ad proprias Romanorum religiones, quoniam de communibus dixi. Romuli nutrix lupa honoribus est affecta diuinis. Et ferrem si animal ipsum fuisset, cuius figuram gerit. Auctor est Liuius, Larentinae esse simulacrum, et quidem non corporis, sed mentis ac morum. Fuit enim Faustuli uxor, et propter uulgati corporis uilitatem, lupa inter pastores, id est, meretrix nuncupata est; unde etiam lupanar dicitur. Exemplum scilicet Atheniensium in ea figuranda Romani secuti sunt; apud quos meretrix quaedam nomine Leaena, cum tyrannum occidisset, quia nefas erat simulacrum constitui meretricis in templo, animalis effigiem posuerunt, cuius nomen gerebat. Itaque ut illi monimentum ex nomine, sic isti ex professione fecerunt. Huius nomini etiam dies festus dicatus est, et Larentinalia constituta. Nec hanc solam Romani meretricem colunt, sed Faulam quoque, quam Herculis scortum fuisse Verrius scribit. Iam quanta ista immortalitas putanda est quam etiam meretrices assequuntur?”). Hofmann 1698, Book 2, 86 (“Quo in loco a Faustulo regii pecoris magistro inventi sunt, et Laurentiae uxori educandi traditi; quae quod vulgatô corpore quaestum faceret, ideoque Lupa inter pastores vocaretur, factus est locus fabulae, romulum et Remum a lupâ educatos fuisse. Lactantius, l. 1. c. 10. romuli nutrix lupa honoribus est affecta divinis. Et ferrem, si animal ipsum fuisset. cuius figuram gerit. Auctor est Livius Laurentiae esse simulacrum, et quidem non corporis sed mentis ac morum. Fuit enim Faustuli uxor, et propter vulgati corporis vilitatem Lupa inter pastores, i. e. meretrix, nuncupata est. Haec ille Non desunt tamen, qui veram belluam Romuli nutricem velint fuisse, non autem prostitutam Laurentiam”).

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http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/facsimile.php?id=sm1226_E6v; Alciato 1985, Vol. 1, Emblem 13: “Motto/Nec quaestioni quidem cedendum./One should not yield even when put it to the torture./Picture/A tongueless lioness, sejant erect affronté, stands in the doorway of circular tower. A plaque charged with an owl is above the door, under the machicolation. (right) Epigram/Leaena, whom, as a lioness (leaena), you see portrayed on the Atheniam (Cecropius) citadel (arx), was the lover (amicus) of Harmodius, or do you not know this, stranger? It was fitting thus to demonstrate the keen spirit (animus) of this heroine (virago) in the form of a wild animal (fera), or it was because she bore such a name. Since, strung on the rack, she betrayed (prodo) no one by her testimony, Iphicrates portrayed her as being tongueless (elinguis)”. For the translations of the text of other editions, see Alciato 1985, Vol. 2, Emblem 13. For a data processing translation cf. http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e013.html. 21 Chevalier, Gheerbrant 2000, 880. Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, her father Acrisius asked an oracle if his prospects would change. The oracle told him to go to the Earth’s end where he would be killed by his daughter’s child. She was childless and, meaning to keep her so, he shut her up in a bronze tower or cave. But Zeus came to her in the form of golden rain, and impregnated her: see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4, 610-611; 697-698; and Martial, Epigrammata, 14, 175. 22 Horace, Carmine, 3, 16.1; Bode 1968: (“[…] Danae quoque, Acrisii filia, ad castitatem tuendam aerea, ut aiunt, turre inclusa, auro quidem, non aureo imbre ab eodem Jove corrupta est. Unde eleganter Horatius: Converso in pretium deo [Horace, Carmine. 3, 16, 8]”). 23 Regius 1493, Chapter 4. 24 See Devereux 1983 at http://www2.units.it/~grmito/saggi/spauracchi.html. 25 Pellizer 1998 (now in the site of G.R.I.M.M. 1997, fig. 3). The story of Demetra is by Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 2, 20. 26 Hervieux 1895, Vol. 3, (“Avianus et ses anciens imitateurs”), prologue to Theodosius (Loqui vero arbores, feras cum hominibus gemere, verbis certare volucres, animalia ridere facimus, ut pro singulorum necessitatibus vel ab ipsis animis sententia proferatur). 27 See the Dialogus creaturarum (perhaps by Nicolò da Bergamo or Mayno dei Mayneri, fourteenth century) in Grässe 1880, 125-280, 164 (“Leo autem ridere incepit cogitans, quam vicem posset illi reddere. Et dum illum sic derideret, accidit, ut leo caperetur in laqueis sibi positis”). 28 For the Arabic tradition of the “smiles of the lion”, see http://www.dar-almasnavi.org/about-arabic-poetry.html (translations from the Persian and Arabic by Ibrahim Gamard); for the verses by the Persian poet Mutannabi (Abû ‘l-Tayyib Ahmad Al-Mutanabbî, †965), see “Mawlânâ Rûmî” refers (in Persian) to a verse by Mutanabbî in Masnavi Vol. 1, 3039: “With this thought, the lion smiled openly. Do not be secure on account of the smiles of the lion!” (Hêr bâ în fikr mê-zad khanda fâsh bar tabissm-hây-é shêr îman ma-bâsh). Nicholson comments, “[…] ‘idhá ra’ayta nuyúba ‘l-laythi bárizat-an fa-lá taZunnanna anna ‘l-laytha yabtasimu/‘When you see the lion’s side-teeth bared,/Do not suppose that the lion is smiling.’/And he added: ‘The greater part of the qaSídah is translated in LHA’

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(“A Literary History of the Arabs”, by R.A. Nicholson, 1907, 1930, 306 seq. [Nicholson, Commentary)]”. 29 Aristotle, De partibus animalium, 673a: “The fact that human beings only are susceptible to tickling is due to the fineness of their skin and to their being the only creatures that laugh”). 30 Ricciardi (Rizzardi) 1591, Book 1, 341. 31 http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/valeriano/valeriano1/jpg/bs007 .html. 32 See Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book 3, 741-742 denique cur acris violentia triste leonum/Seminium sequitur? dolus vulpibus, et fuga cervis. 33 Thucydides is printed with scholia in a princeps by Paolo Manuzio (Venice, 1502), the Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla is dated 1527, and the vernacular version by Francesco di Soldo Strozzi dates from 1545. 34 Ricciardi 1591, Book 1, 341 (“Leonini rictus, vel capita in hostijs, sign(ificat) custodiam domus.Val. f.11”). 35 Hude 1927, 92 (1, 126, 3); TLG 4235.02 Ioannes Rhetorius, Commentarium in Hermogenis librum 6, 504, 1: “ȆİȡȚ ĬȠȣțȚįȓįȠȣ. ȉȦ ȆȡȩțȣȘ İȣIJĮȣșĮ IJȦȣ ȜȩȖȦȣ ĬȠȣțȚįȓįȠȣ ʌȡȠıȑȖȡĮıȑ IJȚȢ ĮıIJİȚȠȢ ȠIJȚ Ƞ ȜȑȦȣ İȖȑȜĮİȣ ȠȣįĮȝȠȣ ȖĮȡ İIJȑȡȦșȚ İȚ ȝȘ İȣIJĮȣșĮ IJȦȣ ĮȣIJȠȣ ȜȩȖȦȣ İȤȡȘıĮIJȠ”. The Ars rhetorica by Hermogenes (b. 161 AD) was printed by Aldus in a princeps of 1508. 36 Herodotus, Historia, 5, 71, Thucydides, Historiae, 1, 126, Plutarch, Vita Solonus, 12. 37 Roberts 1908, 118-122 (particularly 122). Patterson 1993, 145-152; 151-152 (“I suggest that Book 1, 126-138 constitutes in fact a substantial historical objection to Herodotus - whether or not we as readers are in fact convinced. Rather than an indication of naive gullibility in a young historian relying on either oral or written sources, this digression shows the mark of the master. Perhaps here the ‘lion’ did smile, but the humour was not frivolous”). 38 Plutarch, Moralia, 505; De garrulitate, 8. 39 Xenophon, Memorabilia, Book 1, 4, 11. 40 Vuilleumier Laurens 2000, 210-211, 219-221, 226-228. 41 Masen 1681, 440 (“figurare imaginem est illam cum fictione quadam mentis exornare”). 42 Rosier-Catach 2004, 51 (“la fonction principale du signe, selon Augustin, est ‘de faire venire quelque chose à la connaissance’”; but see 54, 505, note 98 et passim too). 43 Vuilleumier Laurens 2000, 499-500. 44 Rosenthal 1998, 155-157 (Aristotle, De anima, 420b; De interpretatione, 16a). 45 Rosenthal 1998, 157. 46 Aristotle, Historia animalium, 576b. 47 Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1395a. 48 Vuilleumier Laurens 2000, 99. 49 Jean 1994. 50 Plutarch, Moralia., 397f; De phyticae oraculis, 8; Moralia, 405; De phyticae oraculis, 22.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN REVIRESCIT, Y’ALL: THE SOUTH CAROLINA AFTERLIFE OF AN OLD IMPRESA EIRWEN E.C. NICHOLSON

In emblematic studies our paths are mapped by sources and contexts, too often, perhaps, a bibliographic maze to the noncognoscenti. But some paths are also stumbled upon by serendipity, something never to be underestimated. The road to this paper began six years ago on a dark and rainy night in a rather elegant B&B in Georgetown, South Carolina. CNN was offering live coverage of a great iconoclastic moment: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. A rather protracted “moment”, as it turned out, which found me seeking something to read instead. In a local newspaper I found a brief description of the iconography of the State’s official Seal which blew Iraq off my front page.1 The State Seal of South Carolina, still in official use,2 was devised in 1776 in the context of the American Revolution, 3 or War of American Independence, by two of South Carolina’s elite who were on the “patriot”– and successful—side in that conflict, William Henry Drayton and Arthur Middleton (within the timeframe of his emblematic contribution, Middleton would be one of the fifty-five signatories of the Declaration of Independence).4

The Original Seal At its centre the Seal shows the motif of a fallen oak tree at the foot of a flourishing palmetto palm (Fig. 17.1). At the distance of nearly a century, this was an adaptation of the iconography and rhetoric of the adversarial medallic dialogue between oak and orange trees specific to the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in England of 1688-1689 which I explored at Leuven in 1996.5 Comparison leaves little doubt that it was the

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triumphalist medals produced on the successful, Whig, 6 side of the “Glorious Revolution” which were the source, in the context of America’s Revolution, for Middleton and Drayton’s new Seal of State, and it is extraordinary that these went unnoticed as sources in David Heisser’s otherwise richly definitive study of the Seal. 7 But Middleton and Drayton’s choice raises questions of influences and rhetorical intent that transcend games of iconographical “snap”. Particularly, it turns our attention to the underexplored phenomenon of elite access to emblem literature in the colonies, and also to colonial elite education in this period, which, as the case of both its devisers so well demonstrates, cannot neatly be confined by geography. These are questions of intellectual provenance and bibliographical and material culture access which were resoundingly absent in Lester C. Olson’s 1991 monograph, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology; and it should also be noted that Olson makes no reference to the South Carolina Seal, or to the truly emblematic vignettes found on South Carolina’s Revolutionary paper currency, notwithstanding that these are more distinctive and far in advance, in a coherent emblematic sense, of those of any of the northern colonies on which Olsen focuses.8 In every sense, the South Carolina State Seal balances the general with the particular: of emblematic-iconographical interest in its own right, it also embraces, however inadequately,9 the bibliographical side to emblem studies in the broadest sense of colonial exposure to emblematica via imported books and related items. There is also the question of period. South Carolina’s Revolutionary emblematic excursion could not fall more decisively within the eighteenth century. Emblem scholarship is coming to see this as a fruitful and misunderstood period for the study of this idiom, as regards both continuities and revivals.10 But within the mainstream of “eighteenth-century studies”, certainly within its Anglo-American framework, the eighteenth century is still characterized as a “postemblematic” era, to the detriment of any informed or sympathetic recognition of the emblem’s continuity in the period and what this might have to say. The American Revolutionary context for the Seal problematizes this still further. Because an empty concept, “modernity”, remains an elastic framework for all eighteenth-century and later “Revolutions”, the emblematic parentage of the Seal–both iconographically, and in the sense of its two devisers’ emblematic interests—threatens the Seal with cultural irrelevance, notwithstanding that it was devised by two committed Revolutionaries in the American Revolution’s first year. Its omission by Olson—in a study purportedly devoted to emblematics in the American

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colonies in the Revolutionary era—is, I will argue, explicable within this larger, dominant, “modern” framework of “eighteenth-century studies”.

Emblems and the Whig Aesthetic What is especially interesting about the South Carolina State Seal is that, when, alongside their other partisan activities, its two devisers borrowed so directly from medals of 1689, they located themselves within the English Whig Revolutionary tradition, when it was the repudiation of the emblematic by the Whig cultural arbiter, Anthony, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, in his Characteristics (1711) which was then, and to an extent remains, the basis for the “post-emblematic” conceptualization of the eighteenth-century within Anglo-American cultural history. 11 I have explored elsewhere how Shaftesbury’s and others’ repudiation of the emblematic as an idiom was informed by real political tensions within an unstable post-Revolution polity.12 In this iconological discourse, in which the victorious but still insecure Whigs took a “progressive” high ground, the emblematic would be presented as a reactionary and counterRevolutionary idiom: how ironic then, that two privileged heirs of the English Whig Revolution should turn to it in the context of the American Whig Revolution, drawing on at least one medal which would only have circulated within a patrician, Whig, audience, in the context of a very patrician “Revolution”, and, in so doing, revive an older arboreal emblematic discourse.13

History and Numismatics: The Importance of a Great Seal At this point it needs to be kept in mind that whereas a medal may be commemorative and/or propagandistic, a State Seal is of the utmost importance as a ratifier of government,14 and, as such, occupies a different, authoritarian, “public space”.15 Its perceived power at both a symbolic and a legalistic level is indicated by the fact that in his flight from England in 1688 in the face of his nephew, William of Orange’s successful invasion– the historical context for South Carolina’s source medals–King James II deliberately dropped his Great Seal into the River Thames. Petulant? Petty? Not entirely: James would not have been alone in thinking that his action would have thwarted, if only temporarily, the legislative potential of the, at that time, interim, regime. Similarly in South Carolina: on 15th September 1775, royal government effectively ceased when the last of its royally appointed governors, Lord William Campbell, dissolved the Commons House of Assembly and retreated to the ship HMS Tamar in

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Charleston harbour. With him he took the last royal State Seal, of George III, leaving South Carolina in the control of the Revolutionary Provincial Congress and its executive Council of Safety, of which our two Seal emblematists were important members.16 This is also the point at which to observe that the history and related iconography of “South Carolina” itself as a state is remarkable for its palimpsests within the rhetoric of the Seal’s source-emblems/imprese, “Revirescit” and “Tandem fit surculos arbor”. In 1776 “Carolina” was 113 years old as a colony. A Royal charter of Charles I, whose posthumous iconography is notable for the load-bearing palm tree, was granted in 1629, lapsed, and was revived in 1663, an act undertaken by his previously-exiled (in the 1641-1660 variant of “English Revolution”) son Charles II, whose Revirescit arboreal rhetoric of renascence I explored at Leuven in 1996. Further to enrich this low-country stew, however, is Charles II’s awarding, in 1663, “Carolina” to eight of his then-supporters, the original “Lords Proprietors”.17 Their feudal privileges were sanctioned by none other than Enlightenment icon John Locke, who, at the behest of the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, primus inter pares of the original eight Lords Proprietors, penned the “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina” (1669), which granted some popular rights but retained essentially feudal privileges and limitations. These “Fundamental Constitutions” operated de facto not de jure – they were never ratified (a process relevant to the SCSS and its context). This low-country transplantation, as it were, of John Locke at this date and within so feudal a context, is interesting. Similarly Locke’s patronage; the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury was a founding, activist Whig who flirted with regicide and died an exiled traitor. It was the similarly committed Whig 3rd Earl who, in Characteristics (1711), damagingly, and within an agenda that was arguably at least as much political as aesthetic, wrote against the emblematic as an idiom of communication.18 The names “Shaftesbury” and particularly “Locke” make for easy, beneficent, invocation within Anglo-American eighteenth-century cultural studies: until one introduces the uncomfortably unprogressive, undemocratic, fact of the “Fundamental Constitutions” and, within this, the history of Shaftesbury I as Proprietor: in time, perhaps, the anti-emblematic prejudice of Shaftesbury III may also be better contextualized.19 Appropriately balancing this is the colony’s (or rather, both colonies: the colony divided into North and South Carolina in 1712) recourse to royal protection against the rapacities on the one hand of the Yamasee Indians (1715-1716) and the indifference and lack of protection of which they had cause to complain against the Proprietors. In 1719 the Carolinas

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rebelled against the Proprietors, called for, and received, royal protection, becoming a royal colony in 1729.

The Revolutionary Seal When, on 26th March, 1776, South Carolina’s Revolutionary Council adopted the constitution it would eventually use as an independent state, it was sealed with a blank wax wafer: eloquent, certainly, of a renunciation of allegiance to the British King, but also a practical reflection of the new State’s lack of an official Seal.20 Affirming the importance of something which to modern eyes may seem merely symbolic, the House of Representatives resolved on 2nd April, 1776: That his Excellency the President and Commander in Chief, by and with the advice and consent of the Privy Council [...] is hereby authorized to design and cause to be made a Great Seal of South Carolina and, until such a one can be made, to fix upon a temporary public Seal.

The new Great Seal was, then, undertaken as a serious legislative exercise; but given that Britain would not cede sovereignty over her American colonies until 1783, it was also an act of treason. The first known published description of the Seal appeared on 11th February, 1778 in a London newspaper, the Public Ledger.21 Communications between American rebels and both the London and provincial press were extensive and effective, and the authorship of this “description” strongly suggests a South Carolinian “patriot” with London connections.22 It reads: The Device for the Great Seal of South Carolina. /A Palmetto Tree supported by Twelve Spears, which, with the tree, are bound together with one band, on which is written “quis separabit?” On the tree are two shields, the one inscribed March 26, the other July 4, and at the foot of the Palmetto, an English Oak fallen, its root above the ground and its branches lopt./ In the exergon, MELIOREM LAPSA LOCAVIT, 1776, the legend “South Carolina” immediately over the Palmetto.

This description is followed, in a recognizably emblematic idiom, with an “EXPLANATION”. This reads: The Palmetto furnishes food for man, and affords him a more secure defence against the enemy, than stonewalls.23 Superior to the English oak, it defies the British navy: In this country [that is, America] it first proved its worth, in a manner that constituted it the most famous tree in America; and being a native of our soil, it is therefore taken to represent the state of

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South Carolina. The Tree and Twelve Spears, allude to the Thirteen United States of America, and the position of the latter shews, that South Carolina receives support from the union. On one of the shields is the date of the Revolution of South Carolina, from under the authority of England; on the other is marked the epocha of the independence of America. /The fallen tree is the oak and emblem of England24: Its position alludes to the state of her authority, with respect to this country [i.e., America]; and the lopt branches denote that her colonies are separated from her: It also alludes to the late legal government established in its place, and represented by the flourishing Palmeto [sic]. The words in the exergon give utterance to the idea; the numerical figures there, being only a year, of course include all the events emblemised [sic] by the whole device; and the legend announces the name of the State, and the sentiments of the people.25

A description and “Explanation” of the reverse follows, which is significant for its new, Revolutionary, nativist, adoption of the laurel plant,26 but it is the obverse, its iconography and context, which concerns us. Firstly, its source in medals of 1689 was produced to assert the legitimacy of William of Orange’s naval-military invasion and subsequent parliamentary takeover of Great Britain.27 The local paper I read that wet night in Georgetown offered only the briefest description of the relevant iconography of the State Seal, simply: an oak tree prostrate, with another species of tree, in this case the palmetto, upright. Two existing medals of 1689 employed this motif. The first, from January 1689, commemorating the offer, by a political elite, of the administration of the country to William, uses the motto “PRO GLANDIBUS AVREA PONA” (For acorns, oranges). 28 So it is the exergon, “MELIOREM LAPSA LOCAVIT”, roughly translated “The fallen tree makes way for a better one”, which locates the Seal’s source more specifically to the reverse of a medal from 1689 commemorating the coronation of William and Mary (Fig. 17.2). 29 The adaptation of this medal by the South Carolinians is remarkable as a literal transplant (staying with arboreal metaphors) of Whig revolutionary iconology. The American Revolution is famous, if for nothing else, for its rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny. In 1776, Britain was twelve years short of the centenary of her own “Glorious” Revolution against supposed royal tyranny: a centenary party which would, as things turned out, be rather spoiled by the recent memory of young America’s successful deployment of similar ideology and language against the parent country, even going so far as to, in many instances, equate King George III with the “absolute” or “arbitrary” “Stuart” style of monarchy the Revolution of 1688 was said to have deposed. 30 In 1776 when South Carolina’s seal was devised, its

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authors drew, literally, on the past in a way that was doubly provocative, replacing 1688’s dynastic change (albeit “spun” as it had been as constitutional improvement) with an outright and armed rejection of monarchy. It is one of many ironies in this story that it should have been a Coronation medal that provided the template for the new, Republican, South Carolina Seal. This said, we might want to notice that the new seal also incorporated classical republican iconography absent from the 1689 medal, notably the fasces binding the palmetto’s trunk and the trophies which hang from the tree, the latter recalling a relevant pre-1689 image with which Middleton and Drayton may or may not have been familiar, in which the “Royall Oake of Brittayne” was emblematic of the polity overthrown by Cromwell in England’s own republican experiment of 1648-1660.31 But if the 1689 Coronation medal is the one source of which the seal’s historian, David Heisser, appears unaware, his claimed “immediate source for the great seal”, namely a £25 currency vignette of 1776 with two oak trees and the motto “MELIOREM LAPSA LOCAVIT”, or, rather, the context he provides for the iconography of this note, take us in a direction unique to the Seal, which is: local contingency. It may or may not be the case that, as Heisser suggests, one of these oaks represented a huge live oak (a distinct Southern species) known as the Liberty Tree, which had been the site of “Patriotic” gatherings in “Charlestown” since the mid1760s. Because while the iconographic and numismatic literacy of Arthur Middleton and William Drayton which allowed them to adopt and adapt the 1689 Coronation medal is central to this paper, what is truly extraordinary about the South Carolina State Seal’s oak versus palmetto iconography is how, palimpsestically, it celebrated a defensive success for South Carolina in the Revolutionary War which coincided as if to order with the need for a new Great Seal. Where the triumphant orange tree of 1689 drew on a dynastic impresa almost a century old, the triumphant palmetto of 1776 drew on an actual, contemporaneous, local event. With the South Carolina State Seal, we are witnessing the adaptation of a rhetorically—and historically—sanctioned emblem to backyard “breaking news”. To quote the Public Ledger’s Explanation of the Palmetto: “Superior to the English oak, it defies the British navy”. On the 28th June, 1776, an abortive plan by the British navy to blockade Charleston harbour with a view to seizing this vital Southern port failed dramatically, and has been counted as Britain’s first major defeat in the War of American Independence.32 About 2,500 British infantry and artillery from fifty troop transports failed to ford a too-deep inlet across to the strategically-located

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Sullivan’s Island. 33 Worse, while the Royal Navy enjoyed superior firepower for a covering bombardment, this was notably frustrated by the spongy palmetto logs of which the island’s fortifications were made. A British officer reported that “[...] the Battery was made of Palmito trees of a springy tough Substance, So that not a Single Shell could do any mischief but what went in at the Embrazure”. The Pennsylvania Evening Post of 23rd July exclaimed: “It is astonishing and almost incredible to think that a palmeto log fort with twelve guns (those were all they could bear on the [British] vessels) and three hundred men should make such havock with so formidable a fleet of British vessels”. Shortly after the battle, Charlestonians themselves ventured out “to see how little impression [...]” had been made on the fort.34 The palm, of course, is emblematically endued with endurance and (appropriate pun) fortitude in both physical and spiritual adversity, but this is surely the only occasion on record when it fought back: the South Carolina palmetto was clearly a palm with attitude. Charlestonians created “Palmetto Day”–now Carolina Day—to celebrate the first anniversary of the battle, with artillery volleys, military reviews and a great banquet “given out in the open under the palmettoes, for the militia and volunteers” families and friends. A year later, 1778, the state issued a ten-shilling currency note engraved with a vignette of the palmetto, the fort and the battle.35 The much-needed Seal had been devised and paid for within three months of the battle and a mould or die was ready for inspection the following spring.36 This returns us to William Henry Drayton and Arthur Middleton, respectively Mr Obverse and Mr Reverse, according to the 1821 Memoirs of State Governor John Drayton, William Henry’s son.37 In 1776, Drayton Sr and Middleton were thirty-four years of age, both Charlestonians with fine plantations not far from one another on the Ashley River.38 Friends by local proximity, and politically active Patriot partisans in the War of Independence, Drayton died in 1779 having served as South Carolina’s first chief justice under the State’s constitution of 1776. Middleton, who died in 1787, helped in drafting the US Constitution and served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where he signed the Declaration of Independence. This meant that at the time of the Seal’s devising, he was absent from South Carolina. But while Heisser found wanting in Middleton’s correspondence a perfect iconographic correlation to the Seal’s design, he describes it as “peppered liberally” not only with classical quotations and allusions but with “[...] pictorial symbols”.39 A shared interest in emblems and devices is evident from their service together on South Carolina’s revolutionary Council of Safety

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1775-1776, during which time they approved designs for the State’s currency.40 The very large and sophisticated body of currency produced under their aegis (at least twenty-eight designs) is consistently emblematic, with the always-Latin motto mostly appearing in a roundel, and might usefully be compared with the aesthetic and iconographic poverty (a codfish, no motto), not to mention paucity, of, for example, Massachusetts notes: four simple motifs and only five notes with a Latin motto.41 Within the Middleton/Drayton corpus is a tree, sapling, oak and palm(etto) iconography. A £10 note of 1776 pictures a “trophy” (captured drums and flags) with a sapling, possibly oak, and the motto “PEDAMINE VIRTUS TU[R]A” (Your virtue as a support); a £50 note of 1775 shows a woman symbolizing the captive province of South Carolina seated under a palmetto watching the sun of freedom breaking through the clouds above the Charleston skyline with the motto “POST TENEBRIS LUX” (After darkness, light); a £20 banknote of 1775 depicts two separate hands grasped, each holding a palm branch and the motto “FIDES PUBLICA” (Public faith); a $1 bill of 1776 carries a palm tree and the motto “NUSQUAM SUB MOLE FATISCIT” (Nowhere does it weaken under weight). Another dollar bill of 1777, printed by Peter Timothy of “Charlestown”, depicts a palm growing from a rock with the motto “PER ARDUA SURGO” (I rise through adversity).42 Then there are the fasces, as bound arrows or spears, individually weak, but collectively strong. A £5 South Carolina note of 1775 carried a splay of twelve arrows with the motto “AUSPICIUM SALUTIS” (An Auspice of well-being); a £100 South Carolina note a year later used the motto “QUIS SEPARABIT” (Who will separate us?), the words which appear on the ribbon that binds the spears to the tree trunk on the Great Seal.43 The 1775 note is mentioned by Olson (significantly minus its Latin motto) in the context of Revolutionary paper currency employing variant and mostly simplistic plays on the number thirteen: the larger body of more truly emblematic currency produced under Middleton and Drayton, who might have figured as either representative or exceptional conduits of the emblematic idiom through the (to an extent) “popular” medium of paper currency, is ignored. 44

Emblematic Exposure What Middleton and Drayton also had in common, and which is of relevance to their collaboration on the Seal, was an elite English education: for Drayton, Westminster School, London; Balliol College, Oxford, and law at the Middle Temple, London; for Middleton, Trinity

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Hall, Cambridge, and law at Middle Temple, London. 45 For Southern gentlemen of their era, they were not exceptional in this, and five of fiftyfive signatories of the Declaration of Independence had studied at the Middle Temple.46 But all four educational loci would have exposed both men to things of relevance for their later emblematic project. Oxford and Cambridge were satellites to London’s book and print trade, and both, together with the legal elite at the Temple and (other?) Inns of Court, offered the potential for exposure to “historical” medals of at most two generations back and, in c.1760, still rhetorically potent. At the Temple, Middleton and Drayton were a few minutes’ walk from the centre of the London book and print trade, some of it, since 1688, dealing in subversive, pro-Stuart material, notably, and closer to the time of their studies, the last known use of the impresa Revirescit, the oak sapling growing from a stricken oak, the other arboreal voice in 1688’s Revolutionary triumphalist orange-tree dialogue; used in a 1752 medal issued for private circulation as a fundraiser by a small group of London Jacobites (Fig. 17.3).47 These environments, and their studies at law, might also have alerted them to the ways in which, when used in a political context, the emblematic idiom could, by its opacity, frustrate interpretative-based prosecution. The pertinent example is that of London magistrate Sir John Gonson’s attempt in 1737 to make “Dumb Scandal”, that is, “Scandal by Pictures or by Signs”, prosecutable by law.48 For Drayton at Oxford, there was also the notoriety of the Oxford Almanac for the year 1754, six years previous to his matriculation, when, in the context of an intensely partisan county election, on which national interest was focussed, the University reverted for its engraved headpiece to the politically encoded, yet provocatively opaque pictorial allegory then loosely termed “emblematic” which, iconologically, had made the Oxford Almanacs the occasion and victim of Shaftesbury’s vituperative anti-emblematic opining in 1711.49 Closer examination reveals that Shaftesbury’s “culture wars”–for they were nothing less than that–could be hypocritical in the sphere of the exoteric versus the esoteric; his Sensi Communis of 1708 had offered detailed instructions for the encoding of blasphemous or controversial arguments so as to frustrate interpretive hostility. With direct reference to Sensi Communis, Ronald Paulson has written that “The presence of encoded messages required an interpretive community to decode them. They were meant to be understood”.50 The SCSS shows how such a rarefied community could exist in the deceptive isolation of the South Carolina low-country. The education of Middleton and Drayton should encourage us think in terms of a transatlantic “economy” of books, artefacts and, with them, the potential for emblematic

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literacy – certainly at an elite level. The attempted British siege of Charleston via Sullivan’s Island in 1776 reminds us of Charleston’s importance as a transatlantic port city (as was also Philadelphia, site of the Continental Congress) and as such a conduit for printed material old and new, requested or speculative (as in mixed lots of books and prints). Charleston’s private subscription Library Society, a lending library of which Middleton, together with others in his family, was a member, was founded in 1748.51 The geographical isolation of the Southern plantations was offset by their London agents, who would supply requested luxury goods, including the books and prints that furnished many libraries since destroyed or dispersed: Arthur Middleton’s library was burned in February 1865 at the end of the War of Northern Aggression, but Heisser notes Joseph Spence’s Polymetis in the eighteenth-century inventory of Charleston’s Izard family and cites it, together with Joseph Addison’s Works as one of several emblematic/iconological sourcebooks available to Charlestonians/Carolinians.52 Yet just as a certain sumptuary puritanism developed within the colonies as the economic relationship with England became politicized, so, arguably, has the “elite” cultural context for exercises such as the Great Seal rendered these “luxuries” similarly problematic for modern scholarship, which has for many decades been ambivalent and often clumsy in its recovery of elite cultures in the Anglo-American eighteenth century; the slaveholding base of the wealth and education of men such as Middleton and Drayton will not have helped. Part of the myth of the American Revolution was, and is, its populism and pseudo-egalitarianism; this is a myth hard to give up, as is also that of its contemporary “propaganda”, its “print culture”, as “popular”, even “mass” (as in mass media): all terms which have often been used in combinations more trite than illuminating, as in Olson’s Emblems of American Community, in which the access or otherwise of elite and other educated Americans to emblem books or emblematic images of any kind is peripheral (in fact, goes unmentioned) to a sui generic “folk emblematica”–notably the “Join-or-Die” rattlesnake— from which people in the New World homespun their own patriotic iconography. 53 The historically grounded, educated, patrician, roots of both the Revolution itself and of the iconography of something like the South Carolina State Seal fit uncomfortably or not at all in this New World view. Yet (and the more reprehensible for Olson to have downplayed this) the transatlantic economy fed not only personal libraries but also material culture at a level of consumerism that was above “popular” but not selfconsciously “elite” or necessarily indigenous: when news of the Patriot/Palmetto victory at Sullivan’s Island reached England, the Queens

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Ware potters (London) “immediately struck off Mugs & other Vessels with Gen Washington superbly mounted on a proud Horse of War, in the back Ground the palmeto Tree”.54 This said, when Olson says, confusingly, of his iconographies of choice, “most of the images originated in Britain and continental Europe”, the Seal qualifies this in two ways. One, if “images” means iconography, it is a hybrid of a traceable British European impresa and the very American and contingent. And second, if by “images” Olson intends material artefacts, then the Seal is documentedly “made in America”.55

Conclusion Both as metaphor and in practice, the transatlantic cultural economy is a valid concept: it could constitute “baggage” in a literal sense of inherited or imported goods and books; but also cultural baggage in exposure, at least for some patricians, to political discourse and iconography, whether imported or experienced at first hand in England and Europe.56 Middleton and Drayton did not draw the State Seal of South Carolina out of thin air. They were able to draw most definitely on one numismatic, propagandist, emblem–that of the triumphalist orange and stricken oak trees—which itself drew on two others: the tandem fit surculos arbor orange sapling of the House of Orange and the Revirescit oak sapling of the deposed House of Stuart, which were used propagandistically both before and after 1688. That for two English-educated South Carolinians such a cultural exchange should result in the adaptation to American Republican purposes the Coronation Medal of an earlier English Revolution is interesting, although not entirely out of keeping with the earlier, 1688, Revolution’s support by English neo-Republicans, including the anti-emblematic 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. For reasons I have just outlined, the Seal’s omission from a study of American Revolutionary “rhetorical iconology” whose emblematic framework is simplistic and oriented to an ill-defined “popular” (Olson) is not surprising either. The “transatlantic baggage” for Middleton, Drayton and the Seal will, I hope, be susceptible of wider application to other states and other colonial and post-colonial exercises in applied emblematics in the United States. But when all is said and done, it is impossible not to warm to the element of contingency in this particular case: the bombardment of Fort Sullivan made the “MELIOREM LAPSA LOCAVIT” emblem extraordinarily apposite – even down to the menacing ships on the horizon. The South Carolina State Seal of 1777 takes “applied emblematic” to a new level, of

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emblematics in action: in the case of the aggressive palmetto trees of Sullivan’s Island, quite literally.

Fig. 17.1. The original seal, obverse. By kind permission of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

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Fig. 17.2. Reverse of coronation medal of William and Mary, Regnier Arondeaux, 1689. Private collection.

Fig. 17.3. “Oak Society” medal, London, 1750. Private collection.

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Notes 1

Duncan 2003, 7. This context is also peculiarly apposite, it will be seen, in that it recalls the destruction, in New York, 1776, of a statue of George III, after a reading of the Declaration of Independence, of which my emblematist was a signatory. 2 As of 1992: Heisser 1992, 20-27, note 115. The palmetto and crescent moon State Flag, adopted in, appropriately, South Carolina’s “second Revolution” of 1861 (see note 23), has a direct connexion to the events of 1776 and an iconography which predates even that. The original design, used on flags protesting England’s Stamp Act (1765), was three white crescents on a blue ground. In 1775 Colonel William Moultrie designed a flag for rebel/“patriot” South Carolina soldiers, of one crescent on blue; a £2 10s note, possibly designed by Middleton and Drayton that year has crossed sabres, crescent moon and the motto “PRO LIBERTATE”; see note 41 below. The addition of the Palmetto tree followed the ineffectual bombardment of Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island on 28th June 1776, the context of the State Seal. The Palmetto was adopted as State tree in 1939. 3 The semantics of “Revolution” in Anglo-American historiography are convoluted but not irrelevant if we consider usage at 1776, when “revolution” enjoyed essentially conservative connotations, as in “a return to…”, although it had already become possible to use it “in a sense synonymous with successful rebellion”, i.e., “a complete overthrow of the established government” but still within an essentially conservative paradigm: Clark 1986, 3-4. Its cover includes, appropriately, the iconic loaded palm of William Marshall’s frontispiece to Eikon Basilike (1648). This conservative understanding of the term would be overtaken by the rhetoric and experience of the most reified of Revolutions, the French, and the relevance to our study of this later understanding of “Revolution” will become clear. In English historiography, “English Revolution” has been mostly, but not consistently, used for the events post-1641 leading to the regicide and republican experiment of 1648-60, as distinct from the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, a reifying usage which became acceptable c.1714, where previously (1688-1714) there had been the more adjectival “late glorious Revolution” or “late happy Revolution” (my thanks to Jonathan Clark on these semantics). With the State Seal, [hereafter SCSS], Drayton and Middleton locate themselves iconographically within either or both seventeenth-century English “revolutions”, although both the Revirescit and Tandem fit surculos arbor emblematics (see note 5) affirm (albeit contentiously different) restorations of monarchy, not its overthrow. The SCSS is thus iconographically and rhetorically, but arguably not politically, palimpsestic. For “palimpsest” as used here, see Wagner 1995, 25-26. 4 On 4th July 1776 Congress ordered the printing of its Declaration, at this point signed only by the President, John Hancock, and Secretary, Charles Thomson, for distribution to the army and to state assemblies: “Independence” was declared in each state as these broadsides arrived, which was not until mid-August in the case of remote Georgia. It was not until 2nd August that an engrossed copy of the

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Declaration was signed by all delegates present. Six absentees added their names later. The names of the signatories were kept secret: only after Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton NJ in January 1777 was an authenticated copy with the names of the signatories issued, but 1777 was not 1783 and the fate of surviving English regicide signatories after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after its own Republican experiment will not have been forgotten. News of the Declaration reached London on 10th August: O’Gorman 1998, 112. 5 Nicholson 1997a, 227-253. This medallic dialogue derived from and sustained two separate but related dynastic royal imprese: the Tandem fit surculos arbor orangetree impresa of the House of Orange, which was a shoot from a seemingly moribund stock tree, and the Revirescit, flourishing oak tree sapling impresa of the supporters of the British Stuart monarchy in the years 1688-1760. 6 “Whig” needs, for the American reader, to be distinguished from the “Whig” of the American Jacksonian era (c.1829-40: for which see Reynolds 2008, specifically 111-113). Traceable to the Exclusion Crisis of the 1670s, English Whiggism meant the self-interested support of a supposedly circumscribed “Parliamentary” monarchy, and was otherwise informed by, at one extreme, Deism, agnosticism and atheism (the last two understood in their own day as “infidelity”) and, more broadly, an Erastian subordination of Church to State which was able to accommodate most “Dissenting” self-exclusions from the Established Church of England. The Whigs who orchestrated the “Revolution” of 1688-1689 had by the 1770s become hegemonic within English parliamentary politics, to the extent that self-styled “Whigs” could both support the Crown against the colonies from within government office and criticize colonial policy from out of office; see Guttridge 1966. The pro-American opposition Whig stance did not enjoy popular support; see Guttridge 1966, 92, 95, 107, 109; and the complacency of the Whig (English) Revolution mentalité became increasingly vulnerable in the face of the French Revolution, producing the conservative reaction of Whig Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790). 7 Heisser 1992, see note 2. 8 Olson 1991. 9 For South Carolina the historian’s ordinarily difficult “recovery” of books bought, owned and bequeathed through the eighteenth century is made harder by later War damage. Barbara Doyle, Historian and Research Consultant, Middleton Place, to whom I owe so much on this project, notes (in correspondence 30th May 2008) that “It is obvious the Middletons had libraries: early probate inventories as well as correspondence mention collections of books along with other personal property but no titles or authors are mentioned.” The Middleton Place Library “was burned in February 1865 near the end of the American Civil War […] relatively few books were salvaged”. 10 Bath 1994, Chapter 10; Manning 2002; Nicholson 1997b, 139-165. 11 Cooper 1711. For the academic background, I would single out Ronald Paulson, not least because his visual literacy and interdisciplinarity have never fully been

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able to transcend the Whiggism and literary bias which has for so long dominated eighteenth-century cultural studies. 12 Nicholson 1996. 13 By 1776 the oak had secured a “popular” English patriotic association not necessarily identical with that employed at both elite and popular levels of discourse, consumption and display for the decades 1740-1760, (relevant to Middleton and Drayton’s English education), for which see Nicholson, “The Oak v. the Orange”. In 1760, George III, as the first British-born Hanoverian monarch, chose for his “Patriot” accession medal to replicate the oak leaves and “Entirely English/British” of his Stuart cousin some sixty times removed, Queen Anne (1701-1714). 14 The history of the State Seal of North Carolina for the years 1663 to the present (accessible statelibrary.ncdr.gov/nc/symbols/seal/htm and eNCyclopedia, State Library of North Carolina) demonstrates for the uninitiated both the necessity of, and the formality surrounding, a State Seal. The physicality of the colonial-era Seal might also be borne in mind: the Charter Seal to the Lords Proprietors was twofaced, three and three-eighths inches diameter (the current SCSS is one and threequarters across). It bonded two wax cakes together with tape before being impressed, the finished impression being about one-fourth of an inch thick. It was a pendant seal; that is, something appended to a document by ribbon, cord or strip of parchment. 15 Heisser 1992, 4, 17-27. My conception of “public space” is somewhat different from Jurgen Habermas’s exclusively urban print-literacy-and-coffee-house “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas 1989, well-summarized on page 16, Mackie 1998), insofar as it includes the experience of ordinary people within the nonsecular and the governmental: the iconographic “public space” between armigerous authority and the more democratically defined “public”, a space that includes a rural parish church with a royal coat of arms and local armigerous hatchments and other visual/verbal material-culture rhetoric (for which see Llewellyn 1991), as well as the pseudo-armigerous, commercial cacophony of the eighteenth-century London street sign. The “visual literacy” to negotiate the urban English “public space” in this period is conventionally credited to Ronald Paulson, although see also Hallett 1999, but, like Habermas’s “public sphere”, Paulson’s is secular and urban and can accommodate the excision, verbal and visual, of the “Dieu” in the “Dieu et mon Droit” better than it can the presence of such carved or painted royal arms in a London–or any other contemporary—church; see Nicholson 2007, 515-518. The “public space” of England begs a more culturally conservative reconstruction; the SCSS arguably occupied such a “public space” between the State government and the South Carolina governed. 16 Committees of Safety were organised from 1775 to function as a form of local government with, among other powers, the right to mobilize militia: it was South Carolina’s Council of Safety—of which Arthur Middleton Sr was a member— which ordered the fortification of Sullivan’s Island and was receptive to using the island’s native sabal palmetto for this; Heisser 1992, 5.

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17 Moving from Albermarle Point (est. 1670) to the more defensible Oyster Point in 1680, the Lords Proprietors established the better-defended Charles Town, which was to become, at this relevant period, the chief centre of culture and wealth in the South, and by 1776 the fourth largest city in the colonies. (Infoplease/Encyclopedia:South Carolina). 18 For Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury see Harris 1987; Clark 2000, 68-71; for Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, see Clark 2000, 136, 210, 325n, 339n (for “the link between religious scepticism and Republican political theory”); also Milne 1962, xii-xiii. 19 Olson’s largest conceptual framework for Emblems of American Community, the transatlantic body politic, invokes and quotes extensively from, Locke’s betterknown Two Treatises of Government (1688-1689): see Olson 1991, 1, 201. 20 Heisser 1992, 4; previous to this necessary warrants bore personal affixes, rather as in the era of the Lords Proprietors. 21 Olson 1991, Emblems, is cognizant of the Public Ledger, to the point that it figures as PL in his “Abbreviations”, (258); how a study of American Revolutionary rhetorical iconology can have overlooked this rich and extensive source is initially remarkable, ultimately explicable. 22 See Dickinson, 10, 11,124n, 153, 212, 213. 23 There are several layers of historical irony here. The SSCS of 1776 drew on the factual resistance of Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island, Charleston harbour. This in turn informed the inclusion of the palmetto in the State Flag of 1861, assertive of South Carolina’s secession from the Union of States created post-1776, and “christened” by the firing of “The First Shot” in the “War Between the States”, aimed at the Federal-held Fort Sumter, Charleston harbour. In this War, “Stonewall” would become the popular name for the iconic General Thomas Jackson (1824-1863). For self-consciousness of this within secessionist states as America’s “Second War of Independence” see the Charleston Mercury, 8th November 1860; “The tea has been thrown overboard; the revolution of 1860 has been initiated”, quoted in Holzer 2008, 47. 24 The oak tree as emblem of the polity of England in a sense that both is and is not emblematic of its reigning dynasty can be seen in the anti-republican visual rhetoric of the engraving, The Royall Oake of Brittayne, frontispiece to the 1660 (2nd) edition of Clement Walker’s History of Independency Part II; in which image, to cross-reference the SCSS and some of its sources, the tree also bears rhetorical shields, some armigerous, others key texts such as Eikon Basilike, “Magna Charta” and the Bible: British Museum collection of print satires/George 1959, Vol. 1, 44. 25 Heisser 1992, 9-10. 26 Exergon: Spes, legend: Dum spiro spero. The Public Ledger notes, of the laurel flower carried by Hope, that “it is a native of our state”; (italics mine): like the Palmetto, it becomes something localized, and ultimately “American”. Cf. Olson 1991, 45, 50-52, 65 on Massachusetts’s polemical use of the white pine: again, note Olsen’s neglect of the SCSS.

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Derived from the House of Orange’s own device of dynastic triumph in the face of political adversity, Tandem fit surculos arbor would be answered iconographically on the part of adherents of the deposed King James II and his descendants with the Royal/English oak (for the “either/or” of this, see note 19), stricken but with its own hopeful saplings/shoots from Anthony Sadler’s Royall Mourner frontispiece (1660) through engraved glasses of the 1750s; see Nicholson 1997b. For the complete contextual change represented by the rebellious/Republican gamble of the SCSS, note the language of the Public Ledger’s “Explanation” of the “lopt”/ or “fallen”, vs. the “flourishing” tree: “Its position alludes to the state of her (England’s) authority”: what the equivalent arboreal juxtaposition would in the English medals of 1688-1689 rather dangerously introduce the conceit of a dynastic conquest (a conceit rapidly quashed in the post-1688 “free” press), was, in South Carolina by 1777, an arboreal discourse with monarchy itself prostrate, not merely one dynasty. Here, too, the numismatic distinction is important: a State Seal, for ratifying a state’s laws and self-identity, with all that this entails for that state’s subjects or citizens, as opposed to a rallying, partisan, medal for private distribution. In this sense, the SCSS more genuinely occupies the “public sphere”, as re-delineated in note 15. 28 Woolf 1998, 22 (8:1) offers a third variant on the “AVREA POMA” medal. 29 This was not the official Coronation medal reverse, a Phaeton emblem, but one produced by Regnier Arondeaux in Holland; see Woolf 1998, 27, 31: 27 “Extract from a letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Correspondent in the City, concerning the Coronation Medal...” is a good example of contemporary medallic ekphrasis. 30 Which George III’s oak-leaved Coronation medal, last used by a Stuart, will not have helped, cf. note 13. 31 See note 24. 32 The British would capture Charleston in 1780; Arthur Middleton, engaged in its defence was taken prisoner until exchanged in 1783, underscoring the truly engaged nature of the SCSS emblematics. 33 Strategically-placed, but even more important economically as one of the most important ports of entry and holding for the slave trade, one more irony of plantation-owning Whig “Liberty” rhetoricians like Drayton and Middleton, the hypocrisy of which anti-American commentators in England at the time were not blind. From the first Proprietors’ settlers, many, like the Middletons, with Barbadian interests, South Carolina came to resemble more closely the plantation economy of the West Indies than did the other mainland colonies; by 1708 a majority of the non-native inhabitants were African slaves. I owe this slavehandling perspective on Sullivan’s Island to Professor Arturo Lindsay’s timely lecture, “Mapping Ports: Sullivan’s Island, Goree Island, Havana and Seville”, Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 28th March 2008. 34 Heisser 1992, 7. 35 A pre-revolutionary banknote of £25 of 1760 seems to have been the first time South Carolina used the palmetto tree as an official symbol of the province; Heisser 1992, 14.

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36 Cf. the security over the State Seal of North Carolina, 1731; shipped from England, arrival delayed, the old seal re-authorized (Edenton, 30th March, 1731), and the carrier of the new Seal paid £10 for his journey. A further, relevant, footnote to the SCSS: within two years, Smithson, the SCSS engraver, who had also served as a private in the Charleston Militia, would refuse to swear an “Oath of Fidelity and Allegiance” to the new State of South Carolina and would emigrate to the British West Indies: the taking or refusal to take such oaths had been a part of the legalcultural context (“juring” and “non-juring”) of the earlier Oak versus Orange tree dialogue of the Revolution of 1688 and would recur as a predictable aspect of Southern Reconstruction after 1865. 37 Heisser 1992, 7, 8: Drayton 1969, Vol. 2, 373. Heisser 1992 (12) quotes in full John Drayton’s own “Description” and “Explanation” of the Seal’s iconography. 38 The Ashley and Cooper Rivers, converging on Charleston, obviously from Lord Proprietor Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. 39 Heisser 1992, 9. 40 Ibid., 8. 41 The South Carolina and all other Revolutionary notes are available to view and compare in the superb website of a remarkable resource, Colonial Currency: a Project of the Robert H. Gore Jr Numismatic Endowment, University of Notre Dame, Dept of Special Collections, under Louis E. Jordan; www.coins.nd.edu/ColCurrency. Dr Jordan informs me that the project dates from the early 1990s, the current website from 1996, and its descriptions in Newman 1997; as such it will not have been available to Olson 1991; I would suggest, however, that Olson’s exclusion of the South Carolina emblematic currency is informed by his larger agenda, as set out here. 42 Arboreal iconography tends to the conservative “even” within a Revolutionary context; the palm iconography here is more suggestive of Eikon Basilike than of any Jeffersonian Declaration. 43 Georgia had yet to secede (April 1776). 44 Olson 1991, 212-18, 213. 45 For Middleton: The Biographical Dictionary of US Congress 1774 to the Present (Washington: on-line only it would seem) has him Hackney-WestminsterSt John’s Cambridge-Middle Temple. John A. Venn, Alumni Cantabridgienses (1940-1954) Part 2, iv, 406 has Middleton at Harrow and Westminster before being admitted as pensioner Trinity Hall, 1st May 1759, matriculated Lent 1760, elected scholar 1760 and previously admitted Inner Temple, 14th April 1757; Leslie Whitelaw, Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, Library, confirms Middle Temple for that date. Returns to South Carolina, no degree recorded, 1763; Barbara Doyle, Middleton Place, confirms a return visit to London in May 1768 and the birth of a son there in the same September, but can find no evidence that this visit extended to a period of fine art study in Rome, suggested in one nineteenth-century source. For Drayton, Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (Oxford, 1888) 5, 358 only notes his matriculation at Balliol on 10th October 1761; Ms Doyle confirms his pre-Oxford education as Westminster.

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46 1776: The British Story of the American Revolution (Greenwich, London: National Maritime Museum, 1976), 76. 47 Woolf 1998, 116-120; Nicholson 1997, 245; Richard Sharp, “The Religious and Political Character of St Clement Danes” in Clark and Erskine-Hill 2002; and Nicholson 2002; and for the rich pictorial print culture at hand to wealthy expatriates such as Middleton and Drayton, Timothy Clayton’s masterly The English Print 1688-1802 (Yale, 1997). For the oak/sapling as a trope in America in the Revolutionary era on the loyalist side, the Rev Jonathan Boucher preached:, “[W]e were not lopped off the parent trunk as useless or noxious limbs, to be hewn down or cast into the fire, but carefully transplanted here”: A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution; in Thirteen Discourses, Preached in North America between the Years 1763 and 1775 (London, 1797), 475, quoted Olson 1991, 224. 48 Gonson 1737, 37. 49 Petter 1974; Buckler 1755; see also the anonymous The Oxford Almanack Explain’d: or, the Emblems of it Unriddl’d: Together With some Prefatory Account of the Emblems of the Two Preceding years (London, 1711); designs of the kind attacked by Shaftesbury had lapsed between 1712 and 1754, but within that time Drayton’s Oxford’s had nursed Tory and occasionally Jacobite sympathies that were often expressed through the media of prints and medals. 50 Paulson 2003), 82; Toland 1720. 51 Fourth largest city in the colonies at 1776. Charleston Library Society, information courtesy of Ms Jane Aldrich: begun by seventeen “gentlemen of various trades and professions”. Until 1792 the “library” was housed by elected librarians in their own houses before materials were transferred to the upper floor of the Statehouse. The Library Society is in the process of putting its records online after 250 years. This will be a rich resource. 52 Heisser 1992, 14, 31; Ms Doyle writes “We have only one book in our collection identifiable as Arthur’s: Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, 3rd ed 1761. This is inscribed ‘Arthr. Middleton 1761’ and further inscribed (in Latin) as being the gift of Arthur’s son Henry to John Wilcocks of Philadelphia”. “An interesting choice, in this particular context, given the convenient categorization and chronology of eighteenth-century English aesthetics”, Heisser 1992, (14) notes. 53 Olson 1991, xiv, xvi, 6, 7; although, page xiv does refer (marginalizing them) to images “calculated to communicate with the learned and affluent […] to the exclusion of the uneducated and less fortunate”. The Seal’s battle-triumphant palmetto iconography would make it contextually “popular” if by that is meant readily interpreted, even if appreciation of its larger iconology was more restricted. Olson’s neglect of both the practical and emblematic appropriation of the nativeto-Sullivan’s Island palmetto within his examples of specifically “American” flora and fauna is explicable perhaps in that its emblematic heritage did not fit his chosen models of discourse. 54 No surviving example traced as of writing.

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Unlike the pre-Revolutionary Great Seal of North Carolina, shipped from England. Olson 1991, 2. 56 I am purposely ignoring the most significant transatlantic “baggage” which sustained the refined culture of the western side of this economy. In December 1775, Revolutionary General Moultrie of “Palmetto Day” led a raid on Sullivan’s Island against an encampment of about 500 escaped slaves who had sought British protection there. See Ball 1998, 220-221.

PART IV: THE EMBLEM IN ITS LITERARY CONTEXTS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “TO THEE THE REED IS AS THE OAK”: FABLE, EMBLEM AND DEVICE IN CYMBELINE1 ALVAN BREGMAN

In this article, I will look at one topical family of emblems that has its root in the fable of the oak and the reed, and show how this can help us detect an organizing theme within Shakespeare’s late romance, Cymbeline. That theme is how best to deal with adversity, when to yield and when to stand firm. Previous critics have naturally taken pains to examine the structure and genre of Cymbeline, and have tried to make sense of its hybrid nature: Cymbeline is, after all, clearly something different from the tragedies with which it was grouped in the First Folio, where it first appeared in print. The contrast in the play between the rustic and magic world of Britain and the urban and mannered world of Italy has been considered, and so too, the contrast between such conceptual opposites as credibility and incredibility.2 The implications surrounding the bizarre scene where Imogen awakes beside Cloten’s headless body have been frequently discussed.3 The masque of Jupiter and the nearness in time to the birth of Christ have led to religious commentary.4 The nature of Posthumus’s wager with Iachimo and Imogen’s disguise has led to commentary on issues of sex and gender.5 The emblematic qualities of Shakespeare’s plays have long been studied and explicated by emblem scholars going back to Henry Green.6 Closer to our own day, Peter M. Daly has closely defined the terms for any discussion of emblems in Shakespeare.7 Literary scholars have taken both wide and narrow views of the subject. Peggy Muñoz Simonds, in her fine book, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1992), has perhaps gone the farthest to show the relevance of emblems in Shakespeare’s difficult and apparently oddly designed romance.8 She succeeds in finding the language, form and themes of the play rooted in well-established Renaissance models - models which can also be seen at work within the emblem genre, still only a few generations old when

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Cymbeline was written. With reference to emblems on Anteros, the Wild Man, the eagle and the beetle, the golden fetters of the courtier, and many others, Simonds establishes without question the relevance of emblems as a mirror against which to see and appreciate new features of Shakespeare’s plays, and, in particular, Cymbeline. Nevertheless, even as emblems reflect and reformat classical, philosophical and religious norms and figures, explicit “quotation” of an emblem is quite rare in Shakespeare. In the end, Simonds carefully reminds us that emblems are not often the “source for Shakespeare’s thought or poetry”; rather, that emblems provide “illustrative parallel[s]” (344) that shed light on the drama. Kwang Soon Cho has a chapter on Cymbeline in his 1998 book, Emblems in Shakespeare’s Last Plays.9 Cho defines imagery and scenes which borrow directly from emblems, and those which have broadly “emblematic” functions. Cho discusses the figure of Imogen/Fidele as a personification of Faith, a familiar figure found in emblems; the headless man episode is taken as an “emblematic representation of the victory of virtue over vice” (46); the cave people are seen to “perform the virtues of humilitas and caritas” (54); and Jupiter’s role in the vision/theophany scenes is contrasted to that of Fortuna. My own study follows a strain of reference that has not hitherto been examined in emblem studies related to Shakespeare. I refer to the fable of the oak and the reed, which surfaces in the middle of Cymbeline, in the dirge sung over the apparently lifeless body of Imogen/Fidele: Fear no more the frown o’ the great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Cymbeline 4, ii, 334-339.10

Here the reed and the oak exemplify the extremes of the natural world, the humble and the great respectively, that are equally subject to Death, the great leveller. The juxtaposition of the reed and the oak has its root in fable, the origin and transmission of which was typically complex. Rodríguez records two separate strains to be found among the anonymous fables arising in ancient Greece.11 In the first strain of the fable, “The oak and the reed were arguing about their strength; when a strong wind blew, the reed bent and survived, whereas the oak, which attempted to resist, was uprooted.”12 In this first version, the fall of the oak settles a point of debate about strength and precedence.

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In the second strain of the fable, “When the trees saw that they were uprooted by the winds and the reeds were not, they asked them why this happened. The answer was that it was because they bent and the trees did not.”13 In this second version, there has been no debate; a lesson is derived by considering natural circumstances after the fact.14 Numerous Latin and vernacular versions of this fable appeared in compilations from classical to early modern times.15 The first illustrated Aesop to appear in print was that of Heinrich Steinhowel in 1476-1477; numerous editions followed, and the French translation published in 1480 in Lyons became the basis for Caxton’s English translation of 1484.16 Caxton’s version of the oak and the reed (Fig. 18.1) imparts the lesson that “None ought to be prowd ageynst his lord/but oughte to humble hym self toward hym”. The fable concludes with a somewhat different point: “For the prowde shall be allwey humbled And the meke and hu[m]ble shalle be enhannced ….”17 Note the image of the North Wind that blows upon the scene: we shall see that Cymbeline is compared to the North Wind in a similar context of meaning. There were many fables similar to that of the oak and the reed, but which developed separately. Take, for example, the fables of the Cedar and the Brushwood18 or of the Fir and the Bramble.19 In the former of these fables, a dismissive tree does away with the lowly plants surrounding it and is uprooted by the elements as a result. In this line, the tree and the bushes are not actually rivals, but are shown by events to have a symbiotic relationship. (Spenser in the February eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, makes use of this trope in his fable of youth and old age.) Simonds has explicated another variant, that of the Elm and the Vine, as an image of marriage found in Cymbeline.20 After 1531, fable books were joined by a new printed genre, the emblem book, introduced by Andrea Alciato. Alciato had coined the word “emblemata” to refer to a kind of epigram which he composed in Latin or translated from the newly discovered Greek Anthology, which itself acted as a transmitter of fables.21 The emblem genre became quickly popular and other writers produced their own emblem books, and for these books, illustrations were either newly designed or borrowed. There was much cross-pollenization between the two genres. It was common to find fables used as subject matter in emblem books, not only by Alciato, but by his followers. It is also easy to find examples where the illustrations for fables are the models for the picturae of fable-related emblems. In many ways, emblem books looked exactly like some illustrated fable books, since fables might also be presented with three parts, namely, a title, a picture, and the text of the fable, with its moral or “epimythion” at

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the end. Given this close formal relationship between the emblem and the fable, it is not surprising to find the fable of the oak and the reed, and its variants, appearing in emblem books. As we shall see, the individual figures (oak, reed) were also featured singly as the subjects of emblems. The trope of rigidity, implied by the oak (or by other kinds of trees) in the fable, was likewise developed using analogical forms such as columns. In many cases, the fable is just one possible reference source for the content of a given device or emblem. Both close connections and divergences appear, as we will see. Here I will review emblematic expressions of the oak and the reed fable that precede or were current during the time when Shakespeare was writing Cymbeline. In 1586, Geoffrey Whitney published A Choice of Emblemes, which borrowed most of its illustrations from the emblem books of Andrea Alciato, Claude Paradin, Joannes Sambucus, Hadrianus Junius and from the fable book of Gabriel Faerni, all of which had been previously published by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp.22 Whitney did not directly translate the emblem verses that accompanied the illustrations, but adapted or imitated the original texts. Whitney also had a small number of original illustrations made for some of his own compositions. Whitney used twenty illustrations taken from the Emblemata (1565) of Hadrianus Junius (1511-1575), including that of Junius’ forty-third emblem, “[Eiksas nikon], sive victrix animi aequitas” (Winning by yielding, or, an even disposition brings victory).23 This pictura (Fig. 18.2) shows the North Wind (Boreas) blowing violently upon both the reed and the tree, causing the tree to break, while the reed, who despises (“despuit”) the storm, survives by patiently yielding.24 In taking over Junius’ pictura, Whitney keeps the theme, but rephrases the motto, “Vincit qui patitur” (He who suffers, will overcome), makes the tree a “mightie oke”, and replaces Junius’ four-line epigram and prose commentary with two six-line stanzas: The mightie oke, that shrinkes not with a blaste, But stiflie standes, when Boreas moste doth blowe, With rage therof, is broken downe at laste, When bending reedes, that couche in tempestes lowe With yeelding still, doe safe, and sounde appeare: And looke alofte, when that the cloudes be cleare. When Enuie, Hate, Contempte, and Slaunder, rage: Which are the stormes, and tempestes, of this life; With patience then, wee must the combat wage, And not with force resist their deadlie strife: But suffer still, and then wee shall in fine, Our foes subdue, when they with shame shall pine.25

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In both Junius’ Latin verse and Whitney’s adaptation, patience and humility are the means of overcoming situations of conflict and strife. 26 Whitney, however, introduces a marginal reference, not found in Junius, from the Epistolae of Erasmus: “Verè magni animi est, quasdam iniurias negligere, nec ad quorundam conuitia aures, vel linguam habere” (A truly great spirit should overlook some wrongs done to it, and to some men’s calumnies have neither ears to hear nor tongue to reply).27 As we shall see, these emblems adumbrate a great many elements in Cymbeline, where situations involving conflict and calumny are present on both a personal and national level. Another interesting rendition of the oak and the reed fable appears in Gli Apologi (1602) by Guilio Cesare Capaccio, who had published a treatise in 1592 entitled Delle imprese, which primarily concerned devices, but which also included a section on emblems.28 The Apologi were Capaccio’s attempt to create an entirely new illustrated genre based on the “apologue”, a rhetorical form so identified with fable that it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. Capaccio describes this genre in a forward “Ai Lettori” in which he proposes to present usefully pleasant stories, differentiated from simple fables and jocular forms by imparting civic virtue and humane morals. We can see the Apologi as a selfconsciously hybrid form, doing exactly what some emblems and some fables already did in their own formal contexts. The pictura of Capaccio’s “Canna, e quercia” (Fig. 18.3) shows a quiet rustic scene with an oak apparently flourishing on the bank of a river in the foreground, together with clumps of reeds on the opposite bank. The poem, however, describes an entirely different scene, where an oak uprooted in the mountains by a fierce wind has floated down the river until it passes some reeds. The oak laments his fate and is surprised that the fragile reeds have survived both wind and waves. A diceria, or epigram, placed at the bottom explains that “L’humiltà ogni grande empito raffrena” (Humility tempers all great fury). The epigram is further discussed in a separate prose section which draws out the moral meaning of the piece, ending with a quotation from Horace (Odes 3, iv, 66-68): “Power with counsel tempered, even the gods make greater. But might that in its soul is bent on all impiety, they hate.”29 Once more, humility and mildness allow the reeds to survive the angry tumult of wind and wave, which destroy the proud and unbending oak. But the Horatian dictum also promotes the proper use of power under the guidance of right counsel. Below, we will reflect upon how this trope helps frame the relationship between Cymbeline and Belarius.

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The oak and reed (and cognate trees and plants) appeared not only together in emblems and fables (and such hybrid genres as apologi) but were featured separately, especially in imprese, or devices. Paolo Giovio, in his Dialogo dell’imprese (Rome, 1555), a seminal work on the subject of devices, described one of the imprese of the Colonna family in a time of trouble and exile. This featured bulrushes and the motto, “Flectimur non frangimur undis” (We are bent but not broken by the waves). Illustrations of this and the other devices appeared in later editions of Giovio’s immensely popular treatise. The English poet Samuel Daniel published a well-known translation of this work, entitled The worthy tract of Paulus Iovius, in 1585. The section on the Colonna device (Fig. 18.4) reads as follows: The Colonesi bare altogether one Impresa for them all, at such time, as Pope Alexander shewed extremitie to the Romaine Barony: whereupon they were constrained with Ihon the Cardinall to flye Rome, and parte of them tooke Naples, and parte Scicill: in which case they were thought to make a better departure then had done the Ursini, for that they had rather loose their robe and dignitie then to commit their liues to the mercie of bloodie tyrants, as did they: whereupon they became vndone and miserably strangled. Their Impresa was to signifie, that although they were persecuted by hard fortune, and their former power so greatly abated, yet liued they, and in hope that when these boysterous stormes were past, they should againe haue to reioyce: and this it was: Certaine Bulrushes figured in the middest of a Riuer, whose nature is to bowe & not to breake, neither with the violence of waue nor winde, & their mot was, Flectimur non frangimur vndis. 30

For the Colonnas, reeds were a palpable image of survival in hard times, figuring literally their family’s intention of “lying low” in order to outlast the storms of contrary fortune. We may incidentally take notice of an emblem by Joachim Camerarius (1534-1598) in which the two themes we have just examined—the story and device of the Colonnas (Englished by Daniel) and the emblem by Hadrianus Junius (Englished by Whitney)—are specifically conflated. In a book of 100 emblems, all on the subject of plants, Camerarius presented an emblem with the motto, “Flectimur non frangimur”, showing only the reed bending under the wind. The subscriptio is brief: “Flectitur obsequio, sic vincit arundo procellas./Laeditur aduersum qui sua fata furit (It is bent by submissiveness: thus the reed overcomes storms. He who rages against his fate is injured).31 In his prose commentary to the emblem, Camerarius recites the story of the Colonnas in Latin, in terms very similar to those

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used by Giovio, and then quotes the quatrain from Junius’ emblem. His own pure emblem thus takes in the materia of fable, emblem and device. The general subject and motto of the Colonna device was also transposed to a new purpose in the book of devices invented by Luca Contile on behalf of the members of the Academia degli Affidati of Pavia.32 Under each device in this work there was a long prose passage describing its subject and meaning in learned fashion, followed by a biographical essay outlining the honours and achievements of the appropriate academician and his family. In keeping with the conceit of the Italian academy, each member had a by-name. For the lawyer Aldigiero Cornazzano, this was “Il pieghevole” (The supple one), and his device was the melega, or sorghum plant, shown with drooping head under the motto “Flector sed non frangor” (I bend but I do not break) (Fig. 18.5). The text explains that Aldigiero graciously inclines to help those who are in need, and, like the nourishing melega plant, provides sustenance to others. However, the priority of the Colonnas had to be recognized, so we are told that their device is appropriate to Aldigiero, “benche forse cotal Impresa sia stata da alcuni altri usata” (even though this impresa may have been put to other uses). We should keep in mind the parallel meanings implicit in these themes as we continue our investigation of the oak and the reed. We may notice that the theme of mildness as opposed to haughtiness among the pliant, inherent in Aldigiero’s device, is present in Cymbeline, especially in the depiction of the cave people who offer sustenance to Imogen. One might expect there to be a single tendency in the use and interpretation of this theme of bending, but in fact, the opposite was true. For example, the meaning of the fable and of the Colonna impresa was taken and reversed in the device belonging to Gabriello Cesarini and described by Camillo Camilli in his Imprese illustri di diuersi (Venice, 1586).33 Cesarini’s device (Fig. 18.6) shows a column with the banner “Frangar non flectar” (I shall be broken, not bent).34 In his commentary, Camilli says that the column represents not merely strength, but all the moral virtues. Fred Nash noted that the device was meant to represent “the endurance of an invincible spirit under every sort of adversity”; a person with such a spirit of endurance would be “more ready to die before doing anything unworthy”.35 It is worth noting how far the line of association flows from the fable which uses the elements of nature (tree, reed) to the device which features the human artefact (column), bearing an opposite meaning. Cymbeline, too, juxtaposes the natural and courtly worlds: within each the implications of equivalent imagery and action are accorded variant meaning.

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As was common with emblematic tropes, the oak and reed were understood not only through moral readings but as illustrations of Christian teaching. Georgette de Montenay, in her Emblemes ou devises chretiennes (1571) seems to rely solely upon scripture and not upon fable in her emblems. Yet using the words of Luke 1, 52 from the Latin Vulgate for her motto (“Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles”, i.e., He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree), she creates an emblem with virtually the same iconography as the fable of the oak and the reed.36 Montenay’s pictura shows a personified wind blowing upon a great tree, which falls, cracked at the trunk, while a sapling (“arbrisseau”) in the foreground bends and survives (Fig. 18.7). The motto is disposed within the pictura so that the words “Deposuit potent” are at the top, adjacent to the falling tree, and the words “et exaltavit” are at the bottom, adjacent to the bending sapling. The connection to the fable was made clearer when Montenay’s emblems were published in a bilingual edition in 1584: there, the Latin verse refers to the “Arundo”, or reed, instead of to a sapling. Another version of the fable with scriptural content can be seen in Arnold Freitag’s emblem entitled “Superbi fastus collisus” (The arrogance of the proud is struck down).37 The pictura shows the familiar design of a great tree torn up by its roots by a blast of wind, with bending (but intact) reeds in the foreground (Fig. 18.8). The subscriptio is also the Latin verse from Luke which was used by Montenay, lengthened by including part of the preceding verse, Luke 1, 51: “Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui,” (He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts). Freitag unambiguously links the scriptural verses to his account of the fable “Fraxini et arundinis” (Of the ash and the reeds). It is worth noting that Freitag’s Mythologica ethica was translated into English by Arthur Golding as Fabletalke (1586). Although it was not printed in its own time, Golding’s project shows that Freitag’s emblems had currency in England when Whitney was publishing his Choice of Emblemes.38 It also shows how artificial is the distinction between fable and emblem in some books. Scriptural interpretation of the reed was not uniform, however. Reference to the plant could also be found in Matthew 11, 7, where Jesus says “unto the multitudes concerning John [the Baptist], What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” The reed in Matthew is a symbol of fickleness, and came in homilies to be contrasted with the olive tree, which did not succumb to the wind, but raised itself higher, showing steadfastness.39 This set a value on uprightness, such as we have seen in some devices employing the column. As an emblem, this approach to the reed appears in such later works as Henricus Engelgrave’s

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Lux evangelica sub velum sacrorum emblematum recondita in anni dominicas (Antwerp, 1648), where Emblem 3 illustrates reeds being blown by a personified wind, while a tree stands straight and unmoved (being resistant to the wind). Englegrave’s subscriptio is unequivocal: the reed stands for human inconstancy.40 It is worth noting that Shakespeare makes reference to this trope when the Second Watchman says of Coriolanus: “he’s the rock, the oak not to be wind-shaken”.41 Finally, another emblem roughly contemporary with Cymbeline provides an iconographic reference to our trope. Otto Vaenius’ Q. Horatii Flacci Emblemata (1607) includes the emblem “Culmen honoris lubricum” (The summit of honour is perilous).42 The superb pictura is filled with detail: in the foreground sits a pensive man looking at a plumbline; behind him is a river gorge with a narrow road upon which a man carries a heavy load on his back and an armed group crosses a bridge; lightning and winds storm and a large tower topples from the high cliffs on one side of the scene (Fig. 18.9). Flanking the seated man are tall trees (on the bank opposite the falling tower) and a clump of reeds in the river. There are four texts, the first of which is from Horace’s Book 2, x, which advises that we live according to the golden mean:43 Whoever lives by the golden mean safely avoids the baseness of a squalid roof; and, soberly avoids the palace that inspires envy. The huge pine is most commonly shaken by the wind, and the lofty towers fall down with the greatest fall, and the tops of mountains attract lightning.

The reasonable and sober man, leading a measured and balanced life, thus avoids the extremes of greatness and lowliness represented by the tall tree and the reeds. Reference to the oak and the reed, and its family of related emblems and devices, thus yields the following themes: pride versus humility; constancy versus inconstancy; rage versus patience; strength versus weakness; rigidity versus flexibility; uprightness versus fickleness; despite versus mildness. In these dichotomies, sometimes the tree is favoured and sometimes the reed. And, as we have seen, when Shakespeare refers to the oak and the reed during the Song to Imogen, he transcends all these dichotomies. The oak and reed, no matter how we interpret them, like all things, must in the end “come to dust”. However, let us now relate what we know about the emblematic treatment of the oak and the reed fable to the verbal and stage imagery we see throughout Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. It is my contention that all the characters in Cymbeline are faced with the choice of whether to stand firm like the oak or bend like the reed, and

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as the emblem tradition demonstrates, there are positive and negative implications to either position in different contexts. The opening acts of the play tend to place a negative value on bending, that primary characteristic of the reed. Throughout the play we have explicit scenes contrasting rage and patience, pride and humility, strength and weakness and so on. These scenes are often encapsulated by emblematic tableaux strongly implied in the text. Cymbeline is initially a figure of rage; indeed, he is likened to the North Wind, as Imogen says of him, “the tyrannous breathing of the north,/Shakes all our buds from growing” (1, iv, 36-37). As such, he is reminiscent of the image of Boreas, the blowing wind from the very first depictions of the fable of the oak and the reed. While the pliant Posthumus, in the Queen’s words, has “lean’d unto his sentence”, in going quietly into exile, Imogen stands up to the storm: “I something fear my father’s wrath, but nothing/(Always reserv’d my holy duty) what/His rage can do on me” (1, ii, 17-19). In giving way, Posthumus is not really that different from Cloten, who also continually “gives ground” to his opponents. Iachimo, another courtly villain, speaks in the same terms: his intention is to “get ground of your fair mistress; make her go back, even to the yielding” (1, v, 108-110). Again, as the Queen tells Pisanio, “What shalt thou expect,/To be a depender on a thing that leans?” (1, vi, 56-57), that is, to be one who leans upon a leaner. Given this suite of negative implications, it may be no surprise that Posthumus, the one who leans or bends, comes to believe the false charges laid against the upright and constant Imogen. The theme of the first part of the play—standing firm against the storms of adversity—is foregrounded when the Second Lord declares: The heavens hold firm The walls of thy dear honour, keep unshak’d That temple, thy fair mind, that thou mayst stand, T’enjoy thy banish’d lord and this great land! (2, i, 64-67)

“Stand” as used here is a stronger word than one might otherwise expect it to be. The force of the imagery changes, however, the first time that we meet the country men. As they emerge from the mouth of their cave, Belarius makes the moment emblematic in his address to the young men: A goodly day not to keep house with such Whose roof’s as low as ours! Stoop, boys: this gate Instructs you how t’adore the heavens; and bows you

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Chapter Eighteen To a morning’s holy office. The gates of monarchs Are arch’d so high that giants may jet through And keep their impious turbans on, without Good morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven! We house i’ th’ rock, yet use thee not so hardly As prouder livers do. (3, iii, 1-9)

Stooping at the cave entrance is equated with bowing to the heavens. Not to stoop is consistent with impiety and the courts of kings. In saying as much, Belarius is being true to his nature: even while at court, he was, as a tree Whose boughs did bend with fruit. But in one night, A storm, or robbery (call it what you will) Shook down my mellow hanging, nay, my leaves, And left me bare to weather” (3, iii, 60-65).

This reminds us of an emblem of Alciato’s, “In fecunditatem sibi ipsi damnosam”, which through transformations became the woodcut endpiece in Lily’s Latin Grammar, the standard textbook for Elizabethan schoolchildren, which Shakespeare almost certainly knew.44 In Alciato’s emblem (Fig. 18.10) children beat a nut-laden tree in order to cause its fruit to fall. The tree laments that it has borne fruit only to its detriment. In the same way, the pliant and loyal Belarius complains that he has been punished for his virtuous learning by the proud, false and inflexible courtiers, whose archetype is Cymbeline himself. It is for this reason that Belarius has stolen and raised the princes away from the Court: I’ th’ cave wherein they bow, thoughts do hit The roofs of palaces, and Nature prompts them In simple and low things to prince it, much Beyond the trick of others. (3, iv. 83-86)

Bowing and stooping are virtuous in the world-view of Belarius; here, the humble reed would be favoured compared to the overbearing oak. When Imogen comes to the cave, in Act 3, scene vi, she has been reduced from her former stature: once upon the mountain-top (line 5) she now sleeps on the ground, afflicted by hunger and the knowledge of Posthumus’ betrayal, and enters the lowly cave, sword drawn, to seek food. When discovered in the cave, she admits that “almost spent with hunger,/I am fall’n in this offence” (3, vii, 35-36). This fall, however, is not wholly ignoble, for

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famine Ere clean it o’erthrow Nature, makes it valiant. Plenty and peace breeds cowards: hardness ever Of hardiness is mother. (3, vi, 19-22)

So also, the princes exhibit the virtues that living hard in Nature bestows upon them. After Guidarius kills Cloten, the brothers both show great sympathy to Imogen, who lies sick in the cave. Belarius sees this as being emblematic of Nature, as opposed to the Court: O thou goddess, Thou divine Nature; thou thyself thou blazon’st In these two princely boys: they are as gentle As zephyrs blowing below the violet, Not wagging his sweet head; and yet, as rough, (Their royal blood enchaf’d) as the rud’st wind That by the top doth take the mountain pine And make him stoop to th’ vale. (4, ii, 169-176)

This passage reflects such conceptualizations as we saw in Vaenius’ Horatian emblem and contrasts the truly gentle zephyr with the rougher (boreal) wind associated with raw power. The last part of the play brings the court and the country into direct contact through the framing action of the war waged between the rebellious British and their Roman overlords. Cymbeline has determined to pay no more tribute to Rome, and suffers an invasion as a result. The battle goes poorly for the British until the intervention of the valiant young princes and the suicidal Posthumus, who repeatedly urge their countrymen to “stand”. Indeed, the battle repeats on a national level the theme of not “giving ground” that was introduced in the opening scenes at court. By heeding the cry to “Stand” and by following the example of the unknown rustic fighters, the British prevail and the scene is set for unveilings and reconciliation. Indeed, Cymbeline opens the final scene with the injunction to “Stand by my side, you whom the gods have made/Preservers of my throne” (5, v, 1-2); he then has the men “Bow your knees” and then “arise my knights”. This stage bowing directly reflects and transforms the bowing at the cave entrance in Act 3, Scene iii. Later in the scene, Belarius repeats the action: as he reveals himself to Cymbeline, he conspicuously bows, saying: “here’s my knee:/Ere I arise I will prefer my sons” (5, v, 326-327). But if that is not enough, Iachimo must also kneel emblematically to Posthumus, saying: “I am down again:/But now my heavy conscience sinks my knee” (5, v, 413-414).

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Another important emblematic moment occurs when Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled. Imogen, having thrown off her disguise, embraces her penitent husband, who tells her to “Hang there like fruit, my soul,/Till the tree die.” He is the tree, she the dependent, now; this echoes and turns Belarius’ image of himself as hanging fruit beaten from the tree, when estranged from Cymbeline. Posthumus no more gives way; Imogen is no longer forced to stand in the face of her father’s stormy rage. Cymbeline himself must relent, too. He warns Belarius of his wrath, when the old man opposes the king’s order for Guiderius to be punished for killing Cloten. But the explication of the prophecy brings an end to storming and rage. On a personal level, Cymbeline is transformed in the imagery of the play from the rough North Wind to the lofty and majestic cedar, now made whole by the revival of its branches, that is, by the return of the young princes. On a national level, the rebellion of the king is softened by his yielding to pay tribute to the Romans. The play’s language and its stage business is informed by the imagery of standing and falling; raging and bowing; patience and strife; rebellion and obedience. At times the images mean one thing, at times another. The symbolic tableaux that are created on stage successively highlight the thematic complex, which is adumbrated by reference to the oak and the reed at the centre of the play. Emphasis on this unified locus of reference provides a means of tying together what has otherwise been considered a work of somewhat confused genre. In a play clearly redolent with references to emblems, our understanding is enriched by the multiple meanings attached to this central fable, so frequently found in contemporary emblem literature. I think, too, that the interlacing of meanings in the Shakespearean play can be an analogy of how we should reconcile the variety of interpretations given in related emblems, such as those borrowing from the fable of the oak and the reed.

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Fig. 18.1. The oak and the reed in Here Begynneth the Book of the Subtyl Historyes and Fables of Esope (Westminster, 1484).

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Fig. 18.2. “Vincet qui patitur”, Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.3. “Canna, et Quercia”, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Delle imprese trattato (Naples, 1592). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

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Fig. 18.4. “Flectimvr non frangimvr vndis”, Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’Imprese militari et amorose (Rome, 1555). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.5. “Flector sed non frangor”, Luca Contile, Ragionamento de Luca Contile sopra la proprietà delle imprese con le particolari de gli Academici Affidati et con le interpretationi et croniche (Pavia, 1574). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.6. “Frangar non flectar”, Camillo Camilli, Imprese illustri di diuersi (Venice, 1586). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

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Fig. 18.7. “Deposvit potent et exaltavit”, Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou devises chrestiennes (Lyons, 1571). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.8. “Superbi fastus collisus”, Arnold Freitag, Mythologica ethica (Antwerp, 1579). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.9. “Cvlmen honoris lvbricvm”, Otto Vaenius, Quinti Horati Flacci Emblemata (Antwerp, 1607). Courtesy of the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Fig. 18.10. “In fecunditatem sibi ipsi damnosum” from Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Paris, 1584). Private collection.

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Notes 1

This paper is dedicated to the late N. Frederick Nash, former Head of the Rare Book Room, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2 See Leggatt 1977, 191-209. Lawry 1979 warns that oppositions within the play are static and not dialectic in quality and focuses on elements such as Milford Haven that represent or imply transcendence. See also Lewis 1991; GlazovCorrigan 1994; and Innes 2007. 3 For example, in Carr 1978; see also, in “Cymbeline and the Validity of Myth,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978), 316-330; see also Hunt 2002. 4 For example, Geller 1980; and Reynolds 2004. 5 Hayles 1980; Go 2003. 6 Green 1870a. 7 Daly 1984. 8 Simonds 1992. 9 Cho 1998. Cho’s monograph is derived from his 1990 thesis, which predates Simonds’s book. Cho does not include Simonds among his references. 10 Quotations from Cymbeline are from J.M Nosworthy’s Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1955). 11 Rodríguez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 1, 201; Vol. 2, 207; and Vol. 3, 236. 12 Rodriquez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 3, 96. 13 Ibid., 302. 14 Both versions are thought to come from a common predecessor (cf. Ibid., 302). The first—and most common—version comes from Sophocles (in the Antigone) via Demetrius Phalerius, whose fourth-century BC compilation is among the earliest extant, and may even be of Oriental origin (Rodriguez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 3, 96). A prose version appeared among the fables of Aphthonius of Antioch, in the fourth century A.D. In Aphthonius, however, there is no argument: the oak boasts of his strength and of his ability and willingness to stand up against the winds, while belittling the weak reed for submissively bending to the elements. But when a tempest arises and breaks down the tree, the flexible reed survives unharmed. Versions by Babrius (36) and Avianus (16) are more closely related to the second version, also in Demetrius (Rodriquez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 1, 487). 15 Rodriguez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 3, 753 records a number of medieval renditions of the fable, especially the “lengthy version by Nicephorus Chrysoberges”, in which the reed initiates the dialogue. In the medieval versions, the place of the oak is often taken by an olive tree. 16 The first dated illustrated book, Ulrich Boner’s Der Edelstein (Bamberg: Albrecht Pfister, 1461) was based on a fourteenth-century collection of 100 verse fables by Avianus and other sources. See Hodnett 1979, 35. 17 Aesop 1484, ff. lxxviir-v. 18 Rodriquez Adrados 1999-2003, Vol. 3, 861-862. 19 Ibid., 329.

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Simonds 1992, 248-268. The story of the elm and the vine does not appear in the canon of ancient fables. 21 Bregman 2007, especially Chapter 2. 22 Francis Raphelengius, Plantin’s nephew and successor, printed Whitney’s book in Leiden. 23 Junius 1565, 49 (D1r). 24 An ornus (mountain-ash) in Junius. 25 Whitney 1586, 220 (e2v). 26 The learned Junius supplies a somewhat obscure reference from Cornificius: “Qui vitae honestati innititur fortiter patiens, is et tutè vivit, & de inimicis triumphat seriò, talique fortuna etiam adiumento esse solet, quod Cornificius dixit.” The French Emblems at Glasgow project translates and comments on the quotation as follows: “(If you put your trust in the integrity of your life, and brave endurance, you will survive, safe and sound, and will triumph over your enemies in earnest, and in such straits as these, it may even regularly be of assistance, what Cornificius said.) Junius does not list this author in his bibliography. Presumably he is referring to Q. Cornificius, the rhetorician and grammarian, a friend of Cicero’s, to whom Quintilian attributed the Rhetorica ad C. Herennium (the author of which is otherwise known as ‘Auctor ad Herennium’.)” See http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FJUb043. 27 Erasmus 1974-2003, Vol. 4, 97: Letter 476 to Pieter Gillis, Brussels, 6th October 1516. 28 Capaccio 1602; Capaccio 1592, “Nel figurar degli emblemi di molte cose naturali per l’imprese si tratta.” With respect to his position in that work he finds it necessary to answer critics from among the impresa writers, and in particular, Scipione Bargagli, author of Dell’imprese (Venetia: Appresso Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1594). 29 I give the translation of the Loeb edition. 30 Giovio 1585, D7v-D8r: Daniel’s translation, like the earliest editions of the original, did not include illustrations. 31 Camerarius 1590 [i.e. 1593], 95. 32 Contile 1574, ff. 108v-109r (Eev-Ee2r). On the Academia degli Affidati, see Caldwell 2004, 98-129. 33 Camilli 1586, 70-72 (E3v-E4v). 34 This is extremely similar to the device of Archibishop Ascanio Piccolomini, which consisted of a column and the motto, “Frangitur non flectitur” [It is broken, it is not bent] and was included among twelve imprese at the end of his Rime … fatte la maggior parte nella primavera dell’eta sua. Et alla fine d’esse saranno dodici imprese del medesimo, le quali tosto haueranno anco in luce l’esposizioni loro (Siena: Nella stamperia del Bonetto, 1594). 35 N. Frederick Nash, unpublished note. 36 Georgette De Montenay, Emblemes ou deuises chrestiennes (Lyons: Jean Marcorelle, 1571). As noted by The Bibliography of French Emblem Books, a copy of this work dated 1567 has been discovered, but the edition of 1571 was the first to be openly issued. See Adams, Rawles and Saunders 1999-2002, 437-439.

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Mythologia ethica, hoc est, Moralis philosophiae per fabulas brutis attributas ... viridarium. Antverpiae: Philippo Gallaeo Christophorus Plantinus excudebat, 1579, 32-33 (Emblems 096.1 F884m). 38 It is also worth noting that an appropriation of the fable emblem in a religious context is consistent with the later appropriation, especially by the Jesuits, of the love emblem for similar purposes. 39 For example, Gregory the Great’s sixth homily on Matthew: “Arundo vento agitata, non erat Ioannes: quem a status rectitudine, nulla rerum varietas inflectebat” (John was not like a reed shaken in the wind; no variety of events used to bend him, who from rectitude stood upright.) 40 “De Inconstantiâ humanâ, quae per arundinem à sapientiâ aeternâ figuratur”. Engelgrave gives two quotations, the first being the text of Matthew 11, 7, the other from Book 5 of Ovid’s Tristia: “Constans in levitate sua”. 41 See Coriolanus 5, 2, 108-109. Quotations from Coriolanus are from Philip Brockbank’s Arden edition (London and NY: Routledge, c.1976). This is followed in the next scene by a moral battle involving yielding and knee-bending between Coriolanus and his mother. 42 Vaenius 1607, 98-99. This work was very popular. An edition of 1612 using the same plates was accompanied by translations in Spanish, Dutch, Italian and French. 43 Besides the passage from Horace, Odes, Book 2, x, there are quotations from Horace, Epistles Book 2, 2, ll. 199-202; Seneca, Agamemnon; and Ovid, Tristia. 44 Simonds illustrates and discusses this emblem, (see Simonds 1992, 182-185), under the rubric, “The ravished tree”. “It is clear from … passages scattered through the Shorte Introduction that Shakespeare had indelible memories of that book. Clearly he had received the regular drill on the Shorte Introduction itself …”: see Baldwin 1944, 594). I am currently preparing an essay on the subject of this emblem by Alciato and its transmission in England.

CHAPTER NINETEEN NEW RIDDLES FROM THE SPHINX: A DIALOGUE OF EMBLEMS IN BEN JONSON’S MASQUE LOVE FREED FROM IGNORANCE AND FOLLY (1611) JENNIFER J. CRAIG

In the masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), a sphinx dances on stage leading Cupid bound. Ben Jonson’s sphinx has a woman’s face and body, lion’s legs, and eagle’s wings. Cupid appears with his bow and arrows, his hands tied behind him. The sphinx mocks Cupid, demanding he solve a riddle to free himself, or die trying. On that February night in 1611, King James I and his court were presented with an enigma. Despite Jonson’s reliance on classical myth, there seems to be no model in classical or contemporary literature for a dialogue between Cupid and the sphinx. What mythological tradition played before them? Was this the sphinx in Oedipus rex, pinning down a Theban warrior? Classical art depicts the moment to show the oppression of Thebes before Oedipus solved the sphinx’s riddle. This warrior is not a mortal man, however, but winged Cupid, and the sphinx’s riddle is not about the ages of man. Moreover, in the first line the sphinx calls her prisoner “sir TYRANNE, lordly Love”, a phrase taken out of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender that ironically identifies Love, not the sphinx, as the oppressor.1 Is this then Petrarch’s “Triumph of Chastity”? In the triumph, all-conquering Cupid is bound by Laura and other chaste women in order to suppress sinful desire. Although the sphinx is no Laura, the monster has “the face of a mayd” (l. 106), and she has the upper hand while Cupid tries to solve the riddle. Cupid eventually arises triumphant, though, reversing the order of Petrarch’s triumphs of love and chastity. The question remains, what is Jonson’s purpose in pairing Cupid and the sphinx?

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Jonson glosses his meaning in the publication of the masque with a marginal note saying, “By this Sphynx was vnderstood Ignorance, who is alwaies the enemie of Loue, & Beauty” (l. 5n.). “Love Freed” is unusual for Jonson’s use of such interpretative explanations, which facilitate recognition of the sources he employed in his imagery. The sphinx’s identification with ignorance is said to come from Tabula Cebetis, where she is labelled “insipientia” or “foolishness”.2 However, the editor Norman Sanders later attributes it to the emblem tradition.3 Alciato’s 1531 emblem of the sphinx, “Submovendam ignorantiam”, or “Ignorance must be banished”, is a more direct source for Jonson’s use of the word “ignorance” (Fig. 19.1). Alciato’s emblem would also have been familiar to James’s court, where emblems were part of daily life, particularly in performance and ceremony. Enmity against the ideals of love and beauty follows another emblem tradition involving a bound Cupid. In a common emblematic theme, Eros is captured by his brother Anteros, love returned or avenged. This paper will investigate the classical and emblematic traditions involved in creating Jonson’s sphinx and Cupid. After tracing their mythologies and literature, it will outline how Jonson juxtaposes the two characters’ traditions. Finally, through a look at the emblematic types for the two characters, it will attempt to decipher Jonson’s purpose in creating such a strange dialogue between Cupid and the sphinx. Jonson’s sphinx has imprisoned Cupid and his charges, the eleven “Daughters of the Morne”—played by Queen Anne of Denmark and her ladies—in a “prison of the night” (ll. 67, 113). The women were travelling to a western island so that Anne’s character, the “Queene of the Orient”, could marry Phoebus, god of the sun (ll. 70-71). The sphinx captures the ladies once they reach the island, threatening to kill them if they cannot answer her riddle. This creature characterizes Jonson’s antimasque, where evil forces try to destroy a virtuous order that later triumphs in the masque proper. Jonson explains that the sphinx’s form of woman, lion, and eagle shows “her fiercenesse, & swiftnesse to euill, where shee hath power” (l. 5n.). This is nearly a quotation from Natale Conti’s handbook Mythologiae. He says the three parts of the Theban sphinx represent her “cruelty and speed” (“crudelitatem & celeritatem”) which “warns us to return to wisdom and prudence”.4 Although Conti makes it clear that the sphinx is frequently associated with mystery and wisdom in classical literature, he does not mention her symbolism as ignorance. A direct correlation with ignorance is rare. Nevertheless, Jonson cites “Antiquitie” as his source for the monster. In Tabula Cebetis, the character of the interpreter likens the picture to the sphinx and her riddle. The 1560 English translation concludes, “For folie is to men a Spinx [sic]”.5 The

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sphinx in the masque is not Folly herself, but she breeds Follies, who are her twelve daughters. A year before “Love Freed”, John Healey gave an alternative translation for the original Greek word “afrosyni”, or “thoughtlessness”. He writes, “For Ignorance is a Sphynx vnto man”.6 Jonson kept current on translations and would have been aware of Healey’s edition. Claude Mignault cites the analogy in Tabula Cebetis for the symbolism of the sphinx in Alciato’s “Submovendam ignorantiam”.7 Many versions of the sphinx exist, including Geryoneo’s sphinx in Book 5, Canto 11, of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s monster of Catholic idolatry is elaborate and closely follows the mythological handbooks. It has a woman’s face, the body of a dog, lion’s claws, a dragon’s tail, and eagle’s wings, as described by Conti out of Clearchus.8 The monster is one of ignorance, who uses “like slight/To many a one, which came vnto her school,/Whom she did put to death, deceiued like a fool!”.9 Alciato’s description has the same features as Jonson’s, however: the woman’s face, lion’s body, and wings. The illustration is without wings, though, until 1621, due to the artist’s apparently literal interpretation of the word “pennas”, or “feathers”. To Alciato, the sphinx represents ignorance derived from frivolity, arrogance, and lust. In order for man to overcome the causes and unlock the riddle’s wisdom, he must realize the “Delphic letter”, or he must know himself.10 If he knows this, he will possess the basic knowledge of humanity found in the sphinx’s riddle on the ages of man. Alciato combines the Theban riddle with Cebes’ sphinx. Similarly, Jonson’s sphinx combines the two traditions. The sphinx poses her riddle to Cupid from a cliff, echoing Oedipus rex. She simultaneously keeps her captives in ignorance—“in the dark”—in a new feature, the “prison of the night”. Like ignorance in Alciato, she mocks Cupid for his frivolity, arrogance, and lust. She accuses him of pride, saying “You presume, vpon your artes,/Of tying and vntying hearts” (ll. 137-139). Cupid himself proves his frivolity when he cannot answer the riddle, but the sphinx points this out saying, “Cupid, you doe cast too farre” (l. 180). When Cupid insists the answer is a woman, the sphinx indicates his lustful nature saying “Doe you finde by this, how long/You haue beene at a fault, and wrong?” (ll. 230-231). She then exclaims “I of right must haue you” (l. 243) and has him carried off in punishment, identifying her role over the ignorant. In addition, the odd illustration of an upright sphinx lends itself to Jonson’s character, who dances onto stage according to the stage directions. It is difficult to imagine a Greek sphinx or Egypt’s reclining sphinx dancing on all fours, and even harder to imagine an actor doing so before King James.

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The sphinx may confuse Cupid and imprison his women in darkness, but according to tradition she learns the meaning of her riddle “first from the Muses” or the divine (l. 276). This is her riddle: First, Cupid, you must cast about To find a world the world without, Wherein what’s done, the eie doth doe; And is the light, and treasure too. This eye still moues, and still is fixed, And in the powers thereof are mixed Two contraries; which Time, till now, Nor Fate knew where to ioyne, or how. Yet, if you hit the right vpon, You must resolue these, all, by on. (ll. 160-169)

A moving but fixed eye is the cryptic symbol. It is Horapollo’s hieroglyph representing God. The symbol is later found in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Piero Valeriano Bolzani’s Hieroglyphica. Here, the eye is not only God, but God, King, and Country combined. The answer is in the last three syllables: “all by on”, or Albion. Albion is the mythic name for James and his island kingdom. The eye of God is an appropriate symbol given James’s claim to the divine right of kings. But why does a Greek sphinx use an Egyptian hieroglyph? First, it must be noted that it was not uncommon to fuse—or confuse—the Greek and Egyptian traditions of the sphinx in the early modern period. Secondly, Valeriano explains out of Plutarch: “the Egyptians had sculptures of Sphinxes in all their temples, to indicate that divine knowledge must be protected from the vulgar by enigmatic symbolism”.11 Mignault also notes this in his Syntagma. The sphinx’s cliff is on the island of the sun king - or of King James. On this sacred ground the Greek sphinx expounds the name of its god in riddle, at the same time making herself the Egyptian gatekeeper of divine knowledge. Only the wise and virtuous shall pass into the island’s inner sanctum; the vulgar and unlearned are left in her darkness. The audience is to understand that they are the privileged to whom divine truth will be revealed - if they can read the signs. Following Plutarch is Hadrianus Junius’ emblem “Deum & ama & time” (Both love and fear God). He sets his sphinx outside a temple as a symbol of God Himself. The presence warns mortals to love God for His mercy to the good and fear Him for His wrath against the sinful. Junius explains that the sphinx possesses a double nature, which like the sphinx of Thebes is expressed through her physical appearance: half lion, half girl.12 This

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concept resembles Jonson’s sphinx, who not only protects divine knowledge but gives an interpretation of it in hieroglyphs. Love is led onto stage by the sphinx, his hands bound. According to the lists of expenses, his costume is “fleshed collored satten” with “Lace and puffes”.13 He appears both naked and adorned—or perhaps tied—with braided laces.14 After the sphinx taunts him for his power to “lay/The world wast” (ll. 24-25), Cupid insists he keeps the world from chaos and offers to sacrifice himself in place of the women. Once the sphinx poses the riddle, though, he struggles to answer it. He suggests it is “the new world i’ the Moone” proposed by Galileo (l. 178), and when that fails he thinks the answer is a lady and her virtues. Having proved his stupidity, the Follies carry him off to be executed. The priests of the Muses then sing and point Cupid in the right direction, toward James’s throne. He answers “Albion”. The sphinx and the Follies throw themselves off their cliff, the Daughters of the Morne are free to dance the revels before their Phoebus, and Cupid is crowned by the Three Graces. In a reversal of Petrarch’s triumphs, Love bound eventually triumphs over his captor. Through the catalyst of divine knowledge, the tableau of Love bound is transformed into that of divine love. Certainly, when the Follies carry Cupid off, Jonson notes, “This shewes, that Loues expositions are not alway serious, till it be diuinely instructed” (l. 250n). In the beginning of “Love Freed”, the sphinx recalls the “Triumph of Love”, saying to Cupid: All the Triumphs, all the spoiles Gotten by your artes, and toiles, Ouer foe, and ouer friend, O’re your mother, here must end (ll. 20-23)

She calls Cupid a tyrant, acting as saviour to those stung by Cupid’s arrows. Petrarch does not mention Cupid’s victory over Venus, however. In his source “Cupido Cruciatus”, or “Cupid Crucified”, by Ausonius, Cupid is tied to a tree and beaten by Venus and other women who suffered under Love’s hands.15 Due to Ausonius and Petrarch, Love bound represents the repression of sinful desire throughout the early modern era. In fact, Ausonius’ poem about lustful and bound Cupid is translated in full by Vincenzo Cartari at the end of his entry on Cupid in his popular mythological handbook. The reference sums up Cartari’s entry, which stresses the falsity of Cupid’s divinity and his many representations of profane, human love.16 Erwin Panofsky explains that the image indicates “pure” love’s defeat of “sensual” love—although he does not go into great detail about this image.17

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A common manifestation is the theme of Eros and Anteros. The original story of Eros and Anteros comes from Pausanias, who mentions Anteros as the god of vengeance for unrequited love. In another version by Themistius in the fourth century, Aphrodite gives birth to Anteros, or Love returned, in order to stimulate growth in infantile Eros. The conflicting renditions of the name Anteros sparked debate among early modern mythographers, who wondered whether this second Eros was the god of vengeance for wronged lovers or of reciprocal love. Alciato in his emblem “ǹȞIJİȡȦȢ Amor virtutis alium Cupidinem superans” (Anteros, The love of virtue, overcoming the other Cupid), uses yet another source. He translates the Greek Anthology 16, 251 where Nemesis sets the avenger against Eros in order to give him a taste of his own medicine. Alciato’s use of the theme was well known. Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, in the thirteenth Syntagma of his De deis gentium, alludes to Alciato’s emblem before detailing the Anthology’s version of Anteros.18 The verse in both the Anthology and Alciato does not mention Eros being put into bonds, though, and the woodcut in Alciato’s 1531 edition does not reflect this either. However, from the Lyons 1534 edition onwards, the image focuses on Anteros binding Cupid to a pillar or tree (Fig. 19.2).19 As Neo-Platonism evolves, “love returned” assumes the violent overtone of a divine “love avenged”.20 Through this visual rendition of Love bound, the audience of the masque sees victory over profane love by a strange Anteros. The image is sustained by the sphinx’s self-righteous words and bound Cupid’s insistence that the answer to the riddle is “a Lady”. This answer is also a Petrarchan conceit scorned by Elizabethan and Jacobean poets who favoured divine or virtuous love. Following the sphinx’s speech, Cupid justifies himself. He is not profane love but one that “rather striue[s]/How to keepe the world aliue/And vphold it” for “without [him],/All againe would Chaos bee” (ll. 27-30). This is cosmic and divine love, whose arrows pierce the world to hold it together in Otto Vaenius’ emblem “All depends vpon love” in Amorum emblemata (1608), where winged Cupid repeatedly shoots a globe with his darts for this purpose.21 He is only unable to answer the riddle under the sphinx’s power since she by nature “perplexe[s] Things most easie” (ll. 234-235). He is the true Anteros, the virtuous love defined by Alciato. In Emblem 110, “ǺȄȊ‫׉‬ȈȎȉ, id est AMOR virtutis (Anteros, which is the love of virtue), Anteros has four crowns, the first of which is Wisdom (Fig. 19.3). When Cupid is inspired with the answer “Albion”, the three Graces crown him saying: A Crowne, a crowne for LOVES bright head, Without whose happie wit

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Cupid is crowned for his wit, which has saved both the Daughters of the Morne and all virtue. In the emblem, Anteros explains his virtue saying, “Nothing in me welcomes the common Venus, and no form of pleasure has captivated me. But I kindle in the uncorrupted minds of men the fires of learning, and draw their spirits to the lofty stars”.22 Similarly, Cupid says to the men at court: And to light your selues enlarge, To behold that glorious starre, For whose loue you came so farre, (ll. 308-310)

The star attained is James, the Apollo of the court. Like the sun god, James is said to inspire his subjects with his participation and patronage in learning and the arts. Since those watching the masque are already near this “star”, Cupid asks the audience to “light [them] selues” with what is most certainly his “fires of learning” in order to show their love for the king, their second Solomon. Jonson uses myth traditions prevalent in emblem literature in order to portray two paradoxes in Cupid and the sphinx – or as the sphinx says in the riddle, their “two contraries”. The sphinx represents both Alciato’s brand of ignorance and Junius’ protection of sacred knowledge. Cupid bound and freed is at once profane and learned love, like Eros and Anteros in Alciato’s two emblems on the love of virtue. The sphinx tries to hide their true identities by labelling bound Cupid “lordly Love”. The more the spectator knows about the types of sphinxes and Cupids, though, the more they understand the masque’s mysteries. The key to deciphering their appearance together lies in Cupid and the sphinx’s approach to the riddle of the eye. In Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Edgar Wind admires how closely Jonson’s riddle follows the rules for the “serious games” (serio ludus) of Nicolaus Cusanus. According to Cusanus—and later Giordano Bruno—metaphorical exercises like the riddle can guide the mind toward knowledge of a “concealed God”. Through such metaphors the union of paradoxical elements in the nature of God is said to be mystically revealed. The revelation comes when logic is combined with inspiration, in what Cusanus terms “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) in his essay of the same name. In his other work, De visione Dei, one of these metaphors is the moving but fixed eye of God. Others are incorporated into the riddle, including Jonson’s expression for the island of Britain: “the world, the world without”.23 Jonson, who wanted his masques to rise above their stereotype as shallow spectacle, takes every

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opportunity to insert into the masques riddles, anagrams, emblems, and other kinds of instructive entertainment. He wants his noble audience to seek what he calls “more remou’d mysteries”.24 When Cupid and the sphinx discuss the riddle, they are at once participating in and part of such serio ludus. The sphinx is the guardian protecting the mysteries of Albion, the god of the court. Through her role as Ignorance, she keeps Cupid blind to the answer. Her paradox as both possessor and obscurer of knowledge is thus fulfilled. She is the metaphor itself and dies when the truth is revealed. Despite being bound, Cupid tries to answer the riddle line by line using reason, and in so doing plays the learned man approaching the metaphors of Cusanus. He gives worldly answers wrapped in further simile: the new world in the moon (ll. 177-178), the microcosm of man (ll. 185-186), the eye as the two eyes of his Lady (ll. 203-206), and finally the contradictions of smiles and tears or fire and frost in women (ll. 222-224). Reason alone is not enough, however, and he is left begging the audience for help. Only when he is carted away by Ignorance do the “Muses Priests”—who are literally philosophers in classical terms—descend with inspiration. Cupid no longer has to break down the riddle to find the solution. He can answer each line in one speech, showing the union of God, King, and Country. In the process, Cupid displays how a learned man in his all-too-human state may attain divine transcendence. Profane love of wisdom combines with the sacred, or bound Eros is united with Anteros in one body. All in all, the dialogue of love with ignorance becomes a demonstration of how a courtier must approach the King with not only devotion but acknowledgement of his divine right to govern. Although Jonson’s Cupid and sphinx make a strange pair, their emblematic traditions reveal the reason for their dialogue. The history of meaning abbreviated in these emblems not only make for succinct memory devices with which to recall the characters, but allow for additional interpretation of Jonson’s figures within their wider classical and contemporary traditions. While the sphinx and Cupid do not seem to share a common origin, the victory of Cupid over the mysteries of the sphinx seems to have found its way into late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury visual arts. Decorative woodcuts and several sculptures show garlanded putti riding the sphinx. A particularly famous statue in the gardens of Versailles has a laughing putto holding a crown of flowers while astride an Egyptian sphinx. A Rococo version from the palace of Sanssouci in Germany has two cupids. One has his head covered with a veil and the other rides on the sphinx’s back. This statue does not prove the existence of an established tradition involving the two creatures -

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perhaps such a tradition is yet to be uncovered. Still, this statue seems to support the discourse between Cupid and the sphinx in “Love Freed”. An ignorant Cupid is veiled and trapped in her claws, while another sits above her and grasps her tail, about to conquer the sphinx’s mystery.

Fig. 19.1. “Submovendam Ignorantiam”, Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531). Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department: Sp Coll S.M. 18. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 19.2. “Anteros, amor uirtutis alium Cupidinem superans”, Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1534). Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department: Sp Coll S.M. Add. 53. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 19.3. “Anteros, id est, AMOR uirtutis”, Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber, (Augsburg: 28th February, 1531). Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department: Sp Col S.M. 18. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library

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Notes 1

“Love Freed from Ignorance and Follie”, Jonson 1941, l. 6. All masque quotations cited hereafter are from the transcription in Herford and Simpson 1941. In “October” of The Shepheardes Calender, the shepherd boy Cuddie exclaims, “For lordly loue is such a Tyranne fell:/That where he rules, all power he doth expel”. 2 Herford and Simpson 1950, 530, n. 5. 3 Sanders 1967, 75. 4 “Atque ut summatim dicam, nos monere per hanc fabulam sapientes volverunt aut prudential.” Conti 1551, 286-287; English translation from Moffitt 1993, 289. 5 Poyntz 1557, sig. AIIIIr. 6 Healey 1610, sig. F7v. 7 Alciato 1621, 797, 801. 8 Conti 1551, 286-287. 9 Spenser 1611, Book 5, 11, 25, 293. 10 The Delphic letter is a bronze cast “E” at the oracle at Delphi. Plutarch speculates about the E in his essay “The E at Delphi”. He concludes that the letter is connected to “Gnothi sauton”, which translates as “know thyself”. “The E at Delphi”, Plutarch 1936, 253; “Submovendam ignorantiam”, Alciato at Glasgow 2008, http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=A31a047. 11 Valeriano 1602, 60; translation in Manning 2002, 20; cf. “Isis and Osiris”, Plutarch 1936, 9. 12 Emblem 42, Junius 1565, 48, 131-133; “Deum & ama & time”, French Emblems at Glasgow 2008, http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FJUb042. 13 Herford and Simpson 1950, 529. 14 All late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century quotations given in the OED for “lace” refer not to the delicate fabric but to braided cord and its use as trim. 15 Ausonius 1919, 206-215. Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White 16 Cartari 1556, 107-110; Hyde 1986, 107. 17 Panofsky 1972, 126-127. 18 Giraldi 1548, 565; Merrill 1944, 277-278. 19 Alciato 1531, sig. D6v; Alciato 1534, 76; cf. Emblem CXI, Mignault 1621, 461; “Commentary on Emblem 111”, Alciato’s Book of Emblems 2008, http://www.mun.ca/alciato/c111.html. 20 Panofsky 1972, 126. 21 Vaenius 1608, 34-35. 22 “[V]nde aliam tempora cincta gerunt,/Haud mihi vulgari est hospes cum Cypride quicquam/Vlla voluptas nos neque forma tulit./Sed puris hominum succendo mentibus ignes,/Disciplinae animos astraque ad alta traho.” Alciato 1531, sig. E1v; translated by Virginia Woods Callahan and Paola Valeri-Tomaszuk in Emblem 110, Alciato’s Book of Emblems 2008, http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e110.html. 23 Wind 1968, 218-224. 24 “Hymenaei” (1606), in Jonson 1941, ll. 18-19.

CHAPTER TWENTY EMBLEM AND EXEMPLUM IN MAURICE SCÈVE’S DÉLIE: OBJECT DE PLUS HAULTE VERTU (1544) MICHAEL J. GIORDANO

Maurice Scève’s Délie: object de plus haulte vertu was published in Lyons by Antoine Constantin in 1544. The success of this work is indicated by the fact that it was printed a second time in 1564 by Nicolas Du Chemin in Paris with new type and clearer, more detailed woodcuts. Literary historians have considered Scève the first French writer of imprese and the first French author to compose a Petrarchan canzoniere.1 The 450 poems of this work sing the melancholic plaint of an unrequited lover who discovers through countless rejections higher planes of knowledge and a renewal of spiritual energy or vertu. In Délie, there are fifty woodcuts, each one consisting of a theme-picture and motto set in a geometric pattern decorated by an ornate surround. Forty-nine of these are imprese, but the very last picture is strictly speaking an emblem.2 Usually the motto of each illustration is echoed in the last line of its companion poem, thereby associating word and image. A family of poems in Délie has been given the name “historical dizains” by such critics as Ruth Mulhauser, Diane Cook, and Cynthia Skenazi who, along with I.D. McFarlane, have deepened our understanding of their meaning.3 Some twenty-five historical dizains are scattered throughout the love poems proper making reference to such contemporary events as the treason of the Connétable de Bourbon, the visit of Pope Clement VII to Marseille, the Battle of Pavia, the expeditions of Charles V to Tunis and his invasion of Provence, the martyrdom of Thomas More, and the deaths of Erasmus and Budé. Some of these poems praise François I, Marguerite de Navarre, and French nationalism.4 The relation between the historical poems and the woodcuts opens up a number of textual paradoxes. At first glance, the pictures make no direct

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reference to history, but rather to the psychological state of the poet-lover. Also, the thematic content of the illustrations are drawn not from contemporary historical events, but from classical mythology, mythological animals, alchemy, biblical episodes, and scenes of everyday life. As examples of these categories, one may cite such figures as Actaeon and Narcissus, the unicorn and the basilisk, the alembic, the Tower of Babel, a clock, a woman churning butter, a cat, spider, and bat.5 Moreover, references to political events spring up quite unexpectedly in successive dizains and appear to interrupt the love poems proper. For example, what is the connection between D 297, consisting of a portrait poem contemplating the beloved’s countenance, and D 298, making reference to the 1472 defeat of Charles the Bold in Picardy and the 1542 defeat of Charles V in the same province? Likewise, within a single poem, allusion to a precise historical event seems to have little to do with the poet-lover’s self-enclosed, interior monologue. For instance, in D 432, it is difficult to seize the connection between the lover’s rare moment of equipoise balancing his senses and intellect, and his reference to the 1541 military campaign of the Turks into Hungary. Finally, the order in which the historical events are presented is not governed by temporal succession but by scrambling time references throughout the poetic sequence. Chronology and poetic progression are frequently out of sync. For instance, the 1535 execution of Thomas More in D 147 is placed after Henry VIII’s 1542 accusations against Catherine Howard in D 85, and the Catherine Howard event of 1542 is told well before Charles V’s 1539 passage through France in D 389. In Gérard Genette’s terms, there is an anachronie between historical events and the discursive order in which they are mentioned.6 A number of these interpretative challenges regarding the meaning of history in Délie become understandable when we realize that Scève’s persona is primarily interested in highlighting examples of character traits derived from historical figures rather than in delineating a chronology of events. As such, the poet-lover uses epideictic rhetoric to praise or blame the political, military, or religious acts of his contemporaries. Based upon Platonic and Neo-Platonic principles, he extracts from historical circumstances the virtues and vices to be lauded or satirized. Keeping in mind that Délie is preoccupied with the refinement of virtue, one sees that the poet-lover is commenting on the relation between civic virtues and the well-ordered soul. The theory behind such a procedure has Platonic sources. In Plato’s Republic the king must guide political justice by the higher aims of intellectual vision, so that the State is a mirror of the individual soul

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striving for balance among the three forces of the senses, the spirit, and the intellect.7 In the Enneads, Plotinus assigns the civic virtues to the first step in the soul’s route to purification whose point of departure is measure: The civic virtues . . . do genuinely set us in order and make us better by giving limit and measure to our desires, and putting measure into all our experience; and they abolish false opinions, by what is altogether better and by the fact of limitation, and by the exclusion of the unmeasured and indefinite in accord with their measuredness; and they are themselves limited and clearly defined. (1, 2:2)8

Scève’s persona looks inward to his soul and the virtues that guide him to Délie in order to judge public morality, or, reciprocally, to summon examples of historical events that refine his wisdom. Ironically, his attitude towards time, and in particular towards public conduct, devolves upon self-purification which necessitates distancing himself from the time of an event to extract its ethical lesson. It is the method of exemplum that is prominent in Délie. In his book entitled Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy, John D. Lyons notes that the word exemplum is “etymologically akin to the verb eximere, ‘to take out, to remove, to take away, to free, to make an exception of’”.9 This concept accords well with Daniel Russell’s notion of the emblematic process of “fragmentation”, “recombination,” and “variation”.10 In other words, the Neo-Platonic tendency of Scève combines with the process of emblematization to provide exempla of conduct in history that ultimately redound to the poet-lover’s pursuit of virtue. One example where an historical poem uses the same emblematic image as a device is D 318. The common ground is the peacock which links this poem to the thirty-fourth device titled “Le Paon”. Since the impresa precedes D 318 by sixteen poems, the reader will have remembered this image as offering a visual context for the poem’s satire. In D 318, the poet-lover uses the Treaty of Nice to provoke moral reflection on Eros, moral miscalculation, and wishful thinking. Jà tout haultain en moy je me paonnois De ce, qu’Amour l’avoit peu inciter: Mais seurement (à ce, que je cognois) Quand il me vint du bien feliciter, Et la promesse au long me reciter Il me servit d’vn tresfaulx Truchement. Que diray donc de ceste abouchement, Que Lygurie, et Provence, et Venisse

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Ont veu (en vain) assembler richement Espaigne, France, et Italie, à Nice? (D 318) (Already quite proud, in my own mind I strutted like a peacock Because Cupid had been able to touch her, But surely [from what I can tell] When he came to congratulate me for this accomplishment, And to recite to me at length the promise, He served me as a very false intermediary. What will I say of this conversation At which Liguris, Provence and Venice Saw Spain, France, and Italy Assemble richly [in vain] at Nice?)

Lines 7-10 of the poem offer a compressed and laconic reference to the efforts of Pope Paul III’s initiative in 1538 to ease the strife in Europe by arranging a truce at Nice between Charles V of Spain and François I of France. Having personally mediated negotiations with the ambassadors of both sides, he finally succeeded in bringing about an apparent truce. However, his counsel and diplomacy were in vain, since neither party wanted a permanent agreement. Compounding the Pope’s problems was the dissimulation of both leaders who, not having seen one another at Nice, insincerely agreed to seal the pact at Aigues-Mortes by displays of affection and friendship. Three years later, war broke out again when Charles reasserted his claims on the three states of Liguria, Provence, and Venice (l. 8) which provoked new French campaigns in Italy.11 Scève’s allusion to the southern city of Aigues-Mortas as the rulers’ meeting place is a veiled reference to poor peace prospects, since the Latin name given to this site in the tenth-century was “Ayga Mortas” meaning “Dead Waters”. Lines 1-6 of the poem constitute a short narrative on false expectations and blinding pride appropriately captured by the verb “paonnais”—“I was strutting like a peacock” (l. 1). The essence of the poet-lover’s tale is that Cupid (“Amour”, l. 2) is an unreliable counsellor who induces false hope. However, whatever the core idea of this dizain, the abrupt and unanticipated change in its subject from love to politics causes perplexity, compelling the reader to find the abstract links between the two levels. The peacock is an emblematic nodal point which symbolizes a number of imprudent suppositions common to the historical figures and the poet-lover. First, this device characterizes the lover as self-assured, smug, and already triumphant that the woman has made a “promesse” (l. 5) to him. This resembles the Pope who confuses his own incitements to peace with the real promise of a lasting pact. Also, the lover’s pride in his ability to impress the beloved, figured by the peacock’s ravishing parade of colours,

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is like those richly assembled diplomats (“assembler richement”, l. 9) whose ritualistic display unknowingly disguises an utterly vain agreement. Connected to the deceptions of such ceremonies is the tripartite enumeration of the three states and the three countries involved in the hostilities, France, Spain, and Italy. The officiousness of this elegant procession belies the false intention of the leaders. The symmetrical roll call of combatants and diplomats in rank and file (l. 8, l. 10) is the perfect parody of the peacock’s ostentatious but misleading strut. Both are captivating motions devoid of efficacious acts, for this diplomacy is nothing but “abouchement” (l. 7). This devastating word denotes “conversation” but it connotes the idea of bringing two mouths together, not for love or honest exchange, but merely for mouthing words. In the formal recitation of terms binding the putative peace-makers, one can see an apposite similarity to the poet-lover’s situation where Love as herald comes to recite Délie’s supposed promise to the eager lover: “Quand il me vint du bien feliciter,/Et la promesse au long me recite” (ll. 4-5). The lover’s erroneous decoding of Eros’ deceptive words looms large here, just as it does in the work as a whole. That the woman has somehow made a promise to the lover is a spurious assumption—a “tresfaulx Truchement” (l. 6) which also alludes to the Pope’s wishful thinking. Neither the lover nor the Pope succeed in tracing back the relay of signs to a reliable source to justify their suppositions, for the former now admits he was “haultain” (l. 1) just as the latter failed to unravel the intentions of the two absent diplomats. Moreover, the pretence of celebration by Charles and François at Aigues-Mortes is like Eros’ false greeting of congratulations to the lover (“. . . il me vint du bien feliciter”- l. 4)—a momentary félicitations but not the felicity of “beatitude” brought about by the recognition of higher virtue (D 305, l. 2). Towards the end of the dizain, the poet-lover uses the expression “en vain” (l. 8) as an apt devise of love and politics, meaning both empty and proud. One source of devices used by Scève in poems not accompanied by a pictura was the personal impresa of historical figures. For example, dizains 19-21 are concerned with the Duke of Bourbon, the highest ranking vassal to François I who defected to the cause of Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain. Angry at François for having intrigued in legal manoeuvres to overthrow a will and obtain much of his landed inheritance, the Duke joined forces with Charles who was considered France’s arch enemy. In 1523, Bourbon retired to Germany to plot rebellion against François in an alliance with Charles V and Henry VIII of England. Though Bourbon was among those who took part in the defeat of François at Pavia, he unsuccessfully attacked

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Marseilles and later lost his life leading his Lutheran troops in a battle preliminary to the Sack of Rome.12 In the twenty-first dizain Scève’s emblematic depiction of the Duke densely encapsulates a moral parody. Thanks to Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’Imprese (1555), we know that Bourbon had a device made for himself whose pictura was a stag with wings bearing the motto “Cursum intendimus alis”.13 Giovio glosses the picture with the descriptive phrase “un Cervo con l’ali”. These words appear in slightly altered form in the first line of dizain 21: Le Cerf volant aux aboys de l’Austruche Hors de son giste esperdu s’envola: Sur le plus hault de l’Europe il se jusche, Cuydant trouver seurté, et repos là, Lieu sacre, et sainct, lequel il viola Par main à tous prophanément notoyre. Aussi par mort precedent victoye Luy fut son nom insignément playé, Comme au besoing pour son loz meritoyre De foy semblable à la sienne payé. (21) (The Flying Stag, hard pressed by the Ostrich, From his lair, bewildered, flew away. Upon the highest part of Europe he alights, Thinking to find security and rest there, Sacred and saintly place which he violated With a hand known profane by all. And so by death preceding the victory Was his name conspicuously dishonoured, As needs be, for his merited renown With faith like his own was paid back.)

In “The Flying Stag pressed by the barking dogs of the Ostrich” (l. 1), the flying stag is Bourbon and the Ostrich, Charles V.14 The proper noun “Austruche” is an emblematic pun bringing together Ostrich and Austria to characterize Charles’s ostentation, native belligerence, and incessant manoeuvring. While the heroic meaning of the Connétable’s armorial blazon conveys extraordinary speed that overcomes all difficulty, the dizain concisely parodies these putative powers in three ways. First, the Duke principally moves not by his own powers but by the barking calls (“aux aboys”) of Charles. Implied in the onomatopoetic “aux aboys” is that Bourbon is Charles’ personal running dog. The second parodic meaning becomes clearer when we recall that the motto of the Duke’s impresa is “Cursum intendimus alis.” While the motto implies running

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with speed that overcomes any obstacle, it is the opposite of the Duke’s fate, who did flee to Rome but only to meet his death. Third, Bourbon’s infamy in violating the Holy City is indicated not only in the adjectival phrase of line 6 “Prophanément notoyre” (“notoriously profane”), but also in the punning connotation of “Volant”, meaning the act of stealing and plundering. Finally, in lines 7-8, we read “Aussi par mort precedant la victoyre/Luy fut son nom insignément playé” (“Thus by death preceding the victory/Was his name conspicuously wounded”). In the adverbial participle “insignément playé”, Scève’s persona makes an anti-impresa of the Connétable’s actions, self-reflexively punning on the Duke who has undone himself and degraded his personal “insignia”. If the purpose of any heroic, armorial blason is to brandish the ideal attitude of its bearer, then Bourbon is depicted as actively wounding his honour and reputation. Délie is so written as to encourage the reader to transpose the meaning of a given device to non-companion poems throughout the work. Therefore, readers wishing to make sense of the conduct of Bourbon and Charles in the context of the love poetry will have to backtrack to Impresa 2 that precedes D 21. Titled “La Lune à deux croiscentz”, the picture shows the moon and two crescents surrounded by smaller stars and encircled by the motto “Entre toutes vne parfaicte”. This device and its companion poem addressed to Délie offer a view of human conduct that contrasts sharply but in similar terms with the Duke’s treason. Toy seule as fait, que ce vil Siecle avare, Et aveuglé de tout sain jugement, Contre l’utile ardemment se prepare Pour l’esbranler à meilleur changement: Et plus ne hayt l’honneste estrangement, Commençant jà à cherir la vertu. Aussi par toy ce grand Monstre abatu, Qui l’Univers de son odeur infecte, T’adorera soubz tes pieds combatu, Comme qui est entre toutes parfaicte. (D 15) (You alone are the cause that this vile world, miserly And blinded from all healthy judgment, prepares itself, Against material gain ardently prepares itself, To move it towards betterment. So that the world no longer hates honourable meditation, Beginning already to cherish virtue. And so, because of you, this great downcast monster, That infects the universe with its odour, Overcome, will adore you at your feet, As one who is among all things perfect.)

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The poet-lover stresses in military terms that the beloved has come to Earth to crush Leviathan under her feet: “Ce grand Monstre abatu,/…/ T’adorera soubz tes pieds combat” (ll. 7-8). Though Délie is a pagan goddess, there is nevertheless an allusion here to the iconography of “Marie, Lumière du monde . . . terrasse sous ses pieds la Mort et le Dragon d’enfer” (“Mary, Light of the world . . . crushes Death and the Devil under foot”).15 The triumphant martial tone of dizain 15 textually foresees what the poet-lover views as its moral opposite - the sack of Rome by Bourbon and Charles V recounted in dizain 21. In turn dizain 21 retroactively provides a religious context in which to judge Bourbon’s morality. That is, in contrast to Délie who crushes evil underfoot (15, l. 9), Bourbon has profaned the Holy City by a deed “prophanément notoyre” (D 21, l. 6). The insistence on the word “notorious” coupled with “à tous”, “seen by all”, paint the scene as universal condemnation and thereby harks back to the contrasting pictura in the device of Délie’s moral force dominating the heavens. According to the iconographer Terverant, the moon stood for the promise of the future.16 In this regard, the coming of Délie is a moral advent proclaimed in messianic tones. Analogous to a military enterprise, but set in a moral framework, the woman comes “to make tremble or to shake her age to ethical improvement” (“esbranler à meilleur changement” [D 15, l. 4]). She will inspire the world to “honneste estrangement” (l. 5) meaning the philosophic attitude of meditative solitude, moral introspection, and contemplative separation that renews the spirit and separates it from base desire. This is opposed to the “vile miserly world” (“ce vile Siecle avare,” l. 1) whose cupidity is manifest in Charles V and the Duke of Bourbon. The contrast could not be more relevant between the Flying Stag and the “Women above all Perfect” - greedy motion versus the paradigmatic ideal of moral stability. Scève’s satire is also stated in monetary or economic terms. The running dog of Charles V, so treacherously treasonous, is described sarcastically in D 21 as the example of fidelity well paid by death: “De foy semblable à la sienne payé” (l. 10). There is a final contrast between Impresa 2 and the historical account of the Duke’s demise. In the device’s companion poem, greed, acquisitiveness, and the accumulation of material riches provoke the poetlover to criticize his age as “blinded from all healthy judgement” (“aveuglé de tout sain jugement”- D 15, l. 2) and infected by the vile odour of Leviathan (“son odeur infecte”- D 15, l. 8). This notion of violating nature’s way by unhealthy, even perverted judgment is exemplified by the Duke who incurs the natural sanctions of being disgraced and left without a country. For Charles’s barking rouses him from his natural abode (his

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lair in France) to fly to self-defeating war only to die in a country not his own: “Hors de son giste esperdu s’envola” (D 21, l. 2). On the other hand, the cosmological scene of the second device shows a universe in perfect poise and balance, with the Moon dominating the lesser stars. The movements of the cosmos guided by Délie are shown as following an orderly course from first to last in a predictable cycle of celestial motion. The decresant moon is on the left, the increscent moon on the right, and the full moon at the centre. This is in contrast to the disordered and vertiginous belligerence of Charles and Bourbon. We have seen that in the poems of Délie Scève may use devices already made for political figures and use them obliquely to allude to one of the work’s fifty pictures. However, Scève’s very poesis is bound to moralizing on a picture which saturates the meaning of an entire poem. Such structures may not be emblems or devices per se, but they do reveal what Valérie Hayaert calls the “mens emblématique.”17 One procedure characteristic of Scève is what Henri Morier terms the “périphrase-image”, a kind of verbal indirection in which a brief, vivid phase or noun is used metonymically to symbolize and visualize another word or level of meaning.18 For example, D 85 is centred on the lover’s apostrophe, “ô Albion” (l. 5) that signifies the white cliffs of England and symbolizes the purity and fidelity lacking in Henry VIII’s adulteries and malicious lies. The poem moves from the poet-lover’s denunciation of calumnies against Délie to his indictment of Henry VIII’s hypocrisy coupled with praise for a “Lady’s” honour: Non sur toy seule Envie a faict ce songe, Mais en maintz lieux, et plus hault mille fois. Et si en toy elle est veue mensonge, Pour verité se troeuve toutefois. Et pour spectacle, ô Albion, tu vois Malice honneur aujourdhuy contrefaire, Pour à ta Dame un tel oultrage faire, Qu’elle a plus cher à honte, et villainie, De sa Coronne, et de soy se deffaire, Que veoir Amour ceder à Calumnie. (D 85) (Not on you alone has Envy placed this falsehood, But in many places has it done so, and to those Placed a thousand times higher. And if, in you, it is seen to be a lie, It is taken for the truth, all the same. And for spectacle, O Albion, you see Malice playing the part of honour now,

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To do such outrage to your Lady That she prefers, in shame and disgrace, To rid herself of crown and life Than see Love give way to Calumny.)

“Albion” unites the two parts of the poem by being the positive standard against which the vice of libel should be judged. Just as lines 1-4 point out that calumnies against Délie are taken for truth, so do verses 5-10 criticize the lies imposed on England by Henry VIII’s scandalous condemnation against an unspecified “Dame” (l. 7). This “Dame” may be Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, or Catherine Howard.19 Thus, the microcosm of the poet’s love is tied to the political catastrophe of Henry VIII’s divorce and split with the Roman Church. Just as envy and falsehood (“Envie” and “songe”, v. 1) defile Délie’s honour, so do these evils in Henry transform love into calumny and national scandal (l. 10). The art of Scève’s emblematic discourse is to use the verbal picture of “Albion” as a nodal point for associating microcosm and macrocosm, love and politics, virtue and treachery, private honour and public dishonour. We can plainly see that the author has patterned his pictorial symbol on emblematic discourse if we think of “Albion” (l. 5) as a pictura and the subsequent gnomic comment (ll. 6-10) as the subscriptio. Thus after the invocation to “Albion” there follows the speaker’s admonition to England, “tu vois/Malice honneur aujourdhuy contrefaire” (“O Albion, you see/Malice playing the part of honour now”- ll. 5-6). Then a commendatory exemplum arises in praise of the English “Dame” - a word which tends to allegorize the heroic conduct of an unspecified injured woman. The last four lines deduce an intricate and exacting principle from English history that bears on the integrity of love rather than on the machinations of politics, namely, that the “Dame” “wishes in shame and disgrace to put aside her crown and her very life rather than see love give way to calumny” (ll. 7-10). Parallel to an emblem or a device, Scève provides a highly vivid verbal description followed by a moral gloss that, like a motto, clinches the relation between politics and love. For the “Dame” “a plus cher à honte, et villainie,/De sa Coronne, et de soy se deffaire,/Que veoir Amour ceder à Calumnie” (ll. 8-10). The richness of Scève’s emblematic discourse is owed in no small measure to the use of what students of rhetoric call the “hypotypose en miniature” or “hypotyposis in miniature”20 whose purpose is to depict a small-scale animation of an event in lively colours. An excellent example of how Scève forged historical viewpoints through such techniques is D 255 which is a radiant rendition of “The Birth of Venus” also known as “Venus Anadyomene”.

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Venus’ Greek name Aphrodite is partly based on aphros meaning “foam”; the epithet “Anadyomene” denotes “she who emerges”. Thus, in verse 1 Scève’s ekphrastic opening depicts in miniature the pictura of Venus emerging fully grown from the sea.21 This myth was the subject of many paintings, including Botticelli’s famous “Birth of Venus” (c.1485) which expressed Florencia Felix and the flowering of Florence’s happiness governed by the Ciceronian notion of humanitas and Christian NeoPlatonism.22 Like Botticelli, Scève’s Venus emphasizes the nobility and purity of his goddess, also suggesting the chaste Urania, who for all that is not less sensuous. Also, one must not overlook the fact that in the word “marguerite”, the poet-lover is alluding to Marguerite de Navarre who would share his Neo-Platonic outlook.23 The first line of the poem is detachable and relatively independent as a self-sufficient unit thereby resembling an emblematic pictura. To this, the lover adds the moral gloss describing the higher Venus “in thought and fact undefiled” (“de pensée, & de faict impolue”- l. 4). The scene is animated when Venus sees a pearl in a shell and says, “I choose/This one . . . in value, lustre, and worth” (ll. 8-9). We might think of this scene as the appearance of another emblematic image, the “marguerite/Dans sa Coquille” (ll. 7-8) which is suffused with an atmosphere of renewal, baptism, and the Gospel lesson of the Pearl of Great Price.24 After admiring the pearl’s virtues, the Virgin

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Venus takes it and announces, “I choose/This one . . . in value, lustre and worth/To embellish (a time will come) the Lily” (ll. 8-10). Since the final word of the poem is “le Lys”, we see that Scève unfurls the national (royal) emblem of France and indirectly evokes King and Queen, François and Marguerite. Having associated them with undefiled Venus, Scève implies that they govern France as brother and sister in filial, religious, and chaste love and with refined and highly distilled passion.25 The sound “li” found most prominently in the rhyme “eslys”/“le Lys” (ll. 8; 10) associates the name Délie with the political and moral virtue of King and Queen that is emblematized by the word “Lys” (l. 10). In virtue of the fact that the lily is also the emblem of Florence, the symbol widens its association with Botticelli and with France’s positive diplomatic ties to that city. Indeed Scève’s Lyons in the 1530s and 1540s could easily be viewed as a newly flourishing, highly cultivated, and proud child of an indigenous Renaissance mirroring the accomplishments of its Italian neighbour.26 Instead of taking the emblem “Lily” as poetic closure, it would be better to activate its potential to spring a process of rereading the poem in the light of its historical import. As retrospective emblematics, the Lily colours the poetic allegory with French pride, retroactively illuminating all levels of love in a spirit not unlike Botticelli’s Platonism. Through the Lily, the filial love of the King and Queen casts its light back on the poetlover’s attraction to Délie, as Procne’s song signals the nation’s renascent Spring (l. 5) under the aegis of Venus’ birth.27 The Venus marina poem is instructive in the way Scève treats the relation between history and emblem. It is a highly self-reflexive dizain examining the paradox of emblematizing a narrative and narrating an emblem. If we think of narrative as a discourse which shares with history the flow of time, we first see that dizain 255 is structured as an uninterrupted unfolding of Venus’s birth and discovery of the pearl. Punctuation eschews colons and full stops until the last word of the poem. Added to this is a poetic diction that glides forward as if it were maintaining the progress of the ocean’s waves, calmly wafting through springtime, changing into the graceful steps of Venus, and culminating in the fully grown flower of France. Yet, this miracle is somehow naturally caught in the frozen time of emblematic pictures, with Venus’ emergence from the sea, her selection of the rare pearl from its shell, and its assimilation to the proud Lily. Just as Venus in her search for “lustre” and “value” (l. 9) chooses the priceless pearl as the emblematical truth of her narrative, so does the poet-lover emblematize his selection of the moral exemplum from the welter of historical events. In emblematizing a myth

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recounting the chosen pearl, a sense of timelessness is created by figuring history as a repetition and pattern rather than as a movement of singular and dissociated events. Scève’s emblematic discourse set within a narrative is his method for discovering worth and permanence in the flux of history. What conclusions can one draw from this study of historical emblematics in Délie? Though Scève was the principal organizer of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis’ 1548 royal entry into Lyons, here in Délie he is more a Platonist sage than a historian, civic leader, or Lyonnais patriot.28 His praise of a character trait is abstracted from time and place and synthesized by a pictorial exemplum of virtue, just as his criticism of conduct implies the remedy of a specific virtue. Scève’s emblematic art, in its indirection and allusiveness between love and history, challenges the commonplace style in favour of textual ruptures and dissociations analogous to the historical events they depict.

Notes 1 For quotation of poems, I have used the critical edition of Gérard Defaux (2004). On the historical significance of Scève as a writer of devices, see Coleman 1975, 63. Though Scève may be considered the first French writer of imprese, Délie is certainly not an emblem book in the manner of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (1531) and Guillaume de La Perrière’s Theatre des bons engines (1540). On this point see Saunders 1996, 405-406. 2 That the last illustration of Délie is an emblem and not a device, see Coleman 1981, 73. 3 Mulhauser 1962, 136-143; Cook 1967, 339-355; Skenazi 1992, 107-122. Poems that have been identified as containing historical or political significance are 19, 20, 21, 28, 53, 54, 85, 115, 147, 252, 253, 254, 255, 298, 305, 318, 323, 389, 416, 432, 437, 448; perhaps also 277 and 385. See the notes on these poems given in I.D. McFarlane’s critical edition (1966). The word dizain designates a French poem of ten lines or a ten line stanza. Henceforth, the abbreviation D will stand for dizain. Délie is composed of 449 dizains and one introductory huitain. A woodcut is generally placed at the head of every nine dizains. 4 See epigrams 19, 20, 21, 28, 53, 55, 147, 305, 323, 254. 5 See illustrations 1, 7, 14, 19, 21, 23, 33, 42, 43, 46, 47. 6 Figures III (1972), 79-121. 7 The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Ed. and intro. Ruth Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1999). The Republic, Book 4, 435c, 676-677. 8 Plotinus (1966), 7 vols. See Vol. 1, 133. 9 Lyons 1989, 9. 10 Russell 1985, 161-181. 11 Knecht 1994, 201-216.

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See Knecht. Also, McFarlane 1966, notes 374-375. See Defaux 2004, Vol. 2, notes 43-45. Finally, Joukovsky 1996, notes 222-224. 13 Dialogo Dell’Imprese Militari et Amorose. Facsimile. Intro. Norman K. Farmer, Jr. (1976), b2. See also Coleman 1975, 88. 14 On the iconography of the ostrich, see Rothery 1985, 52-53. 15 See Defaux 2004, Vol. 1, cxxii. 16 Tervarent 1997, 302. 17 Hayaert 2008. 18 Morier 1961, 848-849. 19 See Defaux 2004, Vol. 2, 122-123. 20 See Morier 1961, 848. 21 See “Aphrodite”, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), 120-121. See also Grant and Hazel 2002, 36. 22 Cheney 1993, 132-135. 23 See Joukovsky for this fine observation (1996), 312. 24 See Matthew, 13, 45; 7, 6. Also, Ferguson 1961, 43. The shell connoted virginity. See Steffler 2002, 24, 90. 25 On the iconography of the lily, see Tervarent 1997, 295. 26 For background on this point, see Coleman 1993, 193-203. 27 The song of Procne (l. 5) is the mythological periphrasis for Spring and Horace’s account of the Venus marina (Odes 4, xi, 14-16) places her birth in April. See Defaux 2004, Vol. 2, 298. 28 See Richard Cooper’s critical edition (1997) of Scève’s publish summary of the Royal Entry. .

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE “IN A STREIGHT BETWEENE TWO”: THE FRAUGHT POSITION OF QUARLES’S DEVOTIONAL EMBLEMS DEANNA SMID

In his text, Emblemes, Francis Quarles includes a well-known emblematic conceit, found also in the emblem collections of Alciato, Whitney, and Wither, among others.1 Emblem 9 in Book 5 (Fig. 21.1), whose motto is from Philippians 1, 23, “I am in a streight betweene two, having a desire to be dissolv’d, and to be with Christ”, pictures the winged soul hovering above the ground, holding out both hands towards the sky. The soul’s ankle is chained to and weighed down by a globe, restraining her between heaven and earth. The globe, as Karl Josef Höltgen identifies it in Quarles’s Emblemes, is “the type or image of the world and its spiritual message is that of contemptus mundi”.2 The figure in the sky to which the soul is straining is haloed and winged, and the poem accompanying the emblem expresses the soul’s wish to advance to heaven, emphasizing the theological nature of the emblem. The emblem expresses a common theme in devotional emblems: “images of man’s separation from God or of man’s own divided nature.” 3 Indeed, in the first three stanzas of the poem, Quarles makes a deliberate attempt to distance his interpretation of the motif of the winged and weighted figure from the interpretations of earlier emblem writers, such as Whitney, who uses the pictura to describe the poverty-stricken plight of a poet.4 Quarles spends so much time discussing the pitfalls of money and riches in the world that he appears to be setting his emblem as a polar opposite to Whitney’s and Alciato’s. Instead of suggesting that advancement is based on money, Quarles writes, So, when my soul directs her better eye To Heav’n’s bright palace, where my treasure lies,

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I spread my willing wings, but cannot fly; Earth hales me down, I cannot, cannot rise.5

Quarles’s “so” in line 36 indicates his separation from other emblematists. Because the soul rejects the pursuit of riches, the speaker can find “my treasure”, a heavenly reward. The figure in Quarles’s emblem is trying to reach that reward, but the weight of the world holds her back, and flap her wings as she might, she cannot reach God, whose representative in the pictura waits for her with outstretched arms.6 Yet, the static suspension of the emblem demonstrates not only the soul’s desire and inability to advance from earthly wealth to heavenly riches, but highlights Quarles’s struggle with his desire and inability to use emblems as devotional tools. The soul in the pictura is focused so completely on her destination that it seems that she cannot, or will not, see the weight that is holding her back, for even that backward glance could cause her to regress. Her entire concentration is forward, on God. The reader, however, can see the weight that is holding back the soul. Such a viewpoint does not imply that the reader has more power than the soul and can more easily break free because the reader understands the problem, but it suggests that the reader, because he or she is looking at the weight, is implicated in and is a part of the weight. Even by viewing, the reader helps to form the earthly mass that is holding back the aspiring soul. In contrast to her intense concentration is the figure in the background of the pictura, who is pointing at the tether that restrains a leashed hawk. That figure in the background is looking directly at the reader, and inviting the reader to look at the tether, so the figure is not only drawing the reader into the picture; he or she is also inviting the reader to participate in the figure’s mistake. The figure with the leashed hawk is not looking at the proper destination, but is looking at the reader and pointing to an earthly object. The reader, likewise, is invited to look at the figure rather than at the destination on which the soul is entirely focused, which is the proper focal point of the pictura. In the poem, Quarles focuses his attention on the significance of the hawk rather than of the pointing figure. He compares the soul to the hawk who is restrained by its keeper, and is held back by its leash, writing, “Her too faithful Leash does soone restraine/Her broken flight, attempted oft in vaine;/It gives her loynes a twitch, and tugs her back againe”. 7 Quarles discusses the sorrow and the violence of being restrained and held back to earth, and he gives the reader a concrete comparison between the restrictive weight of sin and materialism on the soul, and the limiting strength of a leash on a hawk. The metaphor of the restrained hawk also strains, or complicates, the interplay between the

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emblem’s pictura and poem. In the pictura, the reader focuses on the pointing figure, and identifies, by sight, with the figure’s possible reliance on the creature rather than the Creator. In the poem, however, Quarles directs the reader to the hawk and its desire to fly freely. The pictura and the poem, therefore, do not simply repeat each other’s messages, but are both complementary and contrasting. The figure in the background with the leash invites comparison with a number of other emblems in Quarles’s text. For example, the leash appears earlier in Emblem 2 in Book 4, the emblem of the labyrinth, one of the more critically remarked upon emblems in Quarles’s text.8 In that emblem, which, like the emblem of the winged and weighted soul, depicts a difficult, frustrating journey to God, the pictura portrays a pilgrim soul whose back is to the reader and whose focus is on her destination, heaven. In her attempt to make her way towards her destination over a dangerous labyrinth, she keeps track of her goal by means of a guide, a clue, which is a direct line between her and heaven. In contrast, a man in the background of the pictura follows a leashed dog. Dogs in the early modern period, as critics such as Baumlin and Watson show, represent reason and invention, and by depicting a man following a dog, Baumlin and Watson argue, “it is an absolute, unqualified ‘trust’ in God that Quarles here preaches to his reader, for to ‘trust’ in one’s ‘own invention’ (line 23) inevitably fails.”9 Because he trusts in his own power rather than God’s, the figure with the dog is facing away from the proper destination and, the reader understands, will not be united with God. Holding an animal on a leash demonstrates a wrong focus both in the emblem of the labyrinth and in the emblem of the winged and weighted soul, but it also suggests another error that could disrupt a Christian’s spiritual advancement. If the leash implies not only a misguided trust but attempted control over Nature itself, then the straying figures who restrain animals—either a dog or a hawk—are perhaps representative of those who restrain Nature and use it to praise themselves rather than God. They take on the role of the Creator rather than, as creations of God, seeking to worship and to be united with Him. The bird in the background of Emblem 5.9 also directs the reader to another very near: Book 5, Emblem 13. Emblem 5.13 takes its motto from Psalm 55, 6: “O that I had the wings of a Dove, for then I would flee away and be at rest”. As in Emblem 5.9, the soul is facing towards a winged and haloed Christ in the sky. With two wings sprouting from her back, her hands outstretched, the soul is about to leap up and fly away to her heavenly destination. In the poem, the soul asks for the wings of a dove, that she can fly to heaven. The emblem, which seems a straightforward

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demonstration of the Christian’s desire to be united with God, is complicated by the epigram, in which Quarles writes, Tell me, my wishing soule, didst ever trie How fast the wings of Red-crost Faith can flie? Why beg’st thou then the pineons of a Dove? Faiths wings are swifter, but the swiftest, Love.10

The epigram, as so many of Quarles’s epigrams do, reprimands the poem’s speaker, suggesting that the poem is incomplete, or is only a question that the epigram must answer. In Emblem 5.13, the epigram tells the soul that she should not ask for the wings of a dove; rather, she should seek the wings of faith and love, which have the speed to bring her to heaven. Because Emblems 5.9 and 5.13 are so near each other in the text, have similar picturae, and similar themes, Quarles invites the reader to use Emblem 13 to qualify the nature of the wings in Emblem 9. 11 Are the soul’s wings the wings of faith, as the epigram of Emblem 13 says they should be? Or, are they, as the soul mistakenly desires in Emblem 13, only the wings of a dove? Because Quarles compares the soul in Emblem 5.9 to the hawk, he hints that the soul’s wings are faulty because they are avian rather than spiritual, and if the soul only had the wings of faith, or even better, of love, then she could reach her heavenly destination. Reading Emblem 9 in the context of Quarles’s other emblems, especially Emblem 13, complicates and calls into question the soul’s assertions as she attempts to ascend to heaven. In Emblem 9, the reader and viewer must question the comprehensiveness of the emblem, and must read it in conjunction with the rest of the text in order to plumb completely the emblem’s complexity. Already in the contents of Emblem 9 itself, Quarles supplies many layers—metaphors, points of view, images—and does not allow the reader any simple censure of the soul. For instance, in stanza four of the poem, Quarles creates a theological and literary paradox that, in turn, questions the efficacy of emblems in general as a means of Christian devotion. The speaker exclaims, “I cannot do an act which earth disdaines not;/I cannot think a thought which earth corrupts not”.12 Everything on earth holds the speaker back from God, and everything on earth includes the speaker as well. Because she is part of earth, the speaker is part of the problem, adding to the weight restraining her. Moreover, communication itself is part of the world as well, and thereby also tainted. “I cannot speake a word which earth prophanes not”, 13 the speaker admits. Quarles is acutely conscious that every word that earth profanes also includes his text, for Quarles’s poems and their interplay with their picturae defy Rosemary

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Freeman’s often quoted and rightly vehemently opposed assertion that Quarles: had an epigrammatic style, an eye for parallels, a trick of taking the reader into his confidence; he had a fondness for compound epithets which looked impressive and yet could easily be reduced to their simple parts, and thus afforded the reader a pleasant sense of intellectual achievement without overmuch intellectual effort (126).14

The emblem and the emblem book which point out the soul’s desire to be with God and which encourage the reader to seek out God are also implicated in and contributing to the earthly weight holding back the soul from reaching God. Even by employing the repetitive syntactic arrangement of the stanzas of Emblem 5.9, Quarles emphasizes the relationship between the speaker and the earth. In each line, “I” is at the beginning, and “earth” is in the centre. Their separation implies the struggle between the earth and the speaker, but their repetition and juxtaposition also unites the two. The speaker is a creature of the earth, both verbally and visually. The juxtaposition implicates the speaker and the reader, who is also taking on the “I” point of view, in earthly corruption. If Quarles’s emblems are being pulled back down to earth, and are themselves, as part of the earth, pulling Quarles and his readers away from God, the role and purpose of Emblem 5.9, and all of Quarles’s emblems, needs redefinition. Quarles forces his emblems to inhabit an uneasy position—they are both the world that weighs down the soul and the readers, and also the wings that lead them, by praise, devotion, exhortation, and explanation, to God. Recognizing the fraught nature of Quarles’s selfconscious emblems, critics have sought to identify and categorize Quarles’s aims. Ernest Gilman contends that the emblems are selfconsuming, and invite “inspection and demolition at the same time”. 15 Later critics have rightly demonstrated that Gilman’s analysis is incomplete. Dale Randall, for example, writes, If one hesitates to call the images that do appear here—verbal and pictorial alike—self-consuming, it is not merely because one may return to them again and again or because they are so insistently and universally durable, but also because the poem itself suggests that a continuing awareness of the nature of the meager life which illumines this world is necessary for anyone who aspires to enjoy the brilliance of the light that is to come.16

Michael Bath argues that Quarles’s emblems are full of paradox and ambiguity, and that his poetry is subtle and complex. Such complexity, Bath argues, arises from the emblem form itself, and also from the nature

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of meditation which is caught between the world it inhabits and the heaven it anticipates: “though spiritual meditation may be the habit of perfection, the image of the soul it presents remains an image of the soul in this world, and not the next, torn between truth and veiling, shadow and substance”.17 I add to Bath’s assertion the ambiguities lie in language itself; the paradoxes in Quarles’s emblems result from and are fuelled by the complexity inherent in metaphor; for very simply stated, the tenor of metaphor can never be the vehicle, and the vehicle never the tenor. The two basic parts of metaphor are, like the winged and weighted figure, straining to be united, but pulled in opposite directions. Quarles begins his emblem book with a conscious consideration of the problematic position of emblems. In “To the Reader” he states, “And indeed what are the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphs and Emblems of [God’s] glory?”18 Quarles’s insistence that all creation can be “read” as an emblem of divine majesty places emblems, just like the winged and weighted figure of Emblem 5.9, between heaven and earth. All creatures testify to God’s power, but they are also part of the fallen and sinful world that keeps the soul from reaching unity with God. Yet, the two roles of emblems are not necessarily contradictions if emblems are considered as metaphors. The two parts of Quarles’s emblems are the tenor and vehicle; the images of earthly life are the vehicle, and the images of heavenly life the tenor. In Quarles’s metaphors, the reader understands God by considering the world, as Randall argues. Earth and people’s lives on earth are used to describe how to act or not act in order to become God’s image. If read metaphorically, then the world has a redemptive quality because it leads the reader, though partially, to God’s glory. But, that is only one direction of metaphor. If the world can begin to lead the reader allegorically to God, Quarles also calls upon God to complete and perfect metaphor. Just as, in the emblem of the winged and weighted soul, the soul can never meet God unless He reaches down to break her shackles and carry her to heaven, so, Quarles implies, only God can perfect language and allow the emblems to lead the reader to God rather than away from Him. Calling upon God to complete and perfect metaphor also enforces the reader’s humility, for as Tilottama Rajan writes, “The cryptic, opaque quality of the visible world, and the fact that it must be explicated by some higher authority, enforce in the reader an attitude of humility before the weakness of his own understanding”. 19 God’s involvement in language in Quarles’s text also calms concerns the Protestant reader could have about the image of God in the pictura. Quarles writes in his “To the Reader”, “Let not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured in these types”. Quarles

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emphasizes that God is part of the metaphors that teach people how to live, but He is more than just the tenor to which the vehicle, the soul, aspires. He is, in fact, Quarles argues, the one who makes metaphor perfect and His inclusion both reminds and allows readers to use emblems as a meditative tool that leads them to, rather than away from, God. Indeed, the images of God in the picturae are an “allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR”, and thus metaphors themselves. Layering his emblems even further, Quarles depicts by metaphorical images the God who can perfect the metaphors attempting to praise him. Quarles does not allow any easy association between tenor and vehicle, pictura and poem, and God and the human soul, however. In Emblem 5.9, the soul does not realize that the earth has metaphorical worth to help her understand and reach God. In the emblem’s epigram, the epigram’s speaker chides the soul for her complaint, “I cannot speak a word which earth profanes not”.20 The epigram ends, “Art will prevail where knotty strength denies;/My soul, there’s aquafortis in thine eyes”.21 The soul will not turn to look at the earth which is holding her back, so she does not realize that the earth is the vehicle through which she can begin to understand God, the tenor. She also does not see that earth itself is part of God’s glory. In her blindness, the soul does not comprehend art, especially metaphor, as the means of her, and all of Quarles’s readers’, harmony and spiritual advancement. Nevertheless, the reader also should not accept blindly the authority of the epigrams, which, throughout the text, often disagree or argue with the sometimes multiple speakers of the poems. Bath reminds us that “Quarles is the author of these Epigrams just as he is author of the poems on which they comment and whose voices they so often quarrel with, overturn, or contradict”.22 What is the purpose of the multiple voices in the emblems—the voice of the soul, the speaker who refers to the soul in the third person, the quotations from the Bible and from famous theologians, and the voice of the contentious epigram? Perhaps Quarles is attempting to combat the solitude of the picturae, which in many of the emblems, depict a single soul caught in some moral dilemma. The varying voices in the emblems remind the reader that he or she is part of a community, not just of readers, but of Christian pilgrims. The multiple voices also encourage readers to enter into the debate—to take on a single or multiple points of view and become actively involved in the dialogue of the emblems, thereby participating in critical and selfaware devotion.23 Quarles’s multiple speakers force the reader to engage with the emblems, becoming active participants in the soul’s often frustrated journey.

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Quarles is doing even more than rehabilitating the usefulness of the earth as a devotional tool and emphasizing the need for God to resuscitate language in the emblem of the winged and weighted soul. He pushes his reader beyond recognizing a metaphor that demonstrates that the tension between heaven and earth can be a useful one, in which thinking about heaven can facilitate an understanding of the earth, albeit incomplete, and vice versa. Quarles also uses the emblem to define the role of art and contrast it to the struggle, violent longings, and exclamations of pain and frustration in Emblem 5.9 and many others. In opposition and chiding to the soul’s moaning and discomfort, Quarles writes in the epigram that “art will prevail”. But what is “art,” and how does Quarles characterize it in and as his text? Again, reading Emblem 5.9 together with neighbouring emblems expands 5.9’s significance, also to the rest of the text. In Emblem 5.10, which continues the theme of wings and captivity, the soul complains that she cannot sing God’s praises. While she laments, the birds in the background of the pictura, can spread their nimble wing From Shrubs to Cedars, and there chirp and sing, In choice of raptures, the harmonious story Of mans Redemption and his Makers Glory.24

The epigram again rebukes the soul and says, “sitst thou here? and hang’st the feeble wing?/And whin’st to be enlarg’d? Soule, learne to sing”. 25 Expanding the previous epigram, art will do more than prevail, for Epigram 5.10 commands the soul to partake in art, which the soul even admits in the poem she was ordained to do: she is “Spending that breath which was ordain’d to chaunt/Heav’ns praises forth, in sighs and sad complaint”.26 The invocation of music directs the reader back to the very beginning of the emblem book, where Quarles writes to his “much honoured, and no lesse beloved Friend Edw. Benlowes”, “You gave the Musitian the first encouragement; the Musicke returnes to you for Patronage”. If the soul is commanded to sing, then Quarles’s emblems are the song. They are the praise also sung by creation, so while the world holds back the aspiring soul by its complete corruption, the world also, outlined by Quarles’s emblems, sings God’s glory and leads the reader and the soul to God. Emblems generally share many similarities with music. Gretchen L. Finney, in her comprehensive study of the metaphorical significance of music in early modern England, notes the common elements of emblems and music. She argues,

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Like emblems, musical notation uses signs to explain and represent sound, just as emblems use symbols and metaphors to express spiritual or moral ideas. Finney argues that music “was a book of knowledge, which made known through the ear the harmony that existed in heaven, in the universe, and in the body and soul of man”. 28 Certainly the chirping birds of Quarles’s Emblem 5.10 express the harmony of heaven, but the discord between the aspiring soul and distant heaven in Emblem 5.9 threatens harmony and unity. Finney explains: “Harmony in general, it was often said on ancient authority, depended upon the reconciliation of opposites. It resulted from the uniting of things or qualities that were by nature different or discordant”. 29 Such harmonization, the unification of opposing elements, is Quarles’s aim in Emblemes, and he therefore names it his “Musicke”. Yet, Quarles does not use the harmonizing qualities of music to erase the paradoxes and inconsistencies in his text; rather, he highlights the harmonious and disharmonious nature of a life separate from God. As music, Quarles’s emblem book leads his readers to a crescendo: their realization of the polyphonic harmony of God’s interaction with earth and the soul, and their struggle to hear and contribute to God’s perfect song. Moreover, the song is intended to bring delight to the singer, to lift the soul out of frustration and painful struggle. Quarles writes in “To the Reader”, “I wishe thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing”. Pleasure and delight, Quarles contends, are essential devotional tools, and when in the midst of an emblem of pain and frustration, Quarles urges the reader to seek out beauty and art, for reading his emblems is pleasurable. Indeed, John Horden, tracing the publication history of Quarles’s two emblem books, Emblemes and Hieroglyphikes, writes that “the two titles had the attractions of serving both as a devotional work and as a manual for the entertainment and instruction of youth”. 30 Seeking devotional delight does not negate or lighten the intensity of Quarles’s emblems and his complex negotiations between image and text, truth and falsehood. His music, he writes to Edward Benlowes, is “a grave strayne”. Höltgen writes that Quarles, as a devotional or meditative emblematist, appeals “to the reader to make a personal commitment, meditation being an effort of the whole person, an attempt to grasp the essentials of the faith through the senses, the mind, and the will”, 31 and Simon McKeown agrees, writing, “Quarles’s emphasis [is] upon the need for personal

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salvation and intense spiritual commitment”.32 As much as Quarles uses his emblem book to urge conversion, that conversion, although urgent, cannot only be a painful, frustrated struggle, for he also writes his emblems for his and his readers’ delight, as, Quarles posits, delight and devotion are inseparable.

Fig. 21.1. Emblem 9, Book 5, Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library

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Notes 1

See, for example, Whitney 1586, Emblem 152, Wither 1635, Book 3, Illustration 42, and Alciato 1542, Emblem 121. 2 Höltgen 1995, 228. 3 Qualls 1982, 89. 4 Whitney writes in the epigram of Emblem 152, whose pictura depicts a man with one winged arm and one arm tied to a rock: “I shew their state, whose witte, and learninge, ofte/Excell, and woulde to high estate aspire:/But povertie, with heavie clogge of care,/Still pulles them down, when they ascending are” (9-12). 5 Quarles 1635, ll. 36-39. 6 The figure in the sky, although a representative of Christ, is not Christ himself. Höltgen, summarizing Quarles’s use of allegory, explains: “His allegorical strategy to some extent dematerializes the pictures and exhibits type, not images, of divine person. It accommodates Protestant iconophobic objections and aims at spiritual truth behind the pictures. Amor divinus, Divine Love, is a figure of Christ, not Christ himself” (Höltgen 1996, 108). 7 Quarles 1635, ll. 33-35. 8 See, for example, Diehl 1986, 281-301. 9 Baumlin and Watson 2004, 220. 10 Quarles 1635, ll. 1-4. 11 For another comparison between Emblems 5.9 and 5.13, albeit very brief, see Moseley 1989, 171. 12 Quarles 1635, ll. 22-23. 13 Quarles 1635, l. 24. 14 See also William McQueen, who damns Quarles with faint praise when he writes that Quarles’ text “is one of the few Emblem books in which the poetry sometimes merits attention for its own sake” (vii). I.M. Smart displays a similarly lukewarm reaction to Quarles by writing, “Although he is not now considered a writer of outstanding importance, it cannot be doubted that any scholar who ignored his works would form only an incomplete image of Caroline literary tastes” (192). Mary V. Silcox, on the other hand, writes that “it is certainly time for a reconsideration of [Emblemes’s] virtues” (Silcox 2008, 374) and that Quarles’s “verse is…filled with the clever wordplay of wit” (Ibid., 375). 15 Gilman 1986, 92-93. 16 Randall 1987, 99. 17 Bath 1994, 217-218. 18 Quarles’s question again indicates the error of those who restrain and follow animals. Following creatures, they themselves are not performing their role as emblems of God’s glory, and they restrain creation from doing so as well. 19 Rajan 1980, 205. 20 Quarles 1635, l. 24. 21 Quarles 1635, ll. 3-4. 22 Bath 1994, 213.

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23 For an insightful discussion of the theatricality of Quarles’s emblems, see Hill 1995, 168-182. 24 Quarles 1635, ll. 23-26. 25 Quarles 1635, ll. 3-4. 26 Quarles 1635, ll. 21-22. 27 Finney 1959, 40. 28 Finney 1959, 37. 29 Finney 1959, 43. 30 Horden 2007, 30. 31 Höltgen 1996, 9. 32 McKeown 2003, 430.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO BODY, SOUL, AND ANATOMY IN FRANCIS QUARLES’S EMBLEMS JOHNATHAN H. POPE

In Francis Quarles’s emblems, the Protestant self occupies centre stage, subjected to a lifetime of temptations, stresses, victories, and defeats before being presented with the possibility of salvation. This Protestant subject evolves throughout the emblems, and even the most casual reader of Quarles will see that the relationship between body and soul is essential to the functioning of the subject, and the theme receives sustained and repeated contemplation in both Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638). Despite the importance of the soul-body dialectic, however, we know very little about how Quarles understands and interprets embodiment. As he makes clear, the pursuit of salvation must take into account the demands of the body, and he often draws on a humoral perspective of the body that emphasizes the exchange between the inner self and the external world. The significance of this exchange in these devotional emblems lies in the prevalent belief that the soul was connected to the outside world through the bodily senses. Through the senses, then, sin can infect the soul via the body, leading to Quarles’s generally anxious view of the flesh. Ultimately, Quarles draws on theories of the body that were equally comfortable in both natural philosophy and theology in order to explore the relationship between the spiritual and corporeal halves of the self. More broadly, emblems themselves–or emblematic modes of thinking–often correspond with the Christianized perspective observable in early modern English anatomical texts that view the body as a pathway to the knowledge of God. Anatomical texts and emblems demonstrate shared perspectives on the self. Indeed, John Manning has suggested that “emblematic forms can be seen to be predicated on current medical and physiological theory”.1 This relationship to medical discourse is particularly relevant in an anatomical context, especially when we take into account the Christianized perspectives

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evident in many early modern English anatomical texts. English anatomy textbooks such as Thomas Vicary’s Anatomie of Mans Body (1548, reprinted 1577), John Banister’s The Historie of Man (1578), Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), and Samuel Collins’s A Systeme of Anatomy (1685) are frequently just as concerned with the allegorical nature of the human body as the physical, often reading it as an index of the mind of God and as an example of His handiwork. Anatomies and emblems, particularly devotional emblems, are thus unified in regarding both the Books of Nature and Scripture as central in creating and hiding meaning. This belief was certainly not uncommon in other early modern fields of inquiry, but these two genres share a number of similarities that force them into closer proximity. From a chronological perspective, both emblem books and anatomical works share roughly the same starting point, with strong continental origins during the early to mid sixteenth century through Alciato and Vesalius, and English practitioners of both did not emerge with any regularity until the 1570s and 1580s. Both share a similar function, relying on an interaction between picture and word and the relation of the part to the whole. Finally, and most significantly, an anatomical part was rarely just a part, whether organ, bone, or fluid, just as emblems normally focus on the hidden meanings of natural objects or creatures: a pelican, for example, was never just a pelican. I will begin with what are perhaps the more superficial similarities between the two genres: their chronological and geographical origins and their exportation to England. Although these narratives are well-rehearsed within the scholarship pertaining to each field, they have rarely been discussed concurrently.2 Both emblems and anatomies appeared in their most recognizable form on the continent in the early to mid 1500s via Alciato and Vesalius respectively, but neither materialized instantaneously. As critics such as Peter M. Daly, Michael Bath, and John Manning, among others, have pointed out, the emblem genre as we know it had its precedence in diverse sources, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, medieval bestiaries, and rhetorical commonplaces.3 Likewise, although Vesalius established a new systemic and rigorous anatomical methodology, he was hardly the first anatomist. The anatomical process that Vesalius sparked was influenced or predated by, among other things, the writings of Aristotle, Galen, Henri de Mondeville, and humoral theory.4 In addition, although both emblems and books of anatomy quickly became popular on the continent, they arrived relatively late in England. Arguably, the first popular printed English emblem book appeared in 1586 with Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, and the first English attempt at Vesalian anatomy was John Banister’s 1578 textbook, The

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Historie of Man. Neither Whitney nor Banister were the first practitioners of their respective fields: Stephen Bateman’s A Cristall Glasse and Thomas Palmer’s manuscript emblems predate Whitney’s emblems by two decades, and Banister’s work was preceded by the decidedly more medieval anatomy of Thomas Vicary in a now-lost 1548 text. However, both Whitney and Banister have been generally accepted as the English instigators of two largely continental traditions. Following Whitney and Banister, distinctly English versions of emblems and anatomies began to appear with some frequency, albeit not matching the output of the European emblematists and anatomists. Peter M. Daly estimates that although more than five thousand editions of emblem books were published on the continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just 130 editions were printed in English up to 1700.5 Although comparable statistics do not exist for anatomical texts, English variants are frequently overshadowed by their continental counterparts, and are often dismissed for reasons that should sound familiar to English emblem scholars: they have been judged to be derivative and unoriginal. Although this trivializing perspective on English emblems–most famously promoted by Rosemary Freeman who claimed that they were without merit or value when compared with continental examples–has been frequently reevaluated over the past sixty years, the same cannot be said for the study of anatomy.6 Banister’s work has been marginalized as imitative, and as recently as 2007, Richard Sugg characterized Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia as “plagiarized”.7 These perspectives have impeded any sort of sustained investigation of the unique features of English anatomies–such as their persistent integration of Christian narratives–that deviates from what has been generally assumed as true about European anatomies. Perhaps the most significant correspondence between early modern anatomies and emblems is the relationship established between image and text. Although critics are well aware of the pitfalls involved in attempting to offer any sort of airtight definition of an emblem (Manning suggests that “What is an emblem? is not even a good question”), Daly’s “neutral description” will suffice here: “emblems are composed of symbolic pictures and words; a meaningful relationship between the two is intended; the manner of communication is connotative rather than denotative”.8 In the most general sense, the validity of the relationship between emblematic image and text was based on a pervasive sense of an underlying order that united the world of creatures and objects to a divinely inspired creation– and subsequent veiling–of meaning, a perspective that is heightened in devotional emblems. Nevertheless, as many emblem scholars have pointed

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out, symbols were not necessarily fixed in their meaning, often embodying multiple meanings concurrently or undergoing change over time. To choose just two of many examples, Clifford Davidson has written on the changing meaning of the symbol of the fountain of life, and John Horden has done the same for the symbol of the pelican.9 As Davidson writes, “It is characteristic of the Renaissance emblem and of emblematic literature that the iconographic meaning of visual images is dependent on no absolutely stable system of signification; hence traditional meaning is capable of being altered, radically transformed, or even inverted”.10 Consequently, despite the perceived relationship between the emblems and veiled truths, this relationship was not always static. This perspective on the world was not, of course, limited to emblems. Many anatomical textbooks, particularly English ones, endorse a view of the human body that often represents it as a symbol of divine truths that grant corporeality a meaning that transcends a simple, objectivist discussion of form and function. As Banister notes at the outset of The Historie of Man, his book is for the use of godly surgeons and, for the general reader, “the obtainyng of a better mynde in Christ Iesu”.11 Correspondingly, he frequently invokes a divine plan in his discussion of various body parts. For example, he says that by contemplating the bones and action of the hand, we are “beholdyng the handy worke of the incomprehensible Creator: who not one mite, or portion of a part hath fited any where, that serueth no end, or vtilitie to the body”.12 Likewise, the eyes allow us to appreciate what was “wrought by the omnipotent creator”, with muscles underneath that allow man alone of all the creatures to look upward and contemplate Heaven.13 This devotional understanding of the body is endorsed and expanded significantly by Crooke in Mikrokosmographia. In his preface, Crooke says that the body “carrieth in it a representation of all the most glorious and perfect workes of God, as being an Epitome or compend of the whole creation, by which he is rather signified then expressed. And hence it is, that man is called a Microcosme or little worlde”.14 Crooke thus reads the body as a signifier, imbued with meaning beyond itself rather than as an end in itself. Daly suggests that the medieval allegorist and the Renaissance emblematist were united by the belief that “everything that exists points to meanings beyond the things themselves”, and this belief was certainly shared by the early modern English anatomist.15 Consequently, Crooke often represents the body in ways that will sound familiar to the emblem scholar. For example, on the uses of the tongue, he writes, although it be but a little Member yet it is of great vse, because it expresseth all the conceits of the minde, wherefore our wise Creator hath

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Such descriptions complicate a purely denotative understanding of the relationship between image and text in Crooke’s anatomy, invoking as it does a moral perspective that transcends the bare facts of the image on the next page of Crooke’s work (Fig. 22.1). A similar representation of the tongue can be found in Emblem 42 of George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635), which depicts a winged tongue and warns against the dangers of unregulated speech (Fig. 22.2). Wither emphasizes that “We should be slow to Speake, and swift to Heare” in order to avoid the winged tongue’s proclivity for lying, swearing, and gossiping, echoing Crooke’s comments regarding the need for deliberation “before the Tongue pronounce any thing”. In many ways, then, early modern English anatomists discussed the body emblematically as an index of divine truths, tying it into the Christian narrative of fall, redemption, and future salvation as they sought to understand the meaning of the body. Nevertheless, there are tensions between some sections of text and image in Crooke’s anatomy. The visual image of the tongue and its accompanying descriptors, as seen in Figure 22.1, strip away the figurative interpretation of the part itself quoted above, reducing it to objective categorizations. In the almost twenty features and muscles of the tongue that are detailed in the image, the reader is confronted with bare descriptions such as, “H. The flesh consisting of the Glidules, or the ninth Muscle of the Tongue according to Vesalius”.17 Nowhere in the figure does Crooke point to the moralized “bridle” with which the tongue is kept in check. Consequently, neither the textual discussion of the “meaning” of the tongue nor the figure of the tongue itself offers a complete description of the tongue. In order to achieve a complete understanding, the reader must engage in an emblematic negotiation between word and image, a creation of meaning through a dialectic process. But what does any of this have to do with Francis Quarles? As Bath points out, Quarles’s emblems often emphasize the convergence of “sensual awareness” and “spiritual insight”, and the book itself is structured as “the progress of the soul”.18 I am particularly interested in the way in which sensual awareness or, more broadly, corporeal awareness is filtered through spiritual insight in the emblems, as well as in Quarles’s evocation of the body as a devotional object. To put it another way, I am interested in the devotional experience of embodiment in Quarles’s emblems. Despite Karl Josef Höltgen’s assertion that Quarles’s Emblemes

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is both “the most important” and “the most successful English emblem book”, many aspects of the text have been largely overlooked in literary and emblem criticism, including the sense of corporeality in the text.19 In fact, Quarles scholarship throughout the past sixty years or so has arguably grown stagnant, often reiterating the biographical details of the author, the emblems’ relationship with Typus Mundi (1627) and Hermann Hugo’s Pia Desideria (1624), or discussing the Protestant meditative nature of the emblems.20 Although these approaches have undoubtedly deepened our understanding of and appreciation for Quarles’s emblems, there is still a great deal of room within which scholars can operate. Of those critics who have commented on Quarles’s Emblemes, I would like to draw particular attention to Bath’s discussion in Speaking Pictures. He examines Quarles’s emblems within the context of Christian allegory and “the use of sensory images as signs of spiritual truths”.21 Bath notes that the emblems often represent an internal dialogue—corresponding to the frequent visual depiction of two central figures–but that the nature of this dialogue is complex: “Because the voices in this dialogue are both, in some sense, those of the Christian conscience debating with itself, it is often difficult to say whether what we are listening to is one speaker or two, for though there are two voices they are part of a single self or subject”.22 This multiplicity of voice is further complicated by the oftenstriking difference between the voice/voices of the verse and the voice of the epigram, with the epigrammatic voice normally speaking with more authority, occasionally mocking the speaker of the verse.23 For Bath, the inner self that emerges in these emblems is multifaceted, alternately conflicted and complacent, consistent and contradictory. Correspondingly, the text also traces the progression of the soul through Christianized time, beginning with the Fall and moving toward, but never fully reaching, eternity and salvation, in what Bath sees as a “pattern of postponed closure”.24 The final two emblems bring readers within sight of eternity before depositing them back in the fallen world that must first be traversed. Ultimately, Bath argues that: the organisation of the sequence seems to be sending out contradictory signals to the reader – of sameness, yet change; spiritual progress, yet stasis; transcendence, yet failure. The two concluding emblems sum up this ambivalence perfectly, even as they explain it, for though spiritual meditation may be a habit of perfection, the image of the soul it presents remains an image of the soul in this world, and not the next, torn between truth and veiling, shadow and substance.25

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This condition of being in between, or being stranded in time, is central to the sense of self that emerges in devotional and even anatomical texts from the period. Bath is absolutely correct in pointing out the importance of Christianized time in the emblems, and I believe that we can move into a more detailed examination of the actual experience of being stranded in time. Between the Edenic world and the world to come after the Apocalypse, the Christian self finds itself in a dangerous, tempting, and deceptive material world that must be constantly negotiated if salvation is to be achieved. The central anxiety that is apparent in Quarles’s Emblemes is the immense difficulty of such a successful negotiation in a “Crocadilian world” populated by “dunghill worldlings” that offers so little for the devotional subject to work with.26 However, the flesh itself is a part of, and partakes in, this fallen world. In other words, embodiment and the experience of embodiment are key components of the “progress of the soul”. The soul might fight against the “dunghill” in pursuit of salvation, but it must do so through, and often in defiance of, the body, which makes the devotional experience of corporeality very significant. Sensual awareness emerges in Quarles’s emblems as the bridge between body and soul. Body and soul are perpetually intertwined in English anatomical and theological texts from the early modern period, and many of these texts place a particular emphasis on the role of the senses as mediators between the two. The senses were generally seen as the limbs or organs of the soul, enabling it to experience the outside world through sensitive perception. This experience was rarely, if ever, neutral; the senses could act as conduits for virtue as well as sin, a permeability of self that reflected a humoral understanding of the body. In The Body Embarrassed (1993) and Humoring the Body (2004), Gail Kern Paster argues that humoral theory saw the body as a sort of transitional space, engaged in a constant dialogue between the inner self and the external world. In this model, the body is under the constant threat of infecting and infection. William Cowper’s comments on the permeability of the self through the senses and the transmission and reception of sin and virtue in his religious text, The Anatomy of a Christian Man (1611, second edition 1613), reveal such a perception of the senses. He argues that, “it is euident with what continuall care the senses are to be obserued, that from without euill come not, to make the heart worse then it is; and from within euill come not, to infect others that are without”.27 Establishing the Christian self, he explains, requires a continual act of negotiation between interiority and exteriority: “if we take paines to fortifie our selues against the enemie that is without,

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and to slay the corruption that is bred within vs, so soone as it is conceiued, we shal possess our soules in peace”.28 Finally, Cowper also uses physiology to justify religion and vice versa. For example, he argues that God gave us two ears but one tongue so that we would be more willing to listen than to speak, and that He has placed the tongue in a double cage of flesh (lips) and bone (teeth) and tied it to the throat in order to encourage the regulation of speech.29 Similarly, God gave man hands in order to pray, work, and to “extendeth them to doe the workes of mercy and compassion toward the needie”.30 This perspective emerges in anatomy as well, such as in Crooke’s similar discussion of the stature of the body, in which the physiological logic of the body is placed in the hands of God.31 Essentially, the body emerges in Cowper’s text, and in many other theological texts, as the devotional tool of the soul, but one that can be harmful as well as helpful. A similar view of the body is apparent in Quarles’s emblems. In 1.1, Quarles recounts the story of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge as a narrative of the sensory ingestion of sin. The poem begins with the serpent appealing to Eve’s senses – “Not eat? Not tast? Not cast an eye/Vpon the Fruit of this faire Tree?”, he asks. The serpent continues by imploring her, “Woman, Do but cast an eye”, “Do but tast”, and “Do but touch”.32 Sin and death thus enter the world and the body as a result of this sensory act. This lack of sensory regulation also produces a heightened corporeal awareness in the second emblem as the speaker commands, “Looke, looke, by doing, how thou art vndone”. Nakedness has become shameful, and the speaker asks, “Poore man! Are not thy Ioynts grown sore with shaking/To view th’effect of thy bold undertaking”, evoking a new experience of the post-lapsarian body.33 Even in Eden, the senses could deceive, and Quarles suggests throughout his emblems that part of the price of this deception is further corporeal deception. In fact, in 1.15 sense and the soul remain connected, but sense has blinded faith: “See how she [Faith] flutters with her idle wings;/Her wings are clipt and eyes put out by Sense:/Senseconq’ring Faith is now growne blind, and cold”.34 The body becomes the prison of the soul, impeding its progress toward Heaven by trying to tie it more firmly to the earth through sensual delight. Although some religious writers suggested a more negotiated and even potentially cooperative relationship between body and soul, Quarles often seems to view the relationship with almost complete hopelessness: the soul can only overcome the flesh with the greatest of effort, and even then, the body offers very few positives to the relationship. In focusing on the transitional nature of the humoral body, Quarles continually evokes a sense of negative exchange between the inner and

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outer self and the ever-present infecting potential of sin. The senses transmit the experience of the outside world to the soul, but even in Paradise, the senses are capable of deceiving the soul and leading it into sin. The result is Quarles’s inherent mistrust of the body, and the difficulty in overcoming its demands or transcending its bonds. Consequently, the metaphors that Quarles uses to depict the relationship between body and soul are often such that the soul lacks agency and they stress, both visually and verbally, separation and contention. In 3.11, for example, Quarles draws on the familiar representation of the body as a ship tossed on the waves of the world, propelled by the gusts of worldly lusts. The ship, however, is steered by reason and the will, and the soul is merely a passenger bound for the port of Heaven but with no control over the progress of the vessel. According to the epigrammatic speaker, the best the soul can do is to try to raise the sea level with her tears in an effort to submerge the threatening rocks: My soule; the seas are rough; and thou a stranger In these false coasts; O keep aloofe; there’s danger: Cast forth thy Plummet; see a rock appears; Thy ship wants sea-roome; Make it with thy teares.35

The jolting cadence of these lines, broken up by punctuation after roughly every four words, mimics the rough seas but also emphasizes the epigrammatic speaker’s comment to the soul that “thou art a stranger/In these false coasts”. Discord and disunity rather than cooperation characterize the relationship between soul and body/world in this emblem. The discussion of the soul-body relationship as analogous to a bird in a cage in 5.10, locked in by God at birth and only to be opened again at death, similarly denies agency to the soul and any appreciable degree of cooperation between the soul and the body (Fig. 22.3). “My Soule is like a Bird; my Flesh, the Cage”, says the speaker, and just as the soul cannot take control of the ship in 3.11, so too she cannot use the cage of flesh to further her own goals – she can only sing from within, awaiting the release of death. Just as the senses bring the outside world to the soul, the caged soul can also feed on the Eucharistic bread and wine passed through the bars, but the cage of flesh itself does not participate in this act; the Eucharist passes through the cage, but not with the help of the cage. While awaiting the freedom of death, the soul is left to jump back and forth between the perches within the cage that represent sense, reason, faith, hope, doubt, and despair, clearly associating the features of the inner self with the faculties of the soul. The contention between body and soul is heightened by the image itself, which visibly distinguishes between the

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soul or Anima and the cage. In addition, the image also emphasizes the humoral exchange between interior and exterior; the cage itself is made up of bars rather than a single, unbroken piece of material. By extension, although the body is a barrier between the inner self and external world, it is similarly permeable, allowing for both reception (sensitive perception and ingestion) and transmission (song/prayer). A similar representation of the soul-body relationship can be found in 5.8, in which Anima is depicted with her eyes raised and her hands folded in prayer, standing inside the ribcage of a seated and reclining skeleton (Fig. 22.4). Again, this emblem stresses the discordance between body and soul. This is initially established visually by the differing postures of the two figures in the image; Anima stands praying and looking upward toward Heaven while the skeleton maintains a melancholic pose, eyes–or rather, eye sockets–directed toward the reader. In a rare instance of agreement, both the speaker of the verse and the epigrammatic speaker offer a unified perspective on the general incompatibility of the body and the soul. The speaker cautions the soul against seeking to satisfy the wants of the body, noting that the body does not return the love of the soul but rather abuses that love: Behold thy darling [i.e, the body], who, when clad by Thee [i.e, the soul], Derides thy nakednesse; and, when most free, Proclaims her lover, slave; and, being fed Most full, then strikes th’indulgent Feeder dead: What means thou thus, my poore deluded soule, To love so fondly?36

The speaker tells the soul to remember that she is “borne/Of royall blood” and that Christ paid a dear price to release the soul from slavery, so why choose enslavement again by satisfying the body, which only offers honour, pleasure, and wealth, the three worldly glories that Quarles derides throughout Emblemes. The epigram further heightens the paradoxical relationship between soul and body, presenting them as largely antithetical: “What need that House be daub’d with flesh and blood?/Hang’d round with silks and gold; repair’d with food?/Cost idly spent! That cost does but prolong/Thy thraldome; Foole, thou mak’st thy Iayle too strong”. Consequently, the desires of the flesh run counter to the desires of the soul and vice versa: to give in to one is to deny the other. The anxiety that results from such a contentious relationship and existence is captured in the quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus that Quarles includes: “How I am joyned to this body, I know not . . . It is a pleasant Foe, and a perfidious friend: O strange conjunction and Alienation! . . .

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Before I enjoy peace, I am at variance”.37 Embodiment is characterized throughout all the sections of this emblem by polarity, conflict, and tension. The potential for cooperation between body and soul that Cowper suggests is much less probable in Quarles’s emblems, a condition that is established as early as “The Invocation” that opens Book 1. Here, the speaker contrasts the soul, “Our heav’n-blowne fire”, with the flesh and earth. As the devout soul tries to rise above materiality and corporeality, the frail flesh tries to “stop thy flight” and imprison the soul in “dungeon earth”, where the sinful man “drink’st full draughts, wherein/Thy Childrens leprous fingers, scurf’d with Sin,/Have padled”. The material world, then, is characterized as constantly threatening to contaminate the soul. Since the body is part of this material world, the only solution lies in the speaker’s paradoxical request of God: “O teach me stoutly to deny/My selfe, that I may be no longer I”.38 The speaker here recognizes the necessity of corporeality for selfhood, and consequently, the only way truly to transcend the flesh would involve the impossibility of self-erasure, an unachievable state that the speaker struggles with throughout the text. As the speaker says in 1.3, trying to extract goodness from this world is like trying to get honey from a wasps’ nest, seeking something that is not there to begin with. Quarles returns to the question of the nature of the soul and the relationship between it and the body in 3.5. In this emblem, which depicts Divine Love building man on a potter’s wheel, the speaker begins by asking what separates man from the rest of the natural world: some animals have more acute senses and some trees have longer lives, so what makes mankind so much better? The answer, as it often is for devotional writers, is the nature of the soul, particularly in the recognition of the higher faculties of the soul. As the speaker says, “my great Creator did inspire/My chosen earth with that diviner fire/Of Reason; gave he Iudgement, and a Will;/That, to know good; this to chuse good from ill”. However, despite this “diviner fire”, mankind has been debased by the Fall. The body is the temple for the soul, but “Her vessels are polluted, and disdain’d/With loathed lust; her ornaments prophan’d;/Her oyle-forsaken lamps, and hallow’d Tapours/Put out”. This clay temple is now apt to leak and break, easily susceptible to corruption and destruction, and the epigram characterizes man as “earth, cast from the wombe, to th’ urne”.39 This emblem reiterates Quarles’s familiar theme in the text regarding the antithetical relationship between soul and body, but it also touches on issues that frequently surface in anatomical and devotional texts regarding

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the nature of the soul and the process of ensoulment, the secrets of generation and the womb. The question of ensoulment and generation appears in a more concentrated form in Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638). Unlike Emblemes, this was a wholly “original” text, in that the plates were devised specifically for Quarles rather than borrowed from existing continental emblem books. Hieroglyphikes is comparatively short, containing just fifteen emblems, approximately the size of one of the five books that comprise Emblemes. However, Hieroglyphikes is arguably the more focused of the two books, centred on the theme of the Life of Man and the value of self-knowledge. Each emblem depicts a candle in an urn, a representation of man. In the first eight emblems, the candle and its flame are subjected to various trials and torments in order to demonstrate the ordeals of corporeal existence. The final seven emblems symbolize the Seven Ages of Man from infancy through to old age, and as these emblems progress the candle burns shorter and shorter, marked in Roman numerals for each decade that passes. These candles are surrounded by symbols of the age that they represent, such as the saplings and crib in H.9 (Infancy) or the implements of hunting and sport in H.11 (Youth). The message of Hieroglyphikes is that properly structured, that is, devotionally informed, self-knowledge can lead us to better knowledge of God, something that the “men of Nature” alone cannot achieve, because without faith and devotion, we look “But through a Mist”. After all, as the speaker notes, “Man is mans ABC: There is none that can/Reade God aright, unless he first spell Man”.40 Quarles’s discussion of the candle (body) and flame (soul) in Hieroglyphikes elicits a complex dialogue about a devotional understanding of the self and corporeality. At its most basic, this not uncommon metaphor represents the unification of dissimilar elements, the material and destructible flesh (the candle) with the intangible yet present soul (the flame) that together form the individual subject. Both elements are required, because an unlit candle does not serve its purpose, nor can a flame burn without fuel; in our corporeal existence, body and soul require each other, because without both together, the self ceases to exist. However, it is the soul, the “diviner fire” passed on from God, that ultimately gives the body meaning because alone, the candle’s substance is …sordid, and impure, Vseless and vain, and (wanting light) obscure: Tis but a Span at longest, nor can last Beyond that Span; ordain’d, and made to wast: Ev’n such was Man (before his soule gave light

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Chapter Twenty Two To his vile substance) . . . . . . by nature, borne to burne.41

In directing the reader’s attention to the image of the unlit candle with a looped wick in the first emblem, the speaker and the engraver highlight the superior workmanship of God in the fashioning of the body (Fig. 22.5). As John Horden notes, Candles were often made in the home from mutton fat or from various other waste fats. But the best candle, one giving the warmest, softest, and kindest light, was the expensive wax candle. Because it was necessary to dip and re-dip the twisted flax or cotton wick in the molten beeswax in order to build up the necessary thickness of wax the wick was looped at the top to make its suspension easier. Therefore, in depicting the unused candle in the slender shape of a taper, and in giving it a looped wick, the engraver has suggested–to the seventeenth-century mind, at least–that it is of the purest kind.42

The body might be “born to burne”, but it is still a divine creation, crafted with the greatest of care and made from the purest materials. The second emblem in the collection deals specifically with the contentious issue of ensoulment. As we have seen, Quarles discusses ensoulment at various points in Emblemes, such as when the soul is locked in the cage of flesh in 5.10 or in those emblems in which God is depicted as a potter, “spinning” man out of clay. However, whereas ensoulment is alluded to in these emblems, it is only in H.2 that Quarles explicitly discusses the transference of the “divine fire” to the body. Quarles addresses a variety of theories regarding when and how the soul is placed in the body, but this inquiry ultimately represents the limits of human knowledge, which is indicated by the motto “Nescius Vnde” – “whence unknown”.43 In the image, the unlit candle of H.1 now burns (Fig. 22.6). The hand of God extends from a cloud holding fire or lightning near the wick of the candle. On the ground next to the urn lie a tinderbox and a two-faced figure. Although the exact nature of the figure is unclear, Höltgen suggests that it is “the moulded or sculptured double head of the male and female Repis figure (from res bina), symbol of the body in hermetical treatises”.44 We might also consider the possibility that it is a Janus figure. As the god of gates and doorways, Janus presides over the passage of the soul into the body in this emblem. As the god of beginnings and endings, he presides over the commencement of life and its subsequent journey toward death, a journey central to Hieroglyphikes as a whole: the body that is “born to burne” in H.1 has begun its inevitable destruction in the second emblem. Some questions initially raised by the

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image in H.2 are: Who is responsible for lighting the candle? Has it been lit by the tinderbox or by the hand of God? The positioning of the hand of God, holding fire so close to the flame of the candle that they almost touch, suggests that the engraver has captured God in the act of lighting the candle, but the presence of the tinderbox hints at alternative interpretations. Höltgen suggests that this emblem “reveals one of the reasons for Quarles’s popularity and success as an emblematist: he directly translates theoretical concepts of the origin of the soul, whose adequate verbal explanation would be too difficult for most of his readers, into visual symbols”.45 However, we must ask whether this visual representation makes the theories any easier to understand because, as the verse points out, the available theories are beset by contradictions and paradoxes that cannot, in the speaker’s mind, be unravelled. The poem begins in the womb after the child has received its soul, and the speaker seems quickly to answer the question of where the flame came from in the first stanza: “It was a gracious hand that thus endow’d/This snuffe with flame: But marke, this hand doth shroud/It selfe from mortall eyes, and folds it in a Cloud”.46 Although the majority of the poem will deal with fraught questions regarding the soul, the speaker sees one thing as beyond debate, that the movement of the child in the womb generally denotes its ensoulment: “Thus man begins to live; An unknowne flame/Quickens his finisht Organs; now, possest/With motion; and which motion doth proclaime/An active soule, though in a feeble brest”. Although the speaker refrains from providing an exact timeline for this ensoulment, what we see here is an assertion that conforms to longestablished perspectives on the process of generation. In particular, the speaker references the belief that the presence of the soul in the body is indicated by motion, which only takes place after the organs have developed. This perspective both transcends and unites purely physiological or theological understandings of the body.47 The speaker protests, “ask not my Pen” regarding the “how” and “when” of this process, claiming that for such answers, “Here flyes a Cloud before the eyes of men:/I can not tell thee, how; nor canst thou tell mee, when”. Consequently, the speaker outlines some of his own beliefs about ensoulment with a degree of confidence before dealing with the difficulties and paradoxes of the contemporary theories. In the third stanza, the speaker provides a compact summation of many of the current theories of ensoulment. The speaker addresses these theories as a number of questions regarding the origin of the soul: Was it a parcell of celestiall fire, Infus’d, by Heav’n, into this fleshly mould?

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Chapter Twenty Two Or was it (thinke you) made a soule entire? Then; was it new created? Or of old? Or is ’t a propagated Spark, rak’d out From Natures embers? While we goe about, By reason, to resolve, the more we raise a doubt.48

The poem continues by addressing each of these beliefs in turn and essentially reducing them to self-contradictory paradoxes. If the soul comes from Heaven then it must be as free from sin as Heaven itself, so how can it be culpable in Original Sin? If it is pure and sent from Heaven then the body cannot defile it, nor can it defile itself. If all souls are created by God, then when during the six days of Creation were they created, because the Bible tells us that all creation ceased prior to the day of rest? By that logic, if souls are newly created for individuals as they are born, this runs contrary to the Creation story and suggests that “Heav’n did not all, at first, he had to doe”. Consequently, the newly created soul must come from Nature, a product of the acts of intercourse and generation between a man and a woman. But if this is the case, then the human soul must be mortal because “All that’s borne must die”. The poem ends with the epigrammatic speaker rejecting such vain intellectual pursuits, and the epigrammatist concludes that it is “No more accompt but this, to say, I burne!”. In other words, it is important that we have souls, not how we acquire them. As we have seen, humoralism plays an important role in Quarles’s devotional emblems, even though he could have drawn on alternative physiological models. The English anatomist William Harvey had published his theory of the circulation of the blood in 1628, which pushed the understanding of the body into new directions that tended to move away from humoralism and the body-as-microcosm and toward a more mechanical view of the body. Interestingly, Quarles does occasionally draw on machine metaphors, but in relation to the soul rather than the body. In 4.8, we read a familiar representation of the body as a clay vessel formed by the divine potter (Fig. 22.7). The vessel is sluggish but can be (and has been) enlivened by God. In contrast to the clay body, Quarles writes, “My Soule’s a Clock, whose wheeles (for want of use/And winding up, being subject to th’abuse/Of eating Rust) wants vigour to fulfill/Her twelve houres task, and show her makers skill”, and the poem concludes by imploring God to wind up the soul “with thy soule-mooving kayes”. The epigram ultimately rejects this plea, chastizing the speaker for “Expecting motion from thy Makers hand”, arguing that God has “wound thee up, and cleans’d thy Coggs with blood:/If now thy wheeles stand still; thou art not good”.49 The responsibility for maintaining this divine

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mechanism is thus left up to the individual. In some ways, this representation of the body and the soul creates a startling image, a clock encased in clay (which is not portrayed in the image of the emblem). Why would Quarles choose to apply to the soul a mechanical metaphor that was increasingly applied to the body? The answer, I believe, lies in the connection established between clock, soul, and motion. As the epigram notes, the speaker of the verse stands “expecting motion”, a divine winding of his soul-clock, because it has grown rusty and sluggish; but the clock has already been wound once. Motion, then, has been initiated, and the clock will not be wound again. By uniting the soul and the clock metaphor through motion, Quarles is effectively drawing on an understanding of the physiological or animal spirits. Generally speaking, the spirits were believed to be the arbiters between the body and the soul, responsible for sense and, important in this context, motion or movement and were typically believed to reside in the blood so that they could be transmitted throughout the entire body. Consequently, the anatomist Crooke defines the spirits as “A subtle and thinne body alwayes mouueable, engendred of blood and vapour, and the vehicle or carriage of the Faculties of the soule”.50 The animal spirits were most commonly believed to originate in the brain, a belief that Quarles seems to allude to in 1.7, in which Divine Love attempts to invigorate a slumbering or sluggish Anima: “Is this a time to steepe/Thy braines in wastfull slumber? up and rouze/Thy leaden spirits”.51 The motion of Quarles’s soul-clock thus reflects the motion of the animal spirits throughout the body: a wound clock, like a wound soul, is imbued with motion and transmits that motion by the wheels to the rest of the mechanism. Motion is a key component of the emblem as the speaker is stranded between immobility and the desire for animation. “My God, I cannot move”, proclaims the speaker at the outset, lamenting that he does not have “pow’r to will; nor will to rise!”52 The poem ends with the speaker declaring that once his soul is wound, “Her busie wheeles shall serve thee [God] all her dayes;/Her Hand shall point thy pow’r; her Hammer strike thy praise”, further connecting the soul to features of the body such as movement and voice. Additionally, the winding is done by an external force; movement might be a faculty of the soul, but without the hand of God to wind it, it merely has the potential for motion, requiring animation from without. Through this metaphor, then, Quarles unites anatomical and religious interpretations of corporeality, connecting the soul to physiological processes. Corporeality, then, plays a significant role in Quarles’s representation of the devotional self in his emblems. Quarles draws on physiological

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perspectives that combine Christianity and anatomy in order to evoke a sense of self that is as coherent as it is conflicted. In the process of combining “sensual awareness” with “spiritual insight” in order to detail the soul’s progression through an embodied existence, Quarles integrates a subtle discussion of the relationship between the body and the soul that transcends a purely religious perspective, even as such a perspective frames the dialogue.53 The animal spirits, the senses, generation, embodiment, and ensoulment are all incorporated into Quarles’s Christian narrative of fall, redemption, and eventual salvation. His choice of the emblem genre to depict this narrative is particularly apt, sharing, as it does, many of the features of early modern English anatomies that are prepared to read the human body as an index of divine truths, not unlike the emblematic perception on the created world. By bringing these two seemingly disparate genres into dialogue with one another, we can begin to witness new models of interpretation for emblem studies. Although we often assert that emblems participate in broader cultural and intellectual debates, we need to continue to explore the nature of that participation. Emblem studies has much to offer other fields of criticism, such as body criticism, and could in turn be invigorated by the subsequent exchange of ideas.54

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Fig. 22.1. The tongue, in Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London, 1615), 630. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.2. Emblem 42, George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635). Courtesy of The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.3. Emblem 10, Book 5, Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635). Courtesy of The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.4. Emblem 8, Book 5, Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635). Courtesy of The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.5. Hieroglyphicke 1, Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (London, 1638). Courtesy of The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.6. Hieroglyphicke 2, Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (London, 1638). Courtesy of the The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 22.7. Emblem 8, Book 4, Francis Quarles, Emblems (London, 1736). Private collection.

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Notes 1

Manning 2002, 272. For a notable, but brief, exception, see Mitchell 2007, 131-132. Some brief comments on emblems depicting the heart and their relation to anatomical and cultural traditions can be found in Slights 2008. 3 For a detailed discussion of predecessors to the emblem, see Daly 1998; Bath 1994; and Manning 2002. 4 See Sawday 1995; Cunningham 1997; French 1999; Pouchelle 1990; Carlino 1999; and Bynum 1991. 5 Daly 1998, 204; Daly 1988, 2. 6 Freeman 1948, 1. 7 Sugg 2007, 4. 8 Manning 2002, 21; Daly 1998, 8. 9 Davidson 1993, 5-37; Horden 1993, 71-101. 10 Davidson 1993, 5. 11 Banister 1578, sig. A.iii.v. 12 Ibid., 31r. 13 Ibid., 102r-102v. 14 Crooke 1615, 2. 15 Daly 1998, 38. 16 Crooke 1615, 628-629. 17 Ibid., 630. 18 Bath 1994, 203, 214. 19 Höltgen 1986, 23; Höltgen 1996, 1. 20 Höltgen 1996; Dimler 1988; Freeman 1948; Hefferman 1991; English Emblem Books (1948; New York: Octagon Books, 1970); Heffernan 1991; Höltgen 1986; and Lewalski 1979. 21 Bath 1994, 201. 22 Ibid., 212. 23 Quarles’s individual emblems follow a five-part structure. In addition to the pictura, motto, and verse, Quarles also includes, respectively, relevant quotations from various (often religious) authorities and a four-line epigram following the verse. In most cases, the epigrammatic speaker comments on what has been said by the verse speaker. In my discussion of these emblems, I will use “the speaker” to refer to the speaker of the verse, and the epigrammatic speaker will be identified as such. 24 Bath 1994, 216. 25 Bath 1994, 217-218. John Manning makes a similar argument about Quarles in The Emblem (2002), focused on the importance of Christianized time (particularly the belief in the impending proximity of the Apocalypse) for the emblems (Manning 2002, 279). 26 Quarles 1635, 1.4, 1.9. In the analysis that follows, emblems from Emblemes are referred to in text by book and emblem number (i.e, Book 3, Emblem 4 is 2

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referred to as 3.4), whereas emblems from Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man appear as H.# (i.e, Hieroglyphikes Emblem 12 is referred to as H.12). 27 Cowper 1613, 210. 28 Ibid., 210. 29 Ibid., 233. 30 Ibid., 252. 31 Crooke 1615, 2. 32 Quarles 1635, 1.1. 33 Ibid., 1.2. 34 Ibid., 1.15. 35 Ibid., 3.11. 36 Ibid., 5.8. 37 Ibid., 5.8. 38 Ibid., 1-2. 39 Ibid., 3.5. 40 Quarles 1638, Emblem 1. 41 Ibid., Emblem 1. 42 Horden 1993, 80-81. 43 Bath 1994, 224-225. 44 Höltgen 1996, 13. 45 Ibid., 13. 46 Quarles 1638, Emblem 2. 47 The sixteenth-century anatomist Thomas Vicary argued that an embryo received a soul after forty-six days in the womb, the time at which the bones and organs were formed: “then it receyueth the soule with life and breath, and then it beginneth to moue it selfe alone” (Vicary 1577, M.iv.v.). Cowper makes a similar comment in The Anatomy of a Christian Man, stating that “The Naturall man liues not till fourtie and fiue daies after his conception bee expired, but the Christian begins to liue as soone as he is conceiued. . . . The principal effects of life are Sense & Motion” (Cowper 1613, 17). In both cases, movement is indicative of the presence of the soul. 48 Quarles 1638, Emblem 2. 49 Quarles 1635, 4.8. 50 Crooke 1615, 173-174. 51 Quarles 1635, 1.7. 52 Quarles 1635, 4.8. 53 Bath 1994, 203. 54 I would like to thank the organizers of the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies for putting together the Francis Quarles panel and for running this wonderful conference in the first place. I would also like to thank Mary V. Silcox for her invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper and Sabine Mödersheim for her input at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE FIGURING SHANDEAN TALES: TRISTRAM SHANDY ILLUSTRATIONS AND THE RHETORIC OF EMBLEMS* BRIGITTE FRIANT-KESSLER

A traditional view held by some scholars claims that the decline of emblem books began around the end of the eighteenth century. However, as Michael Bath notes in Speaking Pictures, “the emblem flourished long after its cultural sell-by date”.1 Following this line, this paper explores the resurgence of the emblem and examines to what extent emblems offer the possibility of a cross-fertilised reading between the word and the image in late eighteenth-century illustrations - specifically, prints and plates for Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). While chiefly intended to exemplify the artwork of the engraver, plate ornaments also invite the reader/viewer to engage in the decoding of a complex and finely spun web of emblems, some of which are evocative of traditional emblematics, at least in their form. As defined by Peter Daly, an emblem, actually consists of three parts, usually identified by their Latin names: inscriptio—the short motto or quotation that is printed above the picture; pictura—the allegorical picture itself; subscriptio—the prose or verse written beneath the pictura, used to explain the picture’s moral application to everyday life. This prose comes either from a learned source or the emblematist.2

The function of the Sterne emblems, however, differs for a variety of reasons. It will be argued that in the case of Sterne illustrations, there are pictorial renderings of textual scenes—the latter may often be seen as identifiably separate fragments—in which emblems not only mesh with the artists’ desire to embellish the engravings but, within the context of the period and its prevailing aesthetic tenets, and given the technical limits of representation in print as opposed to, say, film, they epitomise a unique

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means of envisioning the multifaceted and metaphorical language so highly characteristic of the Shandean narrative. There are different ways of looking at emblem resurgence in late eighteenth-century book illustration: either the emblem is depicted as a single iconic form—in which case it may serve the same function as a motif in traditional Renaissance emblem books—or it merges into a more complex system of pictorial allusions which then renders it closer to an ornament, for instance, in a historiated frame. To begin with, a brief survey of the occurrences of the word “emblem” in Sterne’s novel will show that the writer used it in a variety of ways in his work. These occurrences, when they happen, did not inspire any illustrator other than Sterne himself, who required the printer to insert a recto-verso hand-marbled leaf.3 However, one particular emblem in a specific print that illustrates the incipit of Volume 7 leads us to reflect on the notion of mise en abyme indicative of the emblem-within-the-emblem pattern, itself reminiscent of Sterne’s digressive episodes and games of interpolating a tale within a tale. The analogy between an emblem referring to marginal elements and a structural whole which Sterne himself qualified as “the main” part, works also for emblems in frame designs. The latter may then serve as seldom-noticed elements, but remain part of a particular figurative system too. Last but not least, emblems may be perceived as a useful tool for illustrators who aim at a purely ornamental level; but they may also, in the case of Tristram Shandy, turn out to be an efficacious element highlighting the artists’ visual rhetoric.

The Word “Emblem” in Tristram Shandy A brief survey yields three occurrences of the word “emblem’ scattered across the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy.4 The first appears in Volume 3, 36: […] you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly [sic] emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

The dark veil has been documented as a reference to two black pages inserted in the first volume (Tristam Shandy 1, 12). Indeed, most critics agree to apprehend that simile as a symbolic slab for parson Yorick’s grave. It is a fairly elegiac passage with an obvious allusion to the Shakespearean source, “Alas, poor Yorick” from Hamlet Act 5, Scene i. The word “emblem” is simultaneously connected to death and to Rabelais, a major source of inspiration for the writer.5 Motteux’s Preface to Rabelais’s

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translation reads “the ingenious of our age, as well as those who lived when Rabelais composed his Gargantua and Pantagruel, have been extremely desirous of discovering the truths which are hid under the dark veil of allegories”. The quotation thus features both the word “emblem” as well as an oblique allusion to the concept of “allegory”. Interestingly, it is to be noted that the marbled page has come to stand as the most emblematic part of the novel, the latter being sometimes identified only by mentioning its spectacularly and uniquely variegated leaves. In Volume 6, the second occurrence of “emblem” mixes two veins, and mocks the Ciceronian rationale of the recta via as it is immediately followed by the example of the cabbage planters which introduces a bawdy double-entendre: “This right line, —— the pathway for Christians to walk in! say divines —— The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero —— The best line! say cabbage-planters —— is the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another” (Tristam Shandy 6, 40). In the following volume, which is mostly about Tristram’s Grand Tour and his travels in France, the “white” of the nuns’ uniform reads as a commonplace for “innocence”, but the rest of the passage belies this virtuous countenance and is thus highly Rabelaisian both in its formulation and its spirit: “The Abbess of Andoüillets, supported by Margarita the novice, advanced slowly to the calash, both clad in white, with their black rosaries hanging at their breasts … There was a simple solemnity in the contrast: they entered the calash; the nuns in the same uniform, sweet emblem of innocence…” (Tristam Shandy 7, 21). It is worth remembering that many of Sterne’s fictional games are based on intertextuality and borrowings (fragments, citations) from other writers which are then re-combined so as to create a new original work.6 In Tristram Shandy, the original model is sometimes cited verbatim, sometimes altered. Sterne’s combinations are also often based on the juxtaposition of antithetical elements which appear surprisingly in the same sentence or paragraph, creating thus either a comic effect or, at times, an enigmatic one. Bearing in mind that the first occurrence of the word “emblem” in the novel is a reference to the “motly emblem”, there is an illustration to Tristram Shandy which allows one to explore strains of what might be seen as an emblematic reading of both the image and the text.

Towards an Emblematic Approach to Illustration: Form and Function of the Emblem-within-the-Emblem The emblem-within-the-emblem pattern is best accounted for in Thomas Patch’s print, dated 1768, published shortly after Sterne’s death

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on 18 March, and entitled Sterne and Death (Fig. 23.1). The engraving is after Sterne’s portrait by Patch, a British artist whom the author of Tristram Shandy had met in Florence in 1765.8 Compared to the original—an oil portrait at Jesus College, Cambridge—the print, which is an engraving, comes with additional elements: two captions (one in English, one in Italian) a paraphernalia of objects which are scattered around the scene, and an emblem discernible at the bottom of the composition. In Patch’s print, the emblem is a single iconic form and may thus serve the same function as a pictura in traditional emblem books, mainly because it is a direct lift from that corpus. Indeed, when looking closely at the small emblem in the lower part of the print, traces of a pictorial borrowing may be noted. Patch’s design is reminiscent of one of the many variants of the commonplace emblem representing the candle and the butterfly or moth. Few critics have elaborated on the various accessories of this fairly crowded stage where Tristram/Sterne has an untimely encounter with Death, but it may be noted that each of these elements taken individually (the map, the books, the statue in the bell jar, the boots, death’s stick) lend themselves to ample discussion since they are each emblems in their own right. Duncan Patrick’s latest study of this print argues that the emblem at the bottom does not represent the soul but is “an apt graphic statement of Patch’s artistic purpose”. He nonetheless does not dwell at length on why this is so: Suitably enough then, the emblem at the foot of the print represents a butterfly hovering over a torch reflected from a mirror couched in a leafy border. Paston interprets this as an emblem of the soul—thinking perhaps of a moth fluttering about a flame—but she fails to observe that the torch is reflected from a mirror and does not threaten the butterfly but merely illuminates it.9

The argument that the flame does not threaten the butterfly may also be viable. However in the emblem tradition, which seems here to be a pictorial model for Patch, the proximity of the butterfly to the flame often varies and seems irrelevant as long as the viewer is given the impression the movement comes from the fluttering insects. The Iconclass of images to which this emblem belongs shows that the motif was widely used all through Europe and was given a variety of meanings depending on the geographical and literary context in which it appeared.10 By comparing only a few of them, results tend to suggest a repetitive pattern and a habit of borrowing these motifs. Thus, possible sources for Patch’s emblem can be found in French emblem books such as Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie

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and Scève’s Délie, as well as Spanish emblems such as the ones commissioned by the kings Philip IV and V during the Golden Age.11 Since this is a relatively new field of study, there must be many more sources and analogues to be investigated by scholars. Examples taken from French emblem books indicate that the image is used over again, but the framing, the perspective of the pictura and the motto, differ each time as shown by a comparative study of Corrozet and Scève. In Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie (Fig. 23.2) “la guerre doulce aux inexperimentez” stands as a warning addressed to those who feel too audacious. The martial metaphor of love as a battle is at work here. The central position of the candle and square framing—incidentally reminiscent of Piero della Francesca’s chequered marble floors—structure the symbolically powerful attraction of the flame, while the lateral windows suggest an opening from where more butterflies may come and gather around the source of light. Contrary to Corrozet’s emblem, the motto “en ma joye douleur” in Scève’s Délie (Fig. 23.3) lays emphasis on the oxymoronic coupling of pain and pleasure which reflects the Petrarchan vein in Scève’s poetry and recalls the encompassing motto “Souffrir non souffrir’ printed at the end of the book’s Preface. It may be only marginally related to the moral message according to which pleasure leads to imprisonment, but the oval frame that surrounds the pictura may echo a sense of enclosure in the line “voyez comme en prison nous vient mettre”. On the other hand, it must be remembered that framing was based on standard patterns which printers could re-use almost indefinitely and sometimes haphazardly. The finely ornate frame decorations in Délie are also similar to those used in seventeenth-century mirror designs, thus combining the image of a spiritual reflection, the celebration of love and the concept of vanitas; the latter being a theme that is particularly enhanced in two Spanish emblems (Figs. 23.4a and 23.4b). In one of the Spanish emblems which feature the butterfly and candle motif, the allusion to vanity is explicitly stated by the text in Spanish: “la vanidad presomptuosa se abrasa en su lucimiento”. A variant of the same motif comes with an extended version of what could be interpreted as the traditional memento mori theme: “gran fortuna es ignorar el dia que has de morir paraque sepas vivir”, which also foregrounds the similitude with vanitas painting. Each of these emblems provides the reader/viewer with a dramatised juxtaposition of signs in which life versus death, love and suffering, temptation and moral virtue coalesce when the text is read together with or against the image. This is nowhere so clear as in Wither’s Emblem 40 from Book 1, with the motto “Those Fooles whom Beauties Flame doth blindes/Feele Death where Life they thought to find” (Fig. 23.5). Patch,

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though, it may be argued, with a different intention in the use of the emblem, plays upon a comparable oxymoronic coupling in his visualisation of the beginning of Volume 7 (Tristam Shandy 7, 1, 577, 110) which is to some extent a tale interpolated in the main narrative. It is also the section in which Tristram’s narrative voice is that of an adult English gentleman, not so much setting off on the Grand Tour, as fleeing from Death’s menacing scythe: had I not better, whilst these few scattered spirits remain, and these two spider legs of mine (holding one of them up to him) are able to support me —had I not better, Eugenius, fly for my life? 'tis my advice, my dear Tristram, said Eugenius—then by heaven! I will lead him a dance he little thinks of—for I will gallop, quoth I, without looking once behind me, to the banks of the Garonne; and if I hear him clattering at my heels— I’ll scamper away to Mount Vesuvius—from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world’s end, where, if he follows me, I pray God he may break his neck.12

The end of this volume is in keeping with Tristram’s prognosis. Indeed, the grim Totentanz has gradually morphed into festive revelry and a dance of life, as neatly demonstrated by Thomas Columbus and Susan Brienza.13 That the volume is meant to celebrate the triumph of life over death is indubitable; and, in fact, the very moment Death enters, the whole intention is to undermine his power, which gives rise to a conversation between the narrator and the figure of Death set in a tragicomic tone. In Patch’s engraving, the dialogic captions which frame the emblem read like echoes of the epigrammatic form used in traditional emblems. There are clearly three parts. Although none is made dramatically obvious, the motto in absentia could be “mors vita initium” as in another of Wither’s emblems. The pictura is the image that depicts the allegorical figure of Death entering Tristram’s lodgings, the scene being crowded with emblematic objects. And finally the epigrammatic lines from the text are the caption – a verbatim quotation from Tristam Shandy 7, 1 – where Tristram is staging a conversation with his “good spirits” addressed as “ye”, so that the dialogue with Death is in fact integrated in a tale-withina-tale system: “and when DEATH himself knocked at my door – ye bade him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission” – ‘There must certainly be some mistake in this matter’ quoth he.” The caption to the print emphasises simultaneously the personification of Death and the theatricality of the situation, but it does not elicit to whom the first-person narrator is speaking. On the other hand, it can be argued that since Death is speaking, he is also the one holding the torch, as in the two Spanish emblems. And

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so the butterfly could metonymically stand for Tristram/Sterne’s audacity to defy the power of Death. Life and death, pain and pleasure, are all rolled into one iconic system, much in the same way Sterne interweaves gravity’s straight line and anti-gravity digressions or, to recall the second occurrence of the word “emblem” in the text, moral rectitude and cabbage planting. The emblem in Patch’s print appears quite clearly to be linked with an iconographic tradition, and although devoid of its moralising message, the image and the text are still effective. Patch’s envisioning conflates vanitas and memento mori as well as allusions to the oxymoronic coupling of pain/pleasure in love. Tristram’s life, as in Scève’s “en ma joye douleur” is close enough to that motto, particularly with Sterne’s eponymous hero/narrator being perpetually beset with accidents and frustrating interruptions of all kinds. The print can also be seen as a macro-emblem constructed on objects which are significant in the narrative and onto which another smaller emblem has been grafted. The still-life composition of Patch’s print, with all the accessories, is counteracted by the smaller emblem which seems to indicate that as long as butterflies flutter there is still life.14 If read as a resurgence of traditional emblem book iconography, the emblem at the bottom of Patch’s caricature creates a mise en abyme effect, thus mirroring not so much the torch and the butterfly but encapsulating Sterne, his work, and perhaps even his entire life. Thus, Tristram/Sterne’s dialogue with Death in the context of this engraving functions like an emblematic epigram which is simultaneously an antidote and an anti-epitaph. Patch’s print is an example of representation that shows how emblems offer the possibility of a variety of interpretations, with one aspect not necessarily excluding the other. Sterne’s own definition of his style was to compare his book to an extraordinary walking stick he had been given and which, according to the writer’s correspondence, came with “more than one handle”. This is close enough to what an emblem is and so Patch’s print may represent the ultimate emblem-within-an-emblem, in more than one sense. Beside this individual example of emblem use in book illustration, emblem resurgence in English print culture in the last decade of the eighteenth century is made nowhere so obvious as in Cooke’s illustrated series of novels and poems.

Cooke’s Illustrated Editions of Tristram Shandy, or How to Put a Figure to a Tale An interesting example of emblem resurgence in book illustration is Cooke’s illustrated editions of Tristram Shandy after 1797. The emblem is

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merged into a web of other pictorial elements but with a function that is reduced to an aesthetic purpose in a historiated frame. However these editorial choices also demonstrate that, in the case of Sterne illustrations, emblems are part of what is possibly the most efficacious and complex visual transposition of the text. I shall briefly look at two examples taken from Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select Novels: the first is another instance of representing death, this time of a fellow veteran soldier assisted on his deathbed by Uncle Toby; the second illustration is an amorous scene, featuring the topos of Love and War, as for instance in Veronese’s classical Mars and Venus depictions, via emblems.15 The amorous encounter is, however, one of unrequited love where a slightly adamant Uncle Toby, sitting in his sentry-box, is being passionately courted by his widowed neighbour, Mrs Wadman. Le Fever’s deathbed scene (Fig. 23.6) is an interpolated tale in Volume 6 and is often perceived as an emblematically sentimental episode in Tristram Shandy. Since the plate is inserted in the volume, its presence temporarily diverts the reader’s attention from the text to an image. The historiated borders offering yet further opportunities for the artist to “lead the eye a kind of wanton chace”, the visual experience becomes more complex.16 Episodes from Tristram Shandy which are thus illustrated are given special relief, and unsurprisingly they often happen to be the most popular ones as well (Slop’s collision with Obadiah, the battle of the cataplasm, etc). In an age when sentimentalism was the equivalent of a buzzword, scenes like Le Fever’s deathbed, or the Beguine’s disposition to heal the wounds of Corporal Trim had become the most circulated. Together with Maria sitting under the poplar, these pictorial renderings were stock-in-trade as demonstrated in the edition of The Beauties of Sterne. But the emblems used by the artists who worked for Cooke put such scenes further in the limelight. A convincing example of this visual rhetoric is the spatial composition chosen by Richard Corbould, the engraver of Le Fever’s deathbed scene, and ornamented by R.W. Satchwell in an 1800 edition of Tristam Shandy. The hourglass held in Death’s hand in the engraving by Patch is here integrated into a more elaborate iconic sign system. The winged skull was commonplace and would remind readers of previous representations as, say, the emblem of In Morte Vita in Joannes Sambucus’ emblems or in George Wither’s ideogrammatic emblems, not least the one of an owl perched on a skull sitting on a book (Book 3, Emblem 34).17 Among Wither’s emblems there is yet another example of oxymoronic concatenation that springs to mind, as it comes with the motto “Mors Vita Initium” representing corn ears sprouting out of a skull (Book 1, Emblem 21); the circularity of this design is enhanced by the fact that the words can be read

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in any possible order.18 This motto could also fit Patch’s, especially with the beginning of Tristram Shandy’s Volume 7 in mind. The emblems in the engraving of Le Fever both underscore the gravity, and remind the reader/viewer of the spiritual dimension of death in the age of sentimentalism. An entirely different atmosphere is conveyed in the scene set on Uncle Toby’s bowling-green, in spite of its sentimental overtones. This plate shows Widow Wadman sitting in the sentry-box with Uncle Toby; it was designed by Charles Catton, who illustrated a number of other titles for Cooke (Fig. 23.7). Catton’s plate is a good example of how the use of emblems in frame ornamentation creates a polarisation between the main scene and the decorated edge. The military accessories (cannon, standards, drums) contrast with the otherwise sentimental tone of the scene within the frame. The emblems may recall Toby’s campaigns and simultaneously, from the reader/viewer’s perspective, they achieve the success of visualising the metaphorical language used by the narrator. Also to be noted are the recontextualised emblems of war which one can observe in the borders of the Blenheim tapestries, furnishing thus an oblique but historical reference to the military campaigns fought by the protagonist who was indeed a fictional veteran of Britain’s early eighteenth-century wars. Connotations can only marginally be translated by an image, but artists such as the ones hired by Cooke, some of which were exclusively ornamentors and spectacularly skilled, transform these plates into a visual rhetoric of emblems which masterfully adorns Sterne’s text. This is nowhere so striking as when one observes only the frames, especially the ones ornamented after 1797. Removing the main scenes from the plates actually gives a much better idea of the framework structure (Fig. 23.8). In book illustrations, emblems represent a visual language in their own right. Comparable to a polyphonic musical composition, emblems in the margins create a secondary narrative voice, based on different imagery, to accompany the main central scene. Simultaneously, the emblem reinforces the theatricality of the depicted scene as, for instance, in the courting scene between Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby. In this case, it underlines the failure of the widow’s attempt to capture the old soldier’s attention, as the veteran is enraptured by his battle memories and is constantly (and consistently) distracted by military details. Fragmentation, mise en abyme and re-combination being essential for the understanding of Sterne’s writing style, the resurgence and borrowing of various traditional emblems convey that too in the illustrations to Tristram Shandy. As Ronald Paulson aptly noted, “The characteristic mode was to create meaning by a restructuring of the intentionality of past art — by rearranging the art objects in a room or a garden, or the iconographic

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elements in a painting”, to which he might have added prints, plates, material culture designs and sundry other fashionable visual representations in the eighteenth century. To cast the net a little wider, it is worth recalling that the overall pattern in Cooke’s Series of Select Novels was repeatedly the same, mainly because the illustrators and engravers were the same too. J. Cooke, whose father had published emblem books, hired hosts of illustrators to turn out a vast number of plates, but their graphic style would still make them distinct. In the early 1790s, frame ornaments were very similar and readers would certainly have become familiar with Cooke’s novels by visually identifying the editorial choice for illustrations. A survey of later editions indicates there was an increasingly diversified type of ornamentation. Whilst each frame has elements which specifically relate to a given narrative, they still retain a kind of originality: the prints to Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, also published by Cooke, cannot be interchanged with those of Sterne’s works, in spite of formal similitudes in plate designs. The Cooke series was extremely popular and what is striking is the consistent use of emblems to the point that some ornaments of these engravings recall the overflow of Mannerist trappings, akin to the engraved frontispiece to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. In that sense, this eighteenth-century bookseller’s designs for book illustrations anticipates by almost a hundred years William Morris’s Arts and Crafts passion for the art of the book, as shown in, say, The Story of the Glittering Plain or the “Kelmscott Chaucer” (1896). The illustrators who worked for Cooke deftly intertwined emblematic motifs, thus turning the whole series into a kind of pattern book for other artists; but at the same their engravings are an invitation to revisit the notion of “marginalisation” of emblems at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Literature in the light of the emblem is often discussed in terms of imagery, metaphorical language where the emblematic image is taken as a model. Peter Daly has shown how fruitful an emblematic reading of drama can be, and Paulette Choné’s study Du point de vue de l’emblème goes along the same line. But the cross-fertilisation between illustrated literature and emblems is also based on borrowings and what one might call “interpicturality”. Thus, different emblematic forms in prints bear on the reminiscence of an ur-image. The emblematic motifs that one can recognise in some late eighteenth-century illustrations to Tristram Shandy create not only the effect of a complex composition, but clearly demonstrate that emblems were endowed with a strong capacity to resist extinction. Emblems in book illustrations offer the possibility of representing in one graphic space a syncretic vision of a text. Engravers and artists may have capitalised on such an intentional bricolage form,

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especially with such a zany text in mind as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Thomas Patch’s print illustrates, in the rhetorical sense of the word, how such a visual hybridity can accompany the beginning of Volume 7 and its happy ending, at the same time. Cooke’s series is based on the same principle, though with a view to underscoring the aesthetic dimension. Emblems in late eighteenth-century illustrations to Tristram Shandy are a means of visualising a peripheral scene whilst a secondary narrative may simultaneously develop in the margins. The notion of marginalisation of the emblem as a form may therefore be revisited. While the late eighteenth-century book trade is often said to be the age of decline for emblems in the marketplace, covering the margins with emblems remains, at that period, one of the most efficient ways to convey the intricacy of Sterne’s text and the multi-layered dimension of his Shandean tales. Other novels, and indeed poetry too, as, for instance, the illustrations to Thomson’s Seasons in Cooke’s series, benefited from this type of graphic design. In addition, these images give the Cooke series the formal appearance of dainty aesthetic objects, something Sterne was determined to have his Tristram Shandy look like by publishing the novel in duodecimo volumes and mixing the verbal and the visual in a variety of forms and oddities (asterisks, dashes, special pages, a flourish, plot lines). Illustrators like Thomas Patch, Richard Corbould and Charles Catton, amongst others, demonstrate, each in his own way, a subtle ability to grasp the spirit of Sterne’s text by mixing narrative representations of textual scenes and abstract forms in a similar way to that found in emblem books, so that the reader/viewer engages in a labyrinthine kind of reading. Finally, emblems, which are either in the margins or within the ornaments of the frames, reflect a complex web of allusions, which brings us full circle back to Tristram’s emblematic marbled page. But while emblems used in illustrations belong to a long iconographic tradition, itself partly based on borrowings, recycling of traditional motifs–and although Sterne proceeds in a similar fashion with his own writing–the many different versions of the marbled pages in Volume 3 remain nonetheless a most enigmatic, achieved, and undoubtedly unique “motly emblem”.

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Fig. 23.1. Sterne and Death, Thomas Patch, copper engraving, 1768. Private collection.

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Fig. 23.2. “La guerre dousce aux inexperimentez”, Gilles Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie (Paris, 1540). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 23.3. “En ma ioye dovlevr”, Maurice Scève, Délie (Paris, 1544). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

Figs. 23.4a and 23.4b. Emblems in honour of Philip V (1683-1746).

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Fig. 23.5. “Cosi vivo piacer condvce a morte”, George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635). Courtesy of the British Library.

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Fig. 23.6. Le Fever’s deathbed scene, Charles Catton, engraving. Cooke’s edition of Tristram Shandy, 1797; 1801 reprint. Private collection.

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Fig. 23.7. Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby, Charles Catton, engraving. Cooke’s edition of Tristram Shandy, 1797; 1801 reprint. Private collection.

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Fig. 23.8. Framework structure of prints with emblems, from Cooke’s editions, 1797-1801. Private collection

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Notes * My research would not have been so rewarding without the unwavering assistance from Dr Geoffrey Day, to whom this paper is dedicated with deepest gratitude for his ever so stimulating views on my Sterne studies. 1 Bath 1994, 271. 2 Daly 1998, 7. 3 For scholarly discussions of the marbled leaf in Tristram Shandy, see Day 1972, De Voogd 1985; De Voogd 1990; and Patterson 1991. 4 Tristram Shandy was published in a serialised form from 1759 to 1767. For more details about the publishing context, see for instance, Keymer 2002, and de Voogd 2007. 5 For Sterne’s borrowings, see New 1976 and the impressive list of possible sources identified and indexed by the annotators of the Florida edition of Sterne’s Works, Vol. 3, The Notes. References to Sterne’s novel are to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978). 6 One of Sterne’s most frequently used sources (and a possible model) is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a work qualified by Burton himself as “a cento”. 7 Patrick 2005, 128; and Watson 1939. This print is also described under Satire Nr. 4187 by D. George in the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, Vol. 4. 8 Cash 1975, 310-311. 9 Patrick 2005, 128. 10 My terminology is here indebted to the emblem website of Glasgow University. 11 See Zafra 2000. 12 Emphasis mine. 13 See Columbus 1971; Brienza 1974. 14 A similar structural pattern of embedded emblems is to be found, for instance, in Edward Collier’s 1696 oil on canvas which is a still life depicting Wither’s 1635 volume A Collection of Emblemes arranged amidst other objects meant to reflect the symbolic nature of Vanitas painting. 15 For a detailed study of that topos, see for instance Paulson 1975. 16 A formulation used by William Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) to define one of his aesthetic tenets, namely the “beauty of intricacy”. 17 The title page of Wither’s Collection of Emblemes, Book 2, features the emblem of the hourglass, the winged skull and the scythe. 18 Wither’s cuts were based on Gabriel Rollenhagen’s engravings, gathered from his two works, Nucleus emblematum selectissimorum (Arnheim, 1611-1613) and Emblematum centuria secunda (Arnheim and Utrecht, 1613). They are circular picturae and surrounding each engravings is an inscriptio normally in Latin. In 1635, Wither enriched Rollenhagen’s engravings by adding an English couplet to each emblem, though Manning would argue that Wither’s texts read more like rhyming prose. On Wither and Rollenhagen, see Manning 2002, 103. 19 Paulson 1975, 19.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR WALTER CRANE’S COLUMBIAN EMBLEM BOOK JAMES TANIS

How did it happen that an Englishman, Walter Crane, was to compose and compile the emblem book celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World? But then, the emblem form itself had been little used in the United States. Crane’s volume was, as far as I am aware, the only emblem book published in America in the late nineteenth century, apart from reprints of the very popular work of the earlier Connecticut emblematist John Warner Barber (1798-1885). Later we will see the differences in their approaches. Walter Crane (1845-1915) is best known for his work as an artistdesigner-illustrator. 1 Most remembered for his children’s books, and especially history booklets, he is linked with Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott among others.2 Not limited to graphic arts, however, Crane produced mosaics, stained glass, textiles, wallpapers, reliefs and various literary works. He was a prolific designer of work for socialist causes, and was known in England in his day as “the artist of socialism.” He designed banners, cartoons, leaflets, and even membership cards for the Socialist League, a society also attended by William Morris and George Bernard Shaw.3 Crane had been moved by accounts of the 1886 American imprisonment and execution of the so-called “Chicago Anarchists,” memorializing them in a large wood-engraving. The following year he created a cover design for a work by William Morris describing English reactions to the Chicago Anarchists. In a violent reactionary onslaught, the London police had killed a young law writer in Trafalgar Square.4 In 1891 Crane visited America for the first time, accompanying a travelling retrospective show of his art, and particularly his drawings – many of which he hoped to sell. 5 He had made arrangements through General Charles G. Loring, Director of the newly established Boston

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Museum of Fine Arts. In Boston he continued to speak out on socialist causes and the plight of the Chicago Anarchists. Among those stirred by Crane’s talks was the popular publisher Louis Prang, who was born in Breslau in Prussian Silesia and was a German veteran of the uprising of 1848. He came to America in 1852. Crane’s talk honouring the Anarchists also attracted Edward Bellamy and Horace Scudder. Together with Louis Prang they encouraged Crane, when visiting Chicago, the next stop on his tour, to acquaint himself with the efforts going on for the celebration of Columbus’s landfall in 1492. The response to Crane was not entirely positive. Having ruffled the feathers of some of Boston’s wealthy conservatives with his defence of the Anarchists, he avoided the subject in public when he got to Chicago. So elaborate had been Chicago’s plans that the actual date of the fair had early been reset from 1892 to 1893. Inspired by those vast coordinated efforts and emboldened by Prang’s strong support, Crane undertook his World’s Fair masterpiece, Columbia’s Courtship. He designed, as well, celebratory wallpaper and two large panels for the Women’s Temperance Building. In May, at the end of his tour, a holiday in New England provided time for him to complete these projects. He delivered his emblems to Louis Prang, who had encouraged the project and who was eager to publish it. The twelve emblematic pages and the title-page were chromolithographed by Prang, each with its vibrant colours on a separate sheet of heavy glossy stock that was then tipped into the gold-highlighted cloth binding. Though copyrighted for 1893, Prang had it ready for Christmas sales in 1892. My copy is an 1892 Christmas present – “Emily from Mother Dec 25th, ’92”. With titles serving as the requisite emblematic mottoes, the twelve plates were headed: I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII.

“Miss America as la belle sauvage” “The Norseman Came” “Columbus Saw” “Spain Conquered” “The Englishman” “The Dutchman” “The Frenchman” “And Other Suitors from over the Water put in their Claims” “But She Prefers her own Independence” “After a Struggle; involving a Question of Color; She puts on a new Costume” “And Ordering her United=State=Coach” “She is Conducted by Chicago to the World’s Fair”

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I embarked on this little study with the intent of placing Crane’s volume in the larger context of other political emblem books, an undertaking soon found to be far too vast for our project here. I will, however, reference a few related volumes at appropriate points. Drawn from common popular views of his day, Crane’s emblematic leaves sought to capture the unique contributions of the diverse groups peopling America. Let us look at five: emblems 1, 3, 4, 10, and 12 of the twelve plates in Columbia’s Courtship: A Picture History of the United States in Twelve Emblematic Designs in Color with Accompanying Verses. Crane began by personalizing and allegorizing America (Fig. 24.1): Fancy free, Columbia wild, Of Nature and of Time, the Child, By ocean’s undiscovered blue Curtained close, where no man knew, Ages long unconscious played. A brown and fearless Indian Maid.

He refers to her as Columbia and first embodies her in the striking figure of a Native American. Draped anachronistically in an animal skin and wearing a male warrior’s headdress, the bare-breasted maid with European features would not have pleased Native Americans, nor those Victorian Americans who would have been put off by her bare-breasted beauty. The Norseman Came (Emblem 2). With the extent of Viking penetration into the New World still at issue today, the figure of Eric the Red would have raised more questions than it settled. Though helping to establish a failed colony in Canada, it is only a conjectural likelihood that Norsemen reached “Columbia’s Shores.” Passing over other pre-Columbian adventurers, Crane turns in Emblem 3 to the man of the hour (Fig. 24.2): Still broke the waves, The Centuries rolled, And then this great Columbus bold The new-world’s shore beheld at last Of all his hopes the anchor cast – And saw, as in a dream untold, The wealth of Ind and all its gold.

As an Englishman himself, he might have been expected to cite John Cabot or the Bristol men. That, however, would not have pleased the Italians who claimed Columbus, nor the Spanish whose forebears made the Genoan’s dream a possibility. With the plate embellished with nautical

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symbols, Columbus clutches a scroll. Possibly it represents the letter of authorization from Ferdinand and Isabella or his own calculations on reaching the Indies? Crane’s map in the upper left focuses on the islands where Columbus made his first landfalls. By comparison, stepping back from Columbia’s Courtship to the work of John Warner Barber, America’s most prolific emblematist, one finds all-encompassing differences. Rather than focusing on national or ethnic groups, as Crane did, Barber, in his Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes turned to the individual contributions of each state. Barber’s Native American appears in his Massachusetts emblem.6 Barber structured each emblem on the motto of the state, with the state’s seal for the graphic and an historic description by his daughter Elizabeth for the exposition (Fig. 24.3). The one similar note is Crane’s Indian maid’s “fancy free” and Barber’s Indian’s “Liberty.” The latter’s Indian is true in dress and in form to an actual Native American. His daughter’s text is accurate and informative, contrasting with the emotive quality of Crane’s verses. A quarter the size of each of Crane’s leaves and printed in black and white, the contrast of Barber’s and Crane’s work is evident in every facet. The charming Indian maid reappears in Emblem 4 (Fig. 24.4). Though still wearing her headdress, she has traded her animal skin for a skirt of tobacco leaves. The Spanish conquistadors had little interest in Columbus’s actual landfalls, nor in the southern and eastern shores of the continent to the north. They headed for the lands of the powerful native nations, the Mayans and the Aztecs and their gold and silver. Then conquering Spain her flag unfurled Above the wondering Indian world, That saw new gods in armor gleam, And golden castles in the beam Of sunset dyed, and lions red – Spain conquered and her realm was spread.

The Spaniard holds the maid back and has grasped her right hand with his. The anxiety on her face and the mirror in her left hand alert the viewer to, what I find, is Crane’s finest emblem. Some years before Crane sailed for Boston, he fathered a songbook, entitled Pan-Piper. With a role reversal the armoured Spaniard became an Englishman and the Indian maid became a Spanish lady. The scene was all set to music.7 The most important point to be made here, however, is the way in which Crane used virtually the same three-fold structure for Pan-

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Pipes that he is to use, without the music, in the emblems for Columbia’s Courtship. In Emblem 5, with visual and narrative references to the Jamestown Colony of 1607, the verse stresses England’s empire building. Allusions to “the breeze of enterprise”, “the chain of colonies made fast”, and visual references to the gun, the cannon, and the warship reflect Crane’s strong anti-imperial stance. The Dutchman in Emblem 6 makes a strong contrast. Surrounded by tulips on the one side and a banner with Leo Belgicus on the other, a rather effete Dutch merchant clearly lacks the drive for political empire. The emphasis is on colonizing where “tillage and commerce lead the van.” The Dutchman enjoys “his pipe and flowing can.” Unlike the Englishman, he has little interest in turning “the new-world Eden” into a political base. Lest Crane leaves the wrong impression of the Dutchman’s contribution, we turn the clock back to the Netherlandish struggle for its own independence from Spain. Two contrasting images make the point. The first is a leaf from Imprese nobili et ingeniose di diversi prencipi, a volume with text by Lodovico Dolce (1508-1568) and graphics by Giovanni Battista Pittoni (b. 1520). This volume of imprese was assembled by Pittoni for publication in Venice in 1583. Dolce conjures up the image of “il gran Filippo”, casting his light over all (Fig. 24.5).8 Contrasting the Dolce-Pittoni image of Philip with that of “The Patient Sanbenitado” in Joris Hoefnagel’s emblem book entitled Patientia, one witnesses the struggle between the politically powerful and the seemingly politically powerless. 9 Though in 1569 Hoefnagel could little have imagined the length of the struggle between Spain and The Netherlands nor its eventual outcome, his Patientia was a path-breaking political tract (Fig. 24.6). The Sanbenitados were those forced by the Spanish Inquisition to recant all differing opinions and to wear the yellow garment with a red St Andrew’s cross, an infamous sign of heresy. In this image, Hoefnagel places the unrepentant over against the implements of Christ’s passion, remarking “Reflect on me, all you who trade in Spanish lands.”10 In America’s later struggle for independence, the victorious Dutch in their struggle for independence from Spain were frequently cited as a model of encouragement for the New World Revolutionaries. The Frenchman in Emblem 7 models “liberty, equality, and fraternity”. Crane tosses the king’s crown on the ground, together with the broken chain of Columbia’s ties to England. The French flag is a symbol “of freedom and brotherhood”, and the fasces to right and left are symbols of unity. Whether intentionally or not, this double-edged image, with its chain on the ground, referenced Crane’s strong support for Irish Home

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Rule. A couple of years earlier he had helped decorate St James’s Hall in preparation for a large Home Rule demonstration. The walls were covered with “harps upon green banners and Home Rule mottoes and shamrocks” and two large maps of Britannia before and after Home Rule. As Crane noted earlier, “Political excitement did not, however, interfere with any ordinary work, and in some ways helped to inspire it.” In Emblem 8 Crane sought to gather together representatives of all the other national groups that came to the New World: Across the sea yet still they come, For work, for fortune, or a home, Whom Motherlands have these denied Labor’s sons still wandering wide; Of every color, race & kin, Columbia’s favor still to win.

Not surprisingly, the Irishman with his harp and shamrock is among the first. Behind the Irishman are the Russian, the German, the Chinese and the African. Each has a symbolic shield of identification. The German, portrayed as a printer, probably recalls Louis Prang, the German refugee of 1848 and the printer of Columbia’s Courtship. In the last four emblems the figure of Columbia returns. In the first, Emblem 9, she is still the Indian maid, but now draped in a flag and holding leaves of tobacco in her right hand. With her left hand she gives perch to an eagle. George Washington appears in the border with the national seal. The motto of this emblem, “But she prefers her own independence”, underlines Crane’s stress on liberty and freedom. None of the European, Asian, or African immigrants overpower the image of the Native American. In Emblem 10 Columbia emerges from the Civil War, the War between the States, as a totally new figure, not in costume alone (Fig. 24.7). The border encloses Lincoln on the right and the freed slave on the left. The flag has become a stylish dress. Throughout the nineteenth century the flag was often overprinted with political slogans and candidates’ portraits. By the twentieth century, however, sensitive patriotic souls began a movement to ban any such “improper use” of the flag. A whole array of guidelines was generated. Crane’s figures would have raised negative feelings among many such folks. Oddly enough, such attitudes largely persisted until 9-11 and the collapse of the Twin Towers. Since then the flag has reappeared in all manner of adaptations. Columbia would now be right in style.

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In Emblem 11 the newly restyled Columbia is about to enter “her United=States=Coach.” She is surrounded on the sides by thirteen stars for the original thirteen states. Crane’s text tells us that Columbia’s UnitedStates-Coach will now be drawn by forty-four horses, the number of the states at the time. The title was a pleasant play on the words United States and Stage Coach. Even so, after all this elegant preparation, one is hardly ready for the dénouement. Chicago, capped by a spread-eagle crown, shows Columbia the Plan for the Fair (Fig. 24.8): Out to the shining western gate, Where Chicago keeps high fete, Robed in Michigan’s fair blue, And decked with gold the prairies grew; She spreads her chart, and proudly shows The wonders that the World’s Fair knows.

A cycle and stalks of wheat represent the Midwest. Her Lake Michigan blue gown displays the sailing ship of the early explorers. The little naked babies in the borders hold the symbols of the Fair’s excellencies. The book was not cheap to produce. Printed on thick paper, each leaf had to be tipped into the binding. Though hundreds of thousands of people attended the Fair, the book sold poorly, unlike the newly designed silver souvenir spoons and the striking new picture postcards. Depicting the high spots of the Fair, the postcards started a craze that presaged the golden age of the postcard. Often the cards were mailed with copies of the first American commemorative postage stamps, the colourful set of Columbians. Crane’s name was not well enough known to be a major selling point. It was the only Crane book limited to its American printing. The rare surviving copies testify to the appeal that Crane’s labours had for some folks. Unfortunately, few visitors to the Fair in 1893 would have known what an emblem book was anyway.

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Fig. 24.1. “Miss America as La Belle Sauvage Fancy Free”, Walter Crane, Columbia’s Courtship (Boston, 1893). Private collection.

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Fig. 24.2. “Columbus Saw”, Walter Crane, Columbia’s Courtship (Boston, 1893). Private collection.

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Fig. 24.3. “Massachussetts”, John Barber, Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes (New Haven, CT, 1850). Private collection.

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Fig. 24.4. “Spain Conqvered”, Walter Crane, Columbia’s Courtship (Boston, 1893). Private collection.

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Fig. 24.5. Device of Philip II from Ludovico Dolce and Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Imprese Nobili, et ingeniose di diversii Prencipi (Venice, 1583). Courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

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Fig. 24.6. “The Patient Sanbenitado”, Joris Hoefnagel, Patientia (1569).

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Fig. 24.7. “After a Strvggle Involving a Qvestion of Color, She Pvts on a New Costvme”, Walter Crane, Columbia’s Courtship (Boston, 1893). Private collection.

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Fig. 24.8. “She is Condvcted by Chicago to the World’s Fair”, Walter Crane, Columbia’s Courtship (Boston, 1893). Private collection.

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Notes 1

See Jackson 1913, 340-344. See Massé 1923. 3 See Walter Crane 1989, 13-23. 4 Crane 1907, 266-271. 5 Spencer 1975, 170-178. 6 Barber 1850, 115. 7 Crane 1883, 19. 8 Dolce and Pittoni 1583, leaf [4].9. 9 See Hoefnagel 1935. 10 See Tanis and Horst 1993, 16-17. 2

PART V: THE EMBLEM NOW

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE CAPRICCI BY LAURENT DE COMMINES IN THE SCOPE OF EMBLEMATICS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OJƖRS SPƖRƮTIS

At the very beginning of my article I wish to ask myself as well as my colleagues—researchers of emblems and developers of the field of emblematics—a rhetorical question: how long will the edifice of emblemcreation and emblem-deciphering, carefully built over previous centuries on the foundations of Renaissance humanism, continue to be in existence? To what extent will it survive as a fruitful and rich field for research and how long will the synthesis of philosophical poetry, metaphor, paradox and miniature graphics keep urging us to meet for a creative exchange of ideas and discussion? My own observations at the Seventh International Conference of the Society for Emblem studies at the University of Illinois in 2005 made me entertain the idea of modern society’s ability, within a certain future timeframe, to think in the structural, morphological, semantic and artistic categories of classical emblems, to comprehend the interrelations between their components, and to appreciate the philosophical capaciousness or situational precision of emblems. Modern society is in constant intellectual development, but I am certain that I am not alone in my misgivings and worries about the humanities and a person’s education heading towards a dead-end or crisis. With specialisation narrowing down, the angle of vision is reduced and so is the scope of the view; homo universalis, whose greatest treasure was an awareness of European cultural values and the skills to handle them, belongs to the past. It is true that in our meetings special sections are set up to discuss the changing nature of the genre of emblems in the twentyfirst century because changes in life cause changes in the meta-language of emblems. However, I am sure that many of us see the Lisbon Treaty and similar treaties resulting in a threat to classical education and the inevitable decline of emblem culture. The extraction of individual

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elements from emblem compositions, the subjectivism in the derivation of emblems, as well as the modifications from older graphic designs, exemplifies present-day post-modern culture. Yet, the newly created results can hardly be described as a revival of the phoenix from the ashes, let alone an elevation to its former glory. My subjective, pessimistic evaluation may be fallacious, and my article may perhaps prove the opposite. However, to my great regret, the exception that I have found and will analyse here is a one-off example of intellectualism in a general educationally levelling process. To our delight, this case demonstrates an educated individual’s desire to regard the transient values of society and our cultural and historical heritage with nostalgia; at the same time this individual masterfully synthesizes the components of the artistic content and form of emblems, as well as literary texts. His work shows the creativity of a person who has enjoyed a classical education. I turn to the creativity of the modern French artist Laurent de Commines (b. 1960, Paris). A representative of an ancient French aristocratic family, Commines has the education of an artist and an architect. Over the last years he has mostly devoted himself to painting, design and applied art. When reading about the lives of famous French historical persons, he succumbed to a fascination for historical placenames and proper names that he found in books and other sources about the Baltics, Livonia and the Duchy of Courland (1561–1795). The temporal and geographical distance excited the artist’s imagination. It was by sheer accident that Laurent de Commines met Violette Palewski, Duchess of Sagan, descendant of the Talleyrand-Périgord family and the dukes of Courland. She was the last of this famous name, acquired by her ancestors through the marriage of Dorothy, youngest daughter of the last reigning Duke of Courland, Peter Biron, to Edmond de Talleyrand, nephew of the prominent French diplomat Charles Maurice Talleyrand. After her retirement, the venerable lady lived in an elegant Neoclassical palace, Chateau du Marais, near Paris and had invited the young artist to visit her on a spring day in 1999. They met in the Blue Salon, surrounded by the portraits of her aristocratic Courland ancestors, among them the distinguished Duchess Dorothy and her daughter Dino. The Duchess’s talk had inflamed Laurent’s artistic imagination so much that he was ready to go to the totally unknown Latvia in search of a glimmer of its lost glory. On 23rd February 2002, in a private letter to the author of the present article, Laurent de Commines wrote, “I am a French painter who has made several trips in Courland, Livland and Estonia ... to look for the memory of the Baltic barons and their lost world.”1 Laurent de Commines had found

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the key to his speculations about the lost era and lost countries in novels by the Baltic German writer Hermann Keiserling and in Le Coup de Grace by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. In the same letter, the artist admits that during his travels around the Baltic States, visiting palaces, manors and historical ruins in shady parks, he “drew them in a lot of watercolour sketches like a “Carnet de Voyage of the ‘Grand Tour’ time.”2 Indeed, Commines’s sensitive heart and artistic talent had opened the door for him to the life and conditions of the Baltic aristocracy so that he could admire it as an irrevocably gone and forgotten romantic world. His brush has created dozens of skilful and realistic watercolours with images of Latvian and Estonian manor houses and parks; they reveal an intellectual’s nostalgic sadness over the pernicious nature of the twentieth century. Although it had democratised society, it had also irreversibly destroyed both the centuries-old class of aristocracy and the symbols of their material culture. The artist describes his travel impressions in a literary imaginative form, capturing the fragments of bygone time and culture that had excited his artistic associations and metaphors. He writes: I have imagined some Piranesian “Caprices” inspired by these ruined or neglected houses which prolong in the imagination this memory of travel. In fact, in these “caprices” I dreamed pictorially about the atmosphere of places, the tragic substance of their history, or the fantasy of a personage who lived here ... These exploratory trips were for me a kind of “pilgrimage to the ruins” in time and space of a post-Soviet Europe which is rediscovering its past. In the same way, architects and painters on the “Grand Tour” reinvented by brush a mythic Italy. Built by Latvian and Estonian peasants for German barons these vestiges of old Baltikum are interpreted by my French nostalgia – and I hope creative sensibility.3

Laurent de Commines started his trip to ancient Livonia and legendary Courland in July 1999, the dramatic final year of the twentieth century, visiting Latvia’s countryside and discovering new manors and carefully built castles. For centuries managed by the Baltic nobility, they were confiscated as a result of the agrarian reform of 1920 and survive down to our day in different states of preservation. Coming across these witnesses of past glory and painting them, Commines could only exclaim: “Porticoes with flanking columns, overgrown gardens, and chipped cornices and coats-of-arms, I could only guess at this lost world when examining the photographs and trying to read between the lines. I had found it at last! I could feel it in my bones! This was the world that appealed to me; it was calling to me; it was waiting for me!”4

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Where are the emblems or manifestation of a related genre? They appear in the next cycle of Commines’s works, dedicated to Courland and the Baltics, under a new, untraditional, Italian name: capriccio. Borrowed from the Latin word capra – goat (chamois), the genre designation was used in Renaissance Italy for a lively, unexpected, surprising literary or musical composition, rich in fantastical elements. Commines had consciously chosen the name for the genre, on the basis of the similarity between the unforeseeably capricious behaviour of a goat and the unceasingly changing nature of art. His distanced, ironic reaction to the past, which reveals only violence and scars, is the only method of artistic creativity that an artist-romantic, disposed to melancholy and intellectually dramatised perception, will eventually arrive at. For the exhibition at the Latvian Museum of Architecture in Riga the author had chosen to call his capriccio cycle of emblems “Baltic Manors in Drawings. Memory and Imagination” (2004), specially designed, and rich in watercolours and literary essays. This work, remarkable for its images and text, revives centuries-old traditions of the capriccio series. Because of the closeness, in terms of the genre, emotionality and stylistics, it can be associated with the names of such outstanding painters and graphic artists as Jacques Callot, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Francisco Goya. And, since Laurent de Commines’s capricci are virtuoso watercolour miniatures, their excellent quality and exquisite details—with a bias towards creating subjective symbol—remind one of the style of the grand master Salvatore Dali, packed with caprices and extravagance. As for composition, Commines’s emblematic watercolour drawings present ornamented squares with a circle inside. That is, each drawing consists of a decorative frame and the conceptual, thematic centre. By the encircled main thematic carrier, the concentration of symbolic details, the artist nurtures the tondo form, which is rarely used today. It helps the viewer to concentrate on the essential, gain an insight into the composition and focus on meaningful details: heraldry, grotesquely transformed fragments of architecture, and expressive aristocratic objects and manor environments. This peculiarity makes Commines’s drawings look even more like traditional emblems. Colour-wise, the poignant miniatures elegize the disintegration of the Baltic nobility and their manors in the twentieth century, just like the popular Renaissance and Baroque vanitas genre works which reflected life, nature and all that exists in a melancholic key of imminent extinction. Basically, the stylistics and emotionality of Commines’s capricci are comparable to the sombre mood of Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving

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“Melancholia I” (1515) when, at the very end of the cycle, the bygone Duchy of Courland is compared to Arcadia: “Et in Courlandia ego”, whose past charm he, like a pilgrim, had tried to divine and capture during his “Grand Tour” (Fig. 25.1). Laurent de Commines describes his attitude in the following way: “Pilgrimage; yes, that is exactly the right word! I had, in fact, devoted three or four successive summers of my life to making a pilgrimage to the ruins and sorrows of a sunken world. And with each return, I had the feeling of plunging even deeper into melancholy; of exploring its complexity and the power of transformation it can have on one’s own personal development.”5 On the occasion of Latvia’s joining the European Union, in June to September 2004, the artist engaged Latvia’s public with an exhibition of his extraordinary compositions in the Museum of Architecture. Let us turn to thematically the most important emblematic capricci by Commines, comprising a cycle of seventeen watercolours entitled “Baltic Manors in Drawings. Memory and Imagination” (2004). All of the drawings display the parts that are characteristic of classical emblem composition: Motto, Pictura and Epigram. The motto, on a separate page of literary commentary, performs the defining function by naming the object, indicating the toponym (e.g. “Guard Pavilion at Ungurmuiža”), or hinting at a certain historical event or a metaphorical situation (e.g. “A Night of War at Mežotne” or “Winter’s Tale at RundƗle”). The motto encourages the reader to create mentally a bridge to the particular historical situation, imagine the life stories of the former owners, or yield to meditative associations about the sad decline of bygone glory. The epigram is usually offered in the form of a philosophical essay with an unpretentious didactic résumé or an invitation for the reader to make the suggested elegiac conclusion. In his talk with Laurent de Commines, the author of the present article found out that the order of texts and the respective emblematic drawings in the collection partly reflects the geography of the artist’s travels and also forms a subjective mosaic of twentieth-century cataclysms. By sorting and selecting Commine’s emblematic drawings, the author of this article creates his own rank of thematic hierarchy which he considers necessary for the observation of the principles of visual discourse, inner logical structure, as well as the evolution of form and content in this publication. This is why the first under consideration is the emblem of the Eleja manor and the historical associations that it evokes: “Project for Tea Pavilion in Elley” (Fig. 25.2). The French artist has found it a rich source for contemplation.

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Its title, “Project for Tea Pavilion in Elley”, is placed in the capriccio’s corner, like a crumpled sheet of paper caught in the decorative wroughtiron gate of the park. The epigram provides information on the sçavant Count Christof Johann Friedrich von Medem, called Jeanneau, and his skills and devotion to drawing and collecting architectural designs of manors and parks. This is why the short literary miniature, with its imaginary oriental, Crimean, or some other southern atmosphere which the owners of the manor would have wished to transport to their humid and gloomy northern country, epitomizes the very same longing that used to urge wealthy Northern Europeans to make their Grand Tour to Italy, Greece or Switzerland for the sake of their love for ancient culture and desire for knowledge. The model of the Tea Pavilion, placed on a pedestal and among the artist’s brushes, symbols and objects of the tea ceremony, hints at the unlimited possibilities of the aristocracy to form their environment and, in an elegiac way, contemplates the end of the Birons, dukes of Courland, when the Russian Empress Catherine II’s policy resulted in the integration of the independent duchy into the Russian Empire in 1795. This in turn caused the Duke’s family to emigrate. Since Duke Peter Biron’s wife, Duchess Dorothea von Medem, came from the owners of the Eleja manor, the Tea Pavilion’s function was changed to commemorate this connection. It was rebuilt as Duchess Dorothea’s memorial pavilion and the marble sculpture of Dorothea was transferred in 1863 from the Jelgava Villa Medem park to the pavilion. During World War I these testimonies to the duchy’s glory suffered the next blow of fortune when the Eleja palace was burnt down, and the pavilion, with the artwork, and the duchess’s sculpture, were damaged. Today the ruins of the palace and the pavilion testify to past events, and the artist makes a rhapsodic entry in his diary which serves as a foreword to the poetic capriccio collection: The gap in the oak trees leading to the ruined pavilion of Eleja ... relates the same story. The obsessive presence of the past already lurks in the shade of the branches, and it permeates the pilgrim walking through the grove.”6 The same mood reigns in the epigram: “The castle has vanished and in the park, the breach in the oak trees only leads to a single but moving fragment of the former splendour of Elley – the sumptuous estate of the Medem family. It is precisely because neglect and humidity has almost turned it into a corpse that I wanted to travel back in time and imagine what the atmosphere was like during the period when this fragment was an attractive project submitted to the owners of the domain. The architect drew up plans and elevations, produced a model, and studied every detail, even designing the porcelain tea service. The atmosphere of a light and sunny Orient, perhaps the souvenir of a trip to Crimea, once

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Laurent de Commines’s capricci epigram texts are charged with hints at literary associations and form a poetic picture, like Claude Debussy’s impressionistic music. In this aspect the modern French artist’s literary commentary as a supplement to his emblem-type capriccio differs from the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century epigrams in which the principal role was assigned to antique literature, religious parallels and didactic Christian allegories. The subjective literary fable, excerpted from historical and biographical episodes of the lives of the Baltic nobility creates the twentyfirst century language of emblems. This can be seen in another emblem-capriccio of the cycle, dedicated to the historical associations inspired by RundƗle Palace, summer residence of the dukes of Courland (Fig. 25.3). Its motto is “Winter’s Tale in RundƗle”, while the capriccio composition includes metaphorical “frozen” fragments of the gate, the garden and interior sculptural elements above which rises a grotesquely transformed image of a Moor with a parasol and the monarch’s crown (Fig. 25.4). Thus the official iconography of the Duchess’s bedroom and the palace breathe a distanced and ironical attitude.8 The image of cold and “frost” as an expression and iconographically affective emotional metaphor has been introduced both in the epigram and the iconography with a political subtext. It highlights the “ice-cold” and hostile attitude, cultivated in the Russian court by Tsarina Anna Ioanovna against Duke Biron of Courland and his family. It was on her orders that the Duke’s family was exiled to Siberia where the Birons spent twenty long years. The epigram speaks the language of allegory and, according to the iconography, expresses the inhuman scale of the political and personal tragedy. I quote: There is a touch of “Munchausen” in the destiny of Ernst Johann Biron, Duke of Courland. He had the same way of climbing up peaks, suddenly plunging down into an abyss, and finally re-conquering the summit! ... During this long winter of ambition, his tenacious energy and determination to seek revenge might have inspired him to invent projects for monuments glorifying his return: “The lion of Courland has not finished with roaring!”

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... he probably swore when drawing this sculpted cascade. He roared again in 1762 when Catherine the Great gave him back his seat. He seized the sceptre firmly and completed the palaces he had started building thirty years earlier. In RundƗle, formerly Ruhental, a fountain cracked by time illustrates this fierce persistence in surviving and reigning.9

Still another capriccio is dedicated to one of Courland’s most romantic palaces, Ɯdole, and its motto announces a new theme: “Family Vault at Ɯdole”, while the structure of the grotesquely transformed family mausoleum in the centre of the composition ironically interprets the meaning of the family name (Fig. 25.5). Having visited Courland’s prominent cultural monuments, the artist is moved by the devastation of the country noblemen’s burial mound. The drawing that has been inspired by these impressions shows a dilapidated mausoleum whose roof is supported by bears, heraldic animals of the von Behr family (Fig. 25.6). By means of witty paradox and the pun (“Behr” – bear) they manifest helplessness in face of ravages of time. The epigram relates, “At Ɯdole, bears, the emblem of their coat-of-arms, seem to watch over the dynasty and uphold the memory of its lineage in the midst of ruined tombs ... Their damaged sepulchre, now eaten away by ivy, is gradually becoming a ghost in the moonlight.”10 The epigrammatic text rescues the most distinguished bearers of the family name from oblivion. Set against the background of the mausoleum, they are personified by the images of bears: the brave cavalry officer who excelled in the 1683 battles at Vienna, still another who fell in 1812 at Moscow, and a third who died in the Russo-Turkish war, defending Sebastopol. After the agrarian reform of 1920, the manor and the palace went through a period of neglect; later it was occupied by an old people’s home, the community house, the summer workshops and lodgings for art students until, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the noble abode again passed into private ownership. It remains our hope that the pessimistic stagnation has finally come to an end. The contemplation of such processes of the degradation of cultural environments and the achievements of civilization leads the capriccio author to regard the “old Europe” as a field of new economic colonization and trace a correspondence with the thirteenth century when Christian missionaries opened the door to Courland for Europeans. Seen from Commines’s perspective, the only subjectively and artistically justifiable reaction to the once-colonized and Europeanized territory, now destroyed, forgotten and overgrown with weeds, is a melancholically permeated work of art. From a subjective humanistic angle, the ruins of past culture betray the ugly face of western civilization and its symbols: manors with their parks, gardens, sculptures

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and paintings, the aristocracy and it mode of life, the bygone monarchies, Christianity and other spiritual values. With his capricci, Commines shows to us the withering face of European culture, just as art connoisseurs can detect it in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of the ruins of Rome, which were created 1500 years after the collapse of the empire. Another capriccio, painted in 2002, “Casino at Blankenfelde” recalls the exile of Louis XVIII when, after the French Revolution, the king and his court spent several years in Jelgava, the capital of the Duchy of Courland, a remote corner of Europe (Fig. 25.7). It was here, in Courland, that he often visited the Blankenfelde manor, estate of the Köningsfels, playing cards for hours on end. The composition that is included in the capriccio’s iconography ironically regards Louis XVIII’s fallacious cardstacked belief in the possibility of the re-establishment of monarchy. However, fate intervened like an accidental roll of the dice, and the king returned to his native country and regained the throne. The epigram, too, relates this extraordinary historical episode with a happy ending for both the monarch and his host: “In 1818, when he ascended once more to his throne, remembering his happy hours at Blankenfelde, the king expressed his gratitude to the Königsfels by making them French counts. Today their descendants are once again in possession of Blankenfelde, and have started to restore it. After a long and deep slumber, destiny has finally come up with the trump card for this place too,” moralises Commines.11 In the emblem-capriccio “A Night of War at Mežotne”, Commines has used verbal and iconographical elements from modernity to create a characteristic expression of the twentieth century (Fig. 25.8). Its compositional centre–the tondo–is supported by four Atlases, crumbling under the weight of political cataclysms. On their shoulders they struggle to hold the disintegrating cupola of the Festive Hall at Mežotne Castle. Their Terrestrial Globe and their Universe, reflect, as in a microcosm, the human catastrophe of the world. In his literary poetic epigram the author tells how: In September 1944, the frontline separating the Red Army from Hitler’s troops included Mežotne within the firing range of its guns. The night of the 14th turned out to be fatal for this refined castle in Courland! ... After the bombardments in 1944 by the Red Army, this rotunda was left for about twenty years with a gaping hole. Cows would come to graze up to the edge of the gravel, depicting a scene similar to a painting by Panini in the antique style.12

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One may ask, what exactly appeared so moving and inspiring for the artist in an “ordinary” wartime story about the destruction of the manor house at Mežotne? Knowing the artist’s life philosophy, his humanistic views speak for themselves, accusing totalitarian regimes and their cynicism, which appears even meaner considering the countless cultural treasures these regimes exposed to peril. The Mežotne Castle is an excellent classical ensemble, and was created for Countess Charlotte von Lieven by the brilliant Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. This prominent gentlewoman of Courland had been granted the Russian Tsar’s favour in the form of considerable landed property as a token of gratitude for bringing up Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine, grandsons of Catherine II. Life in St Petersburg and the Tsar’s court enabled her to commission Quarenghi, who designed theatres, banks, universities and palaces in the capital city, for the castle project. Following his designs, Charlotte von Lieven built Mežotne Castle between 1800 and 1802; it fell victim to two warring armies whose native countries lay elsewhere, but who met in Courland with the purpose of exterminating European civilization and culture. Thus, the Greek mythological images of Atlases in the paintings on the Mežotne Castle cupola (restored in 1974) help to throw a bridge between distant countries and epochs once split by military confrontation. Predominant in the artist’s elegiac meditations on the fate of symbols and cultural heritage are resigned observations and sceptical conclusions. Far from every cultural artefact of the Duchy of Courland can boast of a successful story of rebirth, like that of Mežotne Castle. By contrast, the emblem-capriccio “Hortus Petrinus at Luste” overflows with symbols of destruction (Fig. 25.9). When depicting the park full of broken sculpture, Commines has played both with the compound name of “Lustschloss Friedrichlust” and symbols of destruction. The vignette of the tondocomposition includes motifs of architectural ruins, funereal drapery, nightpersonifying owls and bats, and extinguished lamps. The hopelessness evoked by the visit to the Duke’s pleasure park has prompted the artist’s imagination to draw a distinctly pessimistic vision in which each symbolic image is subtly eloquent: the broken obelisk, the classical sculpture with the motif of “The Rape of the Sabine Women”, the shattered Sphinx and, in the centre of all that, Chronos with a broken scythe. At the moment when Peter Biron, the last Duke of Courland, was forced to leave his country under Russian pressure in 1795, even Time stopped at this place of gaiety and the Muses. The author of the picture and its epigram writes:

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Chapter Twenty Five Is there a languor that belongs specifically to the North? A kind of “melancholia baltica” affecting the inhabitants of the shores of this sea and travellers who venture to this land? If not, why did J.L. Legeay, an architect at the court of Mecklenburg and later Prussia, start to sketch ruins and mausoleums so compulsively in the eighteenth century? The Pomeranian artists, Kersting and Friedrich, turned the Nordic lands and their endless nights into emblems of silence and solitude. And this tradition continued with the painter Desprez, the scenographer of Gustavus III who drew, during his stay in Sweden, so many shadowy crypts and disquieting tombs. Approaching the shores of Courland, this epidemic may have infected its Duke, marking the Neoclassical years of Peter of Courland with the prints of Piranesi. Being solitary and over-sensitive, this misanthropic sovereign preferred the company of the statues he had brought over from Italy to that of his ministers. If the ravages of time had been less cruel to the ruins of his villa in Friedrichlust–renamed Luste–it would still be possible to see in a corner of the park a few vestiges forgotten by Peter when he left for exile. After he abdicated, he transported his pre-Romantic temperament to the castles of Bohemia and Silesia, where he died one winter’s day in 1800.13

Laurent de Commines’s nostalgia-permeated perception and reflection on the miraculous past of the phenomenon of the Duchy of Courland in modern Latvia constantly relate to the amorphous, though infinitely capacious aesthetics, of vanitas vanitatum, cultivated in Renaissance and Baroque art, emblematics and literary fiction. Looking from the window of his Paris flat onto world conflicts, the artist, in a manner of a refined intellectual, yields to sorrowful contemplation of the irrational clash of “the East” and “the West” as a result of which the once harmonious and idyllic corner of European culture—Latvia and Estonia—turned into a collection of fragments, or “Cabinet of Ruins”. The last emblematic capriccio in the cycle differs only in its form from the other tondo drawings. It is a vertically elongated rectangular work with its composition divided into horizontal bands whose essential idea is to create an image of a closet or bookshelf. Inspired by Renaissance and Baroque culture, particularly in the world of scientifically systematized fossils, like exotic relics in Kunstkameras, curiosity cabinets, or collection showcases, Commines has found an appropriate label for the multitude of memories and historical fragments that have piled up like curious pieces of a mosaic on the shelves of his memories and impressions. Immortalised in the painting are the ruins of Classical architecture wherein connoisseurs will recognize generalised symbols of the Baltic nobility’s economic and political might fatefully and ironically reduced to artefacts of the “fragments of history” or ruins.

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Precisely such a motto—“Cabinet of Ruins”—introduces the last capriccio (Fig. 25.10). In its epigram Commines the aesthete cannot but cry out in despair: None of these castles exist any longer! Burnt down or destroyed by bombs during the two world wars, they now belong to the world of phantoms. These jewels of Baltic heritage still bore their German names when most of them fell. And it is by these names that they should be remembered today: Zehnhoff, Würzau, Zarnikau, Diensdorff, Lennewarden, Gross-Eckau ... A connoisseur of architecture and history may have gathered these vanished manors in the form of a collection of maimed models. Around the altar of his fervour, he may have collected these vestiges and relics to create an imaginary museum dedicated to the lost Balticum.14

To conclude the cycle of both literary and artistic conception of his capricci, Commines adds his personal judgement: “For me, too, this corner of Europe, situated between Samogitia and Lake Peipus, was for several years an alchemical engraving of human eternity. Our different temperaments are incorporated in it, from the insouciance of Eleja and the lucidity of Stameriena to the state of despondency of Mežotne. Despondency and fervour finally come together in the ‘Cabinet of Ruins’, pious tabernacle of our remorse.” As the artist addresses his readers, he does not shun the traditional moral common for all collections of emblems. In the given context the sad statement leaves space for hope as well: “Hopefully, this ‘cabinet of ruins’ will give sensitive readers a taste for the past and desire to protect those Baltic manors that are still standing!”15 On the basis of the present treatment of the topic, and unusual in the research of modern culture, I venture to predict the further evolution of the emblem genre. Nearly all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists’ fantasies on the topic of architecture, called by their creators capricci, were morphologically structured so as to contrast the hopeless desolation of the truly existing or imaginary place, and the remarkably rich layer of cultural and historical memory. In these emblematic capricci, flooded with cold moonlight, emotional necromancy is neither sick nor deathly; it is just the artist’s consciously cultivated quality of theatrical expression. It fills the imaginatively construed “Theatrum Mundi” with stories of the past in which Kronos, the cipher of time, has two roles: that of the dramatist and that of the director of the performance. The series of twenty-first century capricci we have been considering does not fit in with, and does not comprise, the mainstream research of our favourite object: emblems. Owing to its peculiar mental construction, Laurent de Commines’s poetic

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and pictorial creativity remains an exotic exception and a marginal phenomenon of intellectual constructions in the modern era of the graphic design of trade marks, symbols and logotypes. The author of the article is partial to these creative individuals with the gift of retrospective perception. Personalities like Laurent de Commines should proceed with their lonely journey into the world of romantic images to kindle their imagination with erudition rooted in classical studies, an education which is becoming progressively rarer in our pragmatic modern world.

Fig. 25.1. “Et in Courlandia ego?”, Laurence de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig. 25.2. “Project for Tea Pavilion at Elley”, Laurence de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig. 25.3. The main gate of RundƗle Palace, Latvia. Photograph by Imants Lancmanis.

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Fig. 25.4. “Winter’s Tale at RundƗle”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig. 25.5. “Ɯdole Castle”, Wilhelm Siegfried von Stafenhagen, copper engraving, nd.

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Fig. 25.6. “Family Vault at Ɯdole”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig. 25.7. “Casino at Blankenfelde”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2002.

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Fig. 25.8. “A Night of War at Mežotne”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig.25.9. “Hortus Petrinus at Luste”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Fig. 25.10. “Cabinet of Ruins”, Louis de Commines, watercolour, 2004.

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Notes 1

Laurent de Commines’ letter from Paris, 23rd February 2002, to OjƗrs SpƗrƯtis. Ibid., 1. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Laurent de Commines: Why Courland? – manuscript of the literary diary, 3. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Commines 2004, 55. 8 Ibid., 42-43. 9 Ibid., 42-43. 10 Ibid., 22-23. 11 Ibid., 58-59. 12 Ibid., 2-3. 13 Ibid., 46-47. 14 Ibid., 66-67. 15 Ibid., 67-68. 2

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX EMBLEM STUDIES: ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES PETER M. DALY

We have a come a long way since 1987, when Michael Bath and I organised the first international conference of the Society for Emblem Studies at the University of Strathclyde. What have we achieved since then and what remains to be done? The last one hundred and fifty years have seen the erection of many milestones. Scholars have provided building blocks that we have used. These days there is a great deal of conference activity.1 This increase in scholarly presentations has been matched by new publications: the journal Emblematica has printed in the first fifteen volumes 6,316 pages; the monographic series published by AMS with twenty-one titles, Brepols with fourteen titles, and Glasgow University with twelve titles, as well as facsimile editions of emblem books published by AMS Press, Brepols, Brill, Niemeyer, Olms, Scolar Press, and the University of Toronto Press. AMS Press recently published the Companion to Emblem Studies with essays by some of the world’s leading scholars on various aspects of emblem studies. There has been something of a boom in emblem studies. I estimate that alone in the decade 1990-1999 over 600 articles, essays, and books were published in emblem studies.2 Perhaps I may make an honest disclaimer: I am not in a position to assess everything that has been done in our discipline. But as a former editor of Emblematica, I have seen a lot of contemporary scholarship.

How many Emblems Books and Emblems were there? Printed emblems may well exist in over 6,500 books of emblems and imprese, not all with illustrations, printed since 1531. No one knows how many printed emblems that represents because no one knows how large

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was the print-run for each title, and how many emblems each book contained. We have tantalisingly little factual information, but we can hazard some informed guesses. We know, for instance, that Jeremias Drexel was probably the most published writer in the seventeenth century. The Munich publisher Cornelius Leysser reports that the number of copies of Drexel’s works printed in Munich up to 1641 was over 1.5 million. And this report covers a twenty-two year period in only one, if major, publication centre, Munich. Individual books might contain as few as five, but often a hundred or more emblems. If we estimate conservatively that 6,000 titles each appeared in 500 copies, and each book had 20 emblems, then that suggests a total of 60 million printed emblems. And the number is probably over 100 million. Then there is the material culture: buildings with their emblematic wall and ceiling decorations, household furnishings ranging from cupboards and wall hangings to trenchers and drinking vessels. Modernisation, fire, and warfare have obliterated most such manifestations of the emblem.

Primary Bibliography At present we have over 6,500 records for books of emblems and imprese in all European languages in the database of The Union Catalogue of Emblem Books.3 Some of that information is still tentative.

Secondary Bibliography We need bibliographies on the criticism and history of emblematics. To date, volumes relating to the English tradition,4 the French tradition,5 the Spanish tradition 6 and the production of the Jesuits7 have appeared.

Theory Theory embraces a great deal. For the sake of clarity, I would divide theoretical concerns into two categories: modern and early modern. Modern scholars—Heckscher and Wirth,8 Schöne,9 Jöns,10 and to some extent Scholz,11 Bath12 and Manning13—have attempted to create theories to encompass the various manifestations of the emblematic mode, or to explain its workings. In a sense, the attempt has been to provide a retrospective view of the various products of the print and material culture that can be properly considered emblematic.14 But what may be properly labelled “emblematic” remains a matter of disagreement. Part of the purpose for this modern theoretical exercise, whether articulated or not,

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has been the necessary attempt to rescue the emblem from oblivion, misunderstanding, even ridicule. But is the emblem genre characterized by three parts? That may have been the usual printed form. The theory that emblems are by generic definition tripartite has been challenged by a number of recent writers, including many neither referred to, nor included, in the March 2007 issue of the prestigious French journal Littérature, devoted to L’Emblème Littéraire: Théories et Pratiques. This issue is probably the most recent publication to attempt to deal with things emblematical in terms of theory and practice. But whose theory, and whose practice? The question is not so much whether emblems have three parts, or two, or more, but what is the nature of the collaboration between the visual and the verbal. The emblem as a printed whole produces a meaning through the interaction of image and text(s). Also there is the necessary distinction to be made between intention and reception: that is, the intention of the printed emblem and its reception by a subsequent reader/viewer. Schöne introduced the notion that the emblem is characterized by a dual function of representation and interpretation.15 It is no novelty to point to the collaboration of writer and artist in the production of emblem books. However, the collaboration may be between a writer, and/or translator, a publisher, an artist, and an engraver. Opposing modern theoretical constructs is the attempt to focus more narrowly on historically delimited contexts for theoretical discourse. There have been a number of studies that ask how an emblematic term was understood and used in the early modern period. But is an emblem—whose you may well ask, since thousands of emblem books were published since 1531—a product or a process? I suppose that the question sounds simplistic, in that it appears to gloss over the difference that exists between creation (by whom?) and reception (by whom? a sixteenth-century reader [with what knowledge?] or a twentyfirst-century reader [with what knowledge?]). Daniel Russell has argued that “the emblem demonstrated a process.”16 He makes it clear that he is writing of the creation of emblems when he observes that the emblem “is a way of taking a position in relation to fragments of earlier artworks” (179). If we revisit Alciato, we know that in the 1520s he was translating into Latin epigrams from the Greek Anthology, and many of them found their way into his emblems. But do we assume that Alciato’s readers recognised echoes of the Greek Anthology? It would stretch credulity to assume that a French or German sixteenth-century reader with little Latin and no Greek read those French or German translations, recognising that they derived from Alciato’s translation from Greek. A certain leap of faith is required if

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modern scholars are to accept the argument that the emblem represents a “reading process” that helped readers (which?), “take a first step towards the more active and independent role in the production of meaning ....”17 Where is the evidence of reader response? Picture description should provide identification rather than interpretation. The picture of a square is always a “square.” A palm tree is recognizable. But at some point certainty becomes clouded. When is a snake a viper, rather than a generic snake? All nature motifs in emblems could be used positively or negatively, in bonam partem or in malam partem. Do we associate snakes with marriage today? In his collection Emblemas moralizadas (Madrid, 1599) De Soto has an emblem (51) which shows two snakes entwined in a circle, to demonstrate a forced marriage, “El matrimonio forçado” as the motto has it, or “El matrimonio violento”, which are the final words of the epigram. Another tradition likens the deadly bite of the dipsas snake to the destruction caused to foolish males by courtesans. Cousteau employs this piece of snake lore in his Pegma, and while the emblem is a warning against whores, the author is critical of skirt-chasers, as he calls them in the inscriptio.18 Then there is the serpent of the Garden of Eden, which in emblems can also refer to the curse of the forbidden. It was not uncommon for emblem writers to adopt the iconographic tradition of placing a woman’s head on the snake, thus equating the serpent with Eve. Many representations omit Eve altogether. Thus the Jesuit student authors of the Typus mundi have a woman-bodied serpent give Adam the apple. Similarly, in his Emblemas morales (Madrid, 1610) Covarrubias places a woman-headed snake on the Tree to illustrate the seduction of the forbidden (Book 2, 95). Interestingly, the subscriptio does not describe the Fall, but expands in general terms on the attraction of the forbidden. Neither Adam nor Eve is blamed, but the picture clearly equates Eve with the serpent, and therefore the initial source of evil. Jumping into the present, Niki de Saint Phalle created a perfume, advertised by snakes. The closest emblematic parallel to Niki de Saint Phalle’s perfume advertisement will be found in emblems by Sambucus, Junius, Camerarius, and Schoonhovius, all of which show two copulating vipers. The texts make it clear that the female holds the male’s head in her mouth, which she bites off when she is sexually satisfied. The action of the female viper is interpreted as destructive passion by Sambucus (82), as the evil of women by Junius (38), also as the evil of women by Camerarius (Vol. 4, 90-91), and as the reward of lust by Schoonhovius (142-144). Niki de Saint Phalle’s snake advertisement seems based on a piece of snakelore that may not be true, but in the early modern period was believed. Emblem writers “knew” that after copulation the female viper kills the

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male by biting off his head. We still say: “Jane bit John’s head off.” I wonder if copulating vipers is the hidden basis of this common idiom? One snake emblem might suggest a single meaning of sex as danger, and another snake emblem might convey a totally different meaning. Reader knowledge is paramount. Of the snake Harsdörffer observes, “The interpretation is frequently doubtful, and, as was said earlier of lions, it can be good or evil. The snake is an image of cleverness, poisonous slander, and when it has its tail in its mouth, it is a representation of eternity.”19 Recognition of meaning depends on the reader’s understanding of the thing portrayed. Harsdörffer comments: “... one cannot judge an emblem without first having thoroughly studied the nature and qualities of the figures, which are often hidden and cannot be depicted; hence the meaning of the emblem becomes difficult and obscure.”20 In stressing the active participation of the reader, whose knowledge of the properties of things portrayed in the emblem is assumed by the emblem-writer, Harsdörffer is in agreement with established opinion. But which qualities of the central motif should be featured? Harsdörffer suggests “comparison ... must not be drawn with accidental, but rather with essential, qualities of a thing.”21 The modern reader may be confused when confronted with an image bearing at times contradictory meanings. But these meanings derive from the good or evil qualities of the thing depicted or named. The concept of univalence would have to be understood in connection with qualities that were considered necessary or true. The emblem is becoming increasingly important in the study of Renaissance and Baroque culture, but research is still hampered by the relative inaccessibility of emblem books themselves. The books may now be rare, but there are several large microform collections that contain emblem books. After this we are left with the occasional reprints.22

Elucidation of the Corpus In addition to Diehl’s Index, the Index emblematicus volumes, the Bernat-Cull index, the Henkel-Schöne handbook, and Tung’s Impresa Index a number of reference works have been published which help render parts of the corpus more accessible. Bustamente’s Instrumentum emblematicum contains more than 20,000 lemmatized Latin keywords deriving from Virgil, Ovid and Horace, among others.23 Heckscher’s Princeton Alciati Companion provides a bibliography of secondary sources on Alciato’s emblems and a glossary of Neo-Latin words used by Alciato and other emblem writers.24 Heckscher produced a further invaluable reference tool for emblem scholarship entitled Emblematic

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Variants.25 This is a list of over one thousand words and phrases. There are also a few books of wider scope dealing with different cross-sections of emblemaytic traditions. The stag in Western art is the subject of Michael Bath’s The Image of the Stag.26 Death is treated by Gisle Mathieu-Castellani in Emblèmes de la mort. 27

The Interpretation of Emblems, Emblem Books and Emblem Writers I can only indicate some of the most important trends, concentrating on books rather than articles, because of space constraints. The interpretation of older literary texts is almost invariably based on historical-critical editions. There are virtually no historical-critical editions of emblem books. Given the size of the corpus, it is fair to say that a great deal remains to be done. Consequently, almost any new discussion of any emblem or emblem book or writer represents a contribution to knowledge. Almost any critical approach, when intelligently applied, will yield results. There is room for everyone in this vineyard, and most tools will prove useful. For example, I see no reason to think motif studies is necessarily passé, nor do I see how deconstructionist discourses are always helpful.

Motifgeschichte Motifgeschichte is today neither customary nor fashionable. But that does not mean that the pursuit of a motif across periods and cultures is necessarily wrong-headed. Motifgeschichte is being applied each time a scholar looks at a particular motif, sometimes a creature, or a theme such as vanity, or woman. There are still remarkably few monographs on individual emblem writers or studies of individual emblem books. The bibliography of writings on Alciato is impressive, but there is still no substantial study of the “pater et princeps” of the emblem. As yet there are no accounts of the vernacular reception of Alciato, apart from my own treatment of the reception of Alciato in England, and the recent Brepols facsimile edition of Held’s German translation of Alciato. Aside from Heckscher’s The Princeton Alciati Companion, the only other book on Alciato is the Callahan Festschrift entitled Alciato and the Emblem Tradition.28 Mention should be made of book length studies. On French emblems by Adams,29 Reynolds-Cornell,30 Grove,31 Russell,32 and Saunders;33 on German emblems by Höpel,34 and Mödersheim;35 on English emblems by Höltgen,36 Daly and Silcox,37 and Bath;38 on Italian imprese by Caldwell;39 on

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Hungarian emblems by Knapp and Tüskés;40 on Polish emblems by Pelc;41 on Swedish emblems by McKeown,42 and on Jesuit emblems by Bauer,43 Rödter,44 and Dimler.45 The number of conferences, articles, books, and series are eloquent witness to the coming of age of an intellectual discipline. The term “discipline” is a reminder that the marginalization of the emblem had much to do with the nineteenth-century organization of knowledge into discrete disciplines. The 1970s and 1980s questioned the traditional disciplines as structures for knowledge, and it is no surprise that a phenomenon like the emblem, embracing word and image and informing all aspects of culture, has attracted increasing interest.

Historicising and Contextualising To one extent or another, the emblem plays an important role in the vernacular and Neo-Latin cultures of all European countries in the early modern period. And I mean both the print and material culture. I would suggest that our overriding concern is to understand the contribution of emblematic forms to particular historical cultures. The elucidation of emblematic forms requires the contextualisation of emblems, which will require many different kinds of information. The historical elucidation of emblems requires approaches that go beyond the description of content, accompanied by normative or evaluative judgements, or framed within such oversimplifications as Catholic image versus Protestant word. Polarising emblematics and iconography by reference to Catholic-eyeimage-picture set against Protestant-ear-word-text is an oversimplification that can lead to distortions.46 Höltgen’s criticism of Lewalski and those who follow her blindly,47 and Dimler’s analysis of Arwaker’s treatment of Hugo,48 should have sensitized us to the dubious nature of such oversimplifications. An historical approach will attempt to answer the simple-sounding question: what does a given emblem communicate, how, and to whom? To insist on the obvious, the emblem must be seen in its historical context. The metaphors we use to describe the relation of the phenomenon to its historical environment are revealing. We used to speak of “background”, as though historical information on the life and times surrounding the writer and the work were somehow a static theatrical backdrop, something distinct from the work. Today we speak of “context” recognizing an interplay between work and surrounding world. However, the work should not be regarded as a mere reflection of the context, but rather as part of that discourse which, in fact, helped to create the very reality that emblems

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may be said to reflect. Historical information of many different kinds needs to be brought to bear on the emblem, and always with an eye to the questions of intended reader as well as actual creator. The question of creator confronts us with the problem of authority in the emblem, which has attracted its due of attention.49 It will suffice to call to mind that a bimedial form like the emblem is the product of differing activities involving a writer, one or more artists, a printer, bookseller, and often a translator. Some emblem books go under the name of the writer, others under the name of artist, and yet others under the name of the publisher or bookseller. In each case, some, often complicated, form of collaboration was involved. Any attempt to contextualise the emblem necessarily brings us into contact with semiotics and communications theory, the sociology and aesthetics of production and reception, in addition to the more traditional questions of history of all sorts, i.e., literary, philological, cultural, political, social, religious, and intellectual. This means that serious emblem studies will frequently require collaboration between, say, the literary scholar and local historian, as well as the art historian - especially when architectural programmes are the object of study. The literary scholar will not always be sufficiently aware of architectural issues to elucidate the emblematic designs decorating buildings. Partly for this reason a conference was held on the general subject of Architecture and the Emblem at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, which included both case studies and a discussion of more general issues.50 Approaches deriving from semiotics and communications theory are being applied perhaps hesitatingly to the emblem. The question is: How does the emblem convey certain information to a certain reader/observer? Also, who “wrote” the emblem? The notion of a “creator” of an emblem presents us with the problem of authority in the emblem, which has attracted some attention. It will suffice to call to mind that a bi-medial form like the emblem is usually the product of activities involving a writer, one or more artists, a printer, a bookseller, and often a translator. Some scholars are looking at the emblem within its historical context. John Manning has been reassessing Whitney’s emblems both in articles and in his introduction to the Scolar Press facsimile edition.51 In addition to his work on the English impresa tradition and the emblematic materials produced during the English civil wars, Alan Young has contextualised the engravings of Wenceslaus Hollar,52 and some of the English translations of Jeremias Drexel.53 Alan Young has done much of the same for Blount and Camden. Bart Westerweel’s studies of the engraved love emblems of Philip Ayres are fine examples of this newer kind of historical

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contextualising.54 Michael Bath has done for Wither what Manning did for Whitney, and Bath’s book on the English emblem has provided a new framework for understanding the English tradition. Historicizing and contextualizing the emblem is the direction in we should be going in studies of emblematics today and tomorrow.

Notes 1

The renewed interest in the emblem may be seen in the increased numbers of papers presented to scholarly meetings, in the allocation of sessions to emblems at The Medieval Congress at Western Michigan State University, Kalamazoo, at the Renaissance Society of America; in the regular international conferences of this Society for Emblem Studies (in Glasgow, 1987; in Glasgow, 1990; in Pittsburgh, 1993; in Leuven 1996; in Munich, 1999; in La Coruña, 2002; in Illinois, 2005; in Winchester, 2008); in many conferences and symposia held in such places as Chattanooga, New York, Glasgow, Hildesheim, La Palma, Leiden, Leuven/Louvain, Maryland, Montreal, Minnesota, Munich, Pisa, Pittsburgh, Szeged, Wolfenbüttel, Wroclaw, Geneva, and Venice. 2 I have compiled An Annotated Bibliography of Emblem Studies for the decade 19901999, which has 639 entries, over half of which are in English 362, (that is, 57%). I am currently working on a follow-up bibliography for the decade 2000-2009, which is unlikely to be any smaller. 3 The project was briefly described in Daly 1988, 121-133. 4 See Daly and Silcox 1990; and Daly and Silcox 1991. 5 See Grove and Russell 2000. 6 See Campa 1990. 7 See Dimler 2005; and Dimler 2006. 8 Heckscher and Wirth 1959. cols. 85-228. 9 Schöne 1964. 10 Jöns 1966. 11 See Scholz 1981, 10-35; Scholz 1984; Paetzold 1986; and Wagenknecht 1988. 12 Bath 1994. 13 Manning 2002. 14 For an earlier consideration of the work of Heckscher, Wirth, Jöns and Schöne, see Daly 1979; and Daly 1998. 15 See Schöne 1963; and Schöne 1964. 16 Russell 1985, 179. 17 Ibid., 179f. 18 Cousteau 1555, 194. 19 The eight volume Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele is herein after abbreviated to FG. 20 “…daß man von keinem Sinnbilde urtheilen kan/man habe dann zuvor der Figuren Natur und Eigenschaften gründlich erlernet / welche vielmals verborgen ist/und nicht ausgemahlet werden kan/daher dann des Sinnbildes Verstand schwer und tunkel wird” (FG, Vol. 4, 244).

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“Diese Gleichniß … muß nicht von zufälligen/sondern wesentlichen Eigenschaften eines Dings hergenommen seyn” (FG, Vol. 7, 39). 22 Done largely by AMS Press, Brepols, Brill, Niemeyer, Olms, and Scolar Press. 23 Díaz de Bustamente 1992. See Johannes Köhler's review in Emblematica 6 (1992), 367-370. 24 Heckscher 1989. 25 See Heckscher and Sherman 1995. 26 Bath 1992. 27 Mathieu-Castellani 1988. See the review by Daniel S. Russell, Emblematica 4 (1989), 394-398. 28 See Daly 1989. 29 See Adams 2003. 30 Reynolds-Cornell 1988. 31 See Grove 2000. 32 Russell 1985; also Russell 1995. 33 Saunders 1988. 34 Höpel 1988. 35 Mödersheim 1994. 36 Höltgen 1986. 37 Daly and. Silcox 1991. 38 Bath 1994; and Bath 2003. 39 Caldwell 2004. 40 Knapp and Tüskés 2003. 41 Pelc 2002. 42 McKeown 2006. 43 Bauer 1986. 44 Rödter 1992. 45 See Dimler' 2005; and Dimler 2007. 46 Tibor Fabiny's paper at the Szeged conference provided a useful overview of these modes without forcing the pattern onto the interpretation of given emblems, thus avoiding the pitfalls involved in applying a "macro" structure. 47 See Höltgen 1986, 55-61. See also Höltgen 1996; and Daly and Silcox 1991, 124128. 48 See Dimler 1988. 49 Russell 1988; and Harms 1991. 50 See Daly and Böker 1999. 51 See Manning 1988; Manning’s “Introduction” in Whitney 1989; and manning 1990. See also Borris and Morgan Holmes 1994. 52 See Young 1988. 53 See Young 2000. 54 See Westerweel 1997.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN EMBLEMS ON THE WEB: AN OVERVIEW BERNARD DESCHAMPS

Introduction Of all the areas of academic life that have been transformed by the rise of the new computer technologies, the university library is probably the place where changes have been felt the most. Indeed, the digital revolution has helped librarians maximize two of the fundamental tasks at the core of their professional activity: the conservation and dissemination of the artefacts contained in their precious collections. It would be hard to find a university library today that does not have at least a few people, if not a task team, whose job it is to implement and take the fullest advantage of the newest computer technologies. In fact, in some cases these libraries have a whole department solely dedicated to this aspect, working in close collaboration with computer science specialists and the various departments of the university. Obviously, it is we, the scholars, the people who use the library to teach and research, who have been the main beneficiaries of these technological advances. And in many cases, we have not only gained from the enhanced digital library: we have collaborated with the librarians in order to build websites, not only to showcase ourselves and inform about our disciplines, but to take advantage of the immense research possibilities that these new technologies are making available to us. In that respect, researchers in emblem studies have been particularly active, producing literature on the subject, as well as more than a few websites dedicated to emblem book research. There are many reasons for this. Emblem books for one thing, are the multi-medial objects par excellence of the early modern period and, as such, particularly well suited by nature to make use of the new

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technologies. The web thrives on images, and the possibility to see the actual image instead of reading a description of it constitutes in itself a great boon. Moreover, to be able to see emblems on a screen where they can be magnified helps, because they are sometimes very small in size. And, from a purely conservational point of view, the fact that the books are rare, old, very often in extremely fragile condition with pages barely attached to the spine or simply detached, with tight binding or inflexible spines that prevent them from opening completely, has definitely contributed to their quick appearance on the internet.1 What I would like to do in the next few pages, is to present a brief chronological survey of the recent events that led to the appearance of emblem books on the web. I will then look a little more closely at four actual websites present on the internet—Illinois, Utrecht, Glasgow, and Munich—and will conclude with a small discussion on the future possibilities for emblem books on the web, as well as on the possible impact of the new technologies on the practice of the Humanities in general.

A Brief History of Digitization Efforts over the Past Ten Years David Graham, in an article published in 2004, entitled “Three Phases of Emblem Digitization: The First Twenty Years, The Next Five”, has divided emblem digitization into three phases. As he explains: In a first phase, lasting from 1983 to about 1993, a plethora of competing standards combined with costly and primitive technology made the very process of emblem digitization difficult, cumbersome, and expensive, and essentially precluded most forms of effective collaboration. The second phase, between 1993 and 2003, has been characterized by a wave of convergence as cross-platform software standards came to be adopted, a development that enabled the first discussions about implementation of collaborative solutions to take place. We now stand at the beginning of a third phase, characterized by emergent solutions in which common standards should enable the accomplishment of goals shared by the community of emblem scholars.2

In fact, this third wave might have started a little earlier than 2003. Already in June 2001, a group of scholars with an interest in computerized emblem research convened at Glasgow University to discuss a CD digital emblem publication project. At this meeting, organized by Alison Adams, accounts of earlier individual projects in the area of emblem digitization

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were discussed. Among those speaking was David Graham himself, who spoke about his “Macintosh Emblem Project”.3 Also part of the discussions in Glasgow were standards issues, more specifically scanning and text entry, image description (natural-language description as compared to classification systems such as Iconclass), as well as corpus definition issues. This meeting was soon followed by another one held at Palma de Mallorca in October of the same year.4 There, a provisional list of emblem books slated for digitization was circulated by Alison Adams and Stephen Rawles. Here again, as in Glasgow, the discussions mainly concerned a CD publication project rather than the elaboration of a website. They included a debate about the pros and cons of the Iconclass system (initiated by David Graham), with Sagrario López Poza objecting that Iconclass might prove too cumbersome to be used by scholars in Philology, with Peter Daly adding that Iconclass privileges pictures, and is therefore not geared to the inclusion of text. Nieves Rodríguez Brisaboa for his part reported that Iconclass was developed for manual use, and not for computers. Needless to say, these pioneering discussions on the development of the best possible digital interface to represent emblem books and the means of sharing scholarship about them, although centred on a CD-ROM format, were extremely useful in the elaboration of future web platforms as well. Then, meeting in La Coruña in Spain in September 2002, the Society for Emblem Studies was the theatre for nine presentations and demonstrations concerning the digitization of emblems. This was also the year when Peter Daly published his book on Digitizing the European Emblem.5 In September 2003, a conference was held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.6 The conference, as we learn from its website, “focused on concrete problems and methods of digitization, establishing metadata and metadata exchange procedures, indexing emblems with ICONCLASS, user perspectives, using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI) for emblem data collection-level descriptions, [and] concerns for digital and establishment of a portal”. The year 2003 can probably be seen as the turning point when attention definitely shifted from CD projects to web-based operations. In this optic, the Wolfenbüttel conference was quickly followed in 2004 by the publication of an online collection of twelve essays stemming from it, entitled “Digital Collections and the Management of Knowledge: Renaissance Emblem Literature as a Case Study for the Digitization of Rare Texts and Images”.7 This document, already six years old now,

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represents an extraordinary vision of the achievements and future project of the scholars involved in emblem digitization and of their goals “to advance common standards and best practices for emblem metadata and its harvesting, multilingual thesauri, inter-operability, and user accessibility and customizing for its projects, [with the] ultimate aim […] to link our group of projects, providing multiple points of access to a large corpus of illustrated Renaissance texts, while simultaneously offering practical models for research in other disciplines.”8 Embedded within the 2005 International Conference of the Society at the University of Illinois was a segment on emblem digitization where eleven of the people who contributed to the DigiCult publication gave papers.9 Also in 2005, in Glasgow this time, a second planning and consultation meeting with the digitization of emblem books at its core was held, followed by the announcement, a year later, that the Glasgow Project was to digitize twenty-seven French sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books in both transcribed and facsimile versions with extensive search functionality.10 It was also in 2006 that the Dutch love emblem site came online at the University of Utrecht”, an event marked in November 2006 by a conference in Utrecht on the Dutch love emblem and emblem digitization.11 In 2007, selected papers from this conference, edited by Els Stronks and Peter Boot, were then published in both book form and online. Significantly, almost half of the papers were concerned with the digitization of the emblem.”12 In 2008 in Winchester, England, Alan Young presented a plenum entitled “Digitizing the Emblem”, which summarized very well the impact of the new technologies on our work, including the advances of other books projects, the like of Google Book or the Million Books Project, but with a strong emphasis on the progress made in the digitization of emblem. Winchester was also the place where the new Arkyves Project was unveiled, during the last session of the conference, by Hans Brandhorst.13 Finally, in April 2010, on the occasion of the conference of the Renaissance Society of America, to be held in Venice, Italy, Thomas Stäcker, who helped organize the Wolfenbüttel conference of 2003, will present a paper discussing the problems created by engraving on dirty or darkened paper, worn fonts, printer’s ink not being homogenously dispersed on the page, and poor scan quality, while Hans Brandhorst for his part will present on The Information Value of Images and discuss the creation of adequate metadata.14

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Illinois The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosts the OpenEmblem Portal.15 Its University Library is also the home of the Digital Library Research, which “conducts a broad range of digital projects, digitizes library collections and archives, researches information retrieval technologies for digital collections, and initiates various digital library research projects.”16 These include the Digital Library Testbed, the Illinois Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content, the Second Generation Digital Mathematics Resources, and the ARCHON Project among others. Needless to say, the results of this on-site expertise in new technologies are impressive. One notable achievement, on top of the present and future development of the Emblem Portal, is the presence on the portal of the German Emblem Book Project.17 Initiated in 1998 by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library,18 in collaboration with Mara Wade of the German department, its digitization objectives are to “make it possible for an increasing number of faculty and students […] to study and teach with these materials in a more flexible format than the physical books would allow”, as well as the preservation of these more often than not very fragile books.19 The goal of the original project, funded by the university’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research in 2001, was to digitize fourteen books from a collection of over six hundred volumes, written from 1540-1800 and published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain or England.20 (Twenty books of the collection were online as of September 2009).21 Also included in the project is “the further development of metadata elements and mapping to a standard metadata scheme.”22 The site offers a good description of the technical difficulties encountered by the team during the process of digitizing a few of the sixty-seven emblem books owned by the Special Collections Library, some of which, as I indicated earlier, were in fragile condition, had tight bindings and/or inflexible spines, narrow gutters, were too thick to be easily scanned, or whose paper showed traces of natural aging that raised concern as to the resulting quality of the digital image.23 The procedure–and restrictions–imposed by a flatbed scanner operation are discussed, as well as the sometimes necessary replacement of the scanner by a digital camera.24 High-resolution access to the images on the Illinois campus was facilitated by a grant of two monitors and workstations from IBM. These tools facilitate the “soft-proofing work to

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check image quality and color quality of the generated images.”25 The DSD, it is said, “follows the Digital Library Federation standards for benchmarking digital reproductions of printed monographs and serials and uses the monitors to qualitatively judge the benefit of providing access to high-resolution images.”26 For its part, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) is “a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering the use of electronic information technologies.”27 It has an impressive number of partners, and the standards and practices it is endorsing are just as impressive as they are necessary to achieve durable progress and cohesion between the various instances involved in the use of the new technologies for the dissemination of knowledge. Some of these standards and practices, which were already discussed at the Wolfenbüttel conference, are the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS),28 The Open Archives Initiative (OAI),29 which seeks to develop a technical framework for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content via the network, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO),30 advocating for its part the need for a standard for the exchange of serials subscription information. On top of this, we also find the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS),31 developing a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, and the aforementioned DLF project for benchmarking digital reproductions of printed monographs and serials. The DLF also has a project called the Electronic Resource Management Initiative,32 “developing common specifications and tools for managing the license agreements, related administrative information, and internal processes associated with collections of licensed electronic resources.” It also co-sponsors–with the Getty Grants Program–the Visual Resources Association (VRA)33 to review and evaluate existing data content standards and current practice in order to compile a manual which would become a Guide to Good Practices for Cataloging Standards for Describing Cultural Objects and Images. Last but not least, it also sponsors the Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI)34 to explore the use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and XML in libraries. The Illinois website is a fine example of the fruitful cooperation between the university library and the various departments mentioned earlier in the introduction. From the strict point of view of Emblem Studies however, it could be said that the need for the portal to establish itself further is still there, in the hope that the Illinois website can truly function as a badly needed centralizing hub for the discipline.

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Utrecht The Emblem Project Utrecht (EPU), as one might expect, has devoted its attention to a typical Dutch corpus comprised of secular and religious emblem books.35 Created in 2002 and funded by The Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) between 2003 and November 2006, the EPU successfully put a website online in 2006, an event celebrated by a conference held on 6th and 7th November, 2006 in Utrecht, and followed by the publication of the conference’s proceedings in 2007.36 The project, as the site’s credits page explains, “is a combined effort of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Utrecht, the Research Institute for Culture and History of the University of Utrecht (OGC), the University Library of Utrecht, the Royal Library (KB, The Hague), the Digital Library for Dutch Language and Literature (DBNL, Leiden) and the Emblem Digitization Research Group (Glasgow University).”37 Its goals are numerous and are not exclusively concerned with the creation of an emblem website, as the publication of an article co-authored by Els Stronks and some of her students demonstrates. However, it is clear that it is the creation of the website that has monopolized most of the participants’ energy. Once more and in keeping with the goal of all the emblem websites whose partial aim is to ensure the widest possible dissemination online of the collections of their associated libraries, the Utrecht website offers so far twenty-eight Dutch secular and religious emblem books. In addition to this, it also includes an extremely well-built fifty-four page educational site–in Dutch and English-where the tripartite construction mode of the emblem, the moralistic character of emblems in general, as well as the specific Dutch innovations in the genre, comparisons of emblematic structures with modern publicity, Alciato’s influence and the influence of the genre on painting, and a discussion on who bought books of love emblems, are all considered.38 Also worthy of mention is the fact that the designers of the site, recognizing the new possibilities offered by the internet technologies, as well as the sometimes severe limitations imposed upon scholars by the printed indexes, facsimiles and reproductions, have aimed to develop indexes and search tools “based on a systematic and thorough analysis of the material, using XML, TEI and Iconclass”.39 The website also hosts a project on Hermann Hugo’s Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624). It features a short introduction, complete with bibliography, as well as a concordance page where all concordances are hyperlinked. One page restricts itself to the pictures, while another presents all the facsimile images of the book. On top of this, the side bar

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shows a roll menu where thumbnail pictures can be clicked on. The full images themselves are shown in an Adobe Flash viewer, an excellent technology to view images on the web. In conclusion, we can only deplore the fact that work on the project seems to have ground to a halt. We can only hope that it will eventually resume, as projects of this quality are not only necessary, but can encourage other universities to follow its example.

Munich The Munich website (Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum), built in association with Bavaria’s State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and whose emblem book collection it aims to present, does not have a comprehensive approach as its main goal.40 On top of the common desire to preserve rare material, it wishes to represent the great thematic and functional variety of the emblem books it has put online, in order to stimulate new research approaches. The website uses a simplified version of the complex schema elaborated by William S. Heckscher and KarlAugust Wirth for the Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte (RDK) as well as the categories developed by Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, (Impresenliteratur and the late form of the encyclopaedic emblem book), in spite of possible duplications between the two classification schemes. The list of the categories used reads as follow: 1) Impresenliteratur; 2) Ethisch-moralische Emblematik; 3) Weltliche Liebesemblematik; 4) Politische Emblematik; 4.1) Fürstenspiegel; 4.2) Emblemschriften anläßlich von Hochzeiten, Geburten und Tauffeiern; 4.3) Sonstige emblematische Gratulationsschriften; 4.4) Funeral-Emblematik; 4.5) Sonstige politische Emblematik; 5) Religiöse Emblematik; 5.1) Predigtsammlungen; 5.2) Marienemblematik; 5.3) Heiligen-Emblematik; 5.4) Religiöse Liebes- und Herzensemblematik; 5.5) Emblematisierte Ordensregeln; 5.6) Protestantische Erbauungsliteratur; 5.7) Katholische Erbauungsliteratur; 5.8) Ordensgeschichte; 5.9) Emblematischer Totentanz; 5.10) Enzyklopädien religiöser Emblematik; 6) Emblemenzyklopädien. The site offers thus more than a hundred books online, all of which are accompanied by a small description and a succinct biography, and viewable with the help of Acrobat Reader, instead of Flash technology. This in itself constitutes an interesting aspect of the site, making it possible to save the chosen emblem page on the home computer as a PDF document. The disadvantage however, is a poorer image quality. The site also has a good search engine online (Emblemdatenbank), that allows the user to search by author, title, artist, publisher and printer, city

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of publication, year of publication, visual motif, motto, Bible quotation, religious calendar day, person, and meaning.41 The instructions for the search engine are also very good, and are written in German, as well as in English.

Glasgow The website hosted at Glasgow University derives in part, as the site tells us, from the university’s “ownership of the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Emblem Books, the largest such collection in the world.”42 Also associated with this particular collection, we find the Sir William Stirling Maxwell Fellowship, intended to encourage scholarly interest in the Collection—one of the many collections of older material found in the University Library,43 founded in 1475—with the expectation “that it will be held in conjunction with sabbatical leave from the Fellow’s home institution.”44 On top of the usual preservation and dissemination of the library’s precious artefacts, the Glasgow University emblem website also hosts the Centre for Emblem Studies, currently led by Laurence Grove, whose task it is to coordinate these most important resources. The Centre draws its members from “across a broad spectrum of Departments, Schools and other Centres in the [University’s] Faculty of Arts”, in order to reflect “the interdisciplinary nature of this text/image based genre which developed in all European countries and languages during the Renaissance, and continued to flourish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the influence of emblems extends to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”.45 One of the most important dissemination aspects of the Centre is the Glasgow Emblem Digitization Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has secured the collaboration of many important collaborators and consultants, including David Graham of Concordia University, as well as Peter Boot (Utrecht) and Hans Brandhorst (Arkyves Project), both from the Netherlands.46 The results, so far, have been impressive. The Centre’s web pages currently host the French Emblems at Glasgow, with twenty-seven browsable emblem books available. The site is well designed, with tabs at the top of the page allowing access to a good help file as well as permitting an advance search, the recording of preferences, and a wellbuilt search function. On top of this, each book is accompanied by an introduction, a succinct biographical paragraph on the author, its publication history, a description of the artefact, and a select secondary bibliography,

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compiled by Alison Adams, Alison Saunders, Laurence Grove and Arnoud Visser. The Centre’s pages also host the Study and Digitization of Italian Emblems project, led by Donato Mansueto and financed under the Sixth EU Framework Programme for activities in the field of research, technological development and demonstration, through a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship.47 Its aim is to create a website “designed to host a digitized corpus of Italian emblem books from the Stirling Maxwell Collection.”48 So far, it offers seven books in its extremely well digitized pages. Finally, the Centre’s pages are also the home of the Alciato at Glasgow project, funded in part by the British Academy and developed as an extension of the French Emblems at Glasgow site.49 Once more, all twenty-two books are digitized from the Stirling Maxwell Collection. The pages offer the same tabs already present in the French Emblem project, as well excellent notes on the publication history, bibliographical descriptions of all books, and a selected secondary bibliography. Access to related material, prepared by Denis Drysdall, is also possible. Members of the Glasgow project have also been extremely active in the establishment of norms for the digitization of emblematic material.50 The site is also the home of the pages of the Society for Emblem Studies.51

Concluding Remarks As we can see, the progress made in less than ten years is considerable. And there is no reason to think that the next five, to paraphrase David Graham, or even next ten years will be any different, which is to say that even more emblem books will probably be made available, and this on an increasing number of websites across the world. We can reasonably hope that this will attract even more attention to a discipline still considered by many as recondite. However, there is still room for improvement. For one thing, it now seems that the great push initiated in the first years of the new century has run its course. The existing websites, their great qualities notwithstanding, are not always up to date; in some cases, nothing has changed on them in the past two to three years. Of course, improving the website, adding scholarship, costs something, and money is not always available. The pressure on funding agencies and universities is great and choices have to be made. The human factor also plays a role: the early pioneers have moved on and are now faced with other challenges, or have retired.

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Still, the decade ahead of us is crucial, and not only because web technologies will carry on changing and improving, but mainly because we are now rapidly moving away from the gathering of largely static material–to be sure, a fundamental aspect of websites centred on emblem books–towards the creation of web tools that will enable scholars to interact pro-actively with the material online. This essential feature, in itself, also constitutes a small revolution, without which the present websites could simply remain elaborate and expensive new toys in the hands of librarians, archivists, and computer programmers, anchored in a so-called “technical and pre-critical” stage.52 There can be no doubt that we find ourselves at a crucial juncture. As David Seaman, Director of the Digital Library Federation told delegates at the 2005 conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, we are now moving beyond “simply placing largely static material on websites, [and creating ones] that encourage innovation by allowing scholars to engage deeply with digital library material, helping them to annotate, contextualize, enrich, and re-use this online content”.53 However, if this sounds simple, it is not, because at the core of it, we find a clash of cultures comparable to the one that took place at the end of the Middle Ages, when not only new ideas, but new work methods, spawned by the new ideals of the Renaissance, began to impose themselves. This time however, what the new technologies promote is not the individual and lonely work of the Renaissance scholar, accomplished in some remote corner of the ivory tower, but rather a push towards integrative, collaborative and multidisciplinary attainment. As such, they constitute a direct challenge to the print media culture, the old “publish or perish” syndrome by which scholars in the Humanities, encouraged and supported by tenure and promotion committees, have lived their careers for more than a century. Understandably, resistance is strong, and the level of scepticism rather high, because the new web technologies are deemed to be unreliable. The web is at best an unstable place. It is worth considering that, in an extreme case, many of the documents in the endnotes to this paper could be unavailable tomorrow–and by extension, unverifiable–or they could be modified. Yet, and in spite of the lack of reliability that the printed word has so far guaranteed, there is a call for more fluidity. There is a need for works with more than one author as well, just like in the natural sciences, where additions to an original work are constantly made by others scholars as knowledge evolves. We are beginning to observe the same phenomenon in the Humanities. To be sure, humanists have never lacked for questions, but somehow, the way we approach the answers evolves as technology changes. As Amy Friedlander explained recently, one researcher

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The questions confronting us in emblem studies are no less complex and it is certain that in the end, we will have to work that way, be it only to be able to see a page situated thousands of miles away. This not only calls for certain standards of excellence and reliability; it also calls for the necessary tools to help us achieve this goal. One of them, named a Virtual Research Environment, or VRE, developed in the United Kingdom by the Joint Information Systems Committee, an independent advisory body, called for “an infrastructure ideally usable on a routine basis by researchers from all disciplines [as well as] loosely-coupled, distributed, inter-operable tools, rather than a monolithic piece of software”. An ideal VRE would “include modes of access which (almost) any user can download and install on their laptop/desktop/PDA/home computer, […] adopt and use appropriate open standards [and] be compatible with other widely used and deployed systems, including at least: web, email, instant messaging, SMS, Wikis and video-conferencing tools from lightweight desktop applications through to high-end videoconferencing via Access Grid. This means that the VRE should be accessible via web browsers and 3G mobile phones among other modes of access.” Such a tool would of course be “extensible with enhanced or new tools by any developer, through use of published standards and provided software development kits, software libraries etc.” It would also “support tailoring of the environment by individuals or groups to reflect their interests and preferences”.55 We already find a strong push in that direction coming from within the emblem world itself. Giving suggestions for a so-called “deep” emblem portal, Mara Wade has posited such a portal should “integrate access to a number of emblem digitization projects hosted on servers world-wide, provide search capabilities across remote corpora of data, allow the user to integrate the results of that search, [help scholars] to customize both the search and the search results, [and finally], permit the user to manipulate data, for example, to save hit lists and search histories.”56 Also, we are witnessing the birth of the EDITOR tool for annotating digital editions,

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which annotate the XML source file that is the basis for the scholarly edition in the form of brief commentary, of categorization of text fragments, of links to resources outside of the text, of references to passages elsewhere in the text, etc. EDITOR is being developed by Peter Boot at the Huygens Instituut,57 and is the technology used at Utrecht.58 In conclusion, I think it is fair to say that the web technologies are here to stay, and that they constitute a remarkable and positive development for our discipline, as well as an enormous challenge. We have already reached the point where knowledge cannot be disseminated without the help of computers. However, this progress has taken place with very little participation from our part: we have had very little to say in the way these networks have been developed. This does not mean we need to become computer programmers: it means that an active participation in the design and development of these new technologies is essential. It also means that we need to train our students–most of them born with a computer in their crib–how to use these networks for the advancement of knowledge. We do not have a choice, because, as Jerome McGann prophesizes, whether we like it or not “in the next fifty years the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.”59 We must not fear this change. Libraries will not disappear: books will survive. As Sarah Thomas, the Director of the Bodleian Library explained recently, it’s too soon to write off the book yet. “The book is a long-lived technology,” she says, pointing to the massive walls of Oxford’s old library. “For centuries people have gathered here to do research and exchange opinions. In the future the library will continue to be a place where a community meets – just more open than it was before.”60

Notes 1

For the description of the present state of many emblem books, I have allowed myself to be largely inspired by the description made of them in the assessment of the original collection on the website of the University Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Meant to present an evaluation of the difficulties facing the team about to scan a few emblem books, this description, I find, summarizes very well the challenge posed by the digitization of artefacts dating back to the Early Modern Period. See: http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/about/technical.asp. (Accessed August 2009). 2 http://www.digicult.info/downloads/dc_emblemsbook_lowres.pdf. (Accessed March 2009).

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Some of Graham’s thoughts on this subject can be found in Graham 1992. The relevant facts about both meetings are well presented at http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/research.htm. (Accessed April 2009). 5 Daly 2002. 6 Funded by a TRANSCOOP Grant of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as a part of a thee-year grant for a project entitled “Emblematica On-Line” led by Thomas Stäcker of the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) and Mara R. Wade of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to establish standards and best practices for digitizing emblem literature. http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/confrep.html. (Accessed April 2009). Abstracts for the conference are here: http://www.hab.de/bibliothek/wdb/emblematica/ag03-abstracts.htm. (idem). 7 See note 2. 8 In the words of Mara Wade, editor of the publication. 9 The conference within a conference was entitled “Portals, Tools, and Data: Conducting Digital Research with Renaissance Texts and Images.” See: http://www.conferences.uiuc.edu/conferences/main.asp?cat=4585 (Accessed November 2008). 10 http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/ (accessed November 2008). 11 http://emblems.let.uu.nl/project_project_info.html (idem). 12 Stronks and Boot 2007; and http://www.dans.knaw.nl/nl/dans_publicaties/naam_1/. (Accessed December 2008). See also the review by Elena Pierazzo: Pierazzo 2008. 13 http://www.arkyves.org/. (Accessed September 2008). 14 http://www.rsa.org/pdfs/2010/092409_ThursdayPM.pdf. (Accessed September 2009). 15 http://media.library.uiuc.edu/projects/oebp/. (idem). 16 http://images.library.uiuc.edu/research.asp. (idem). 17 http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/index.asp. (idem). 18 http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/. (idem). 19 “Many emblem books are small in physical size (averaging 5” wide x 9” height), and it is very difficult without the aid of a magnifying glass to decipher the intricate detail of an emblem engraving, and the corresponding mottos, many of which are written in Frakturschrift.” (idem). 20 http://www.research.illinois.edu/. (idem). 21 http://www.library.illinois.edu/contentdm/cdm4/results.php?&CISORESTMP=re sults.php&CISOVIEWTMP=item_viewer.php&CISOMODE=grid&CISOGRID=t humbnail,A,1;title,A,1;contri,A,1;motta,200,0;none,A,0;20;title,none,none,none,no ne&CISOBIB=contri,A,1,N;title,A,0,N;date,200,0,N;none,A,0,N;none,A,0,N;20;c ontri,none,none,none,none&CISOTHUMB=20%20%284x5%29;contri,none,none, none,none&CISOTITLE=20;contri,none,none,none,none&CISOHIERA=20;title,c ontri,none,none,none&CISOSUPPRESS=0&CISOTYPE=browse&CISOROOT= %2Femblems. (idem). 22 http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/about/metadata.asp. (idem). 23 Idem. 4

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24 On this subject, it is interesting to note that, so far, no convincing hand-held scanner has been developed. It is a tool that would be immeasurably useful for scanning older books. If memory serves well, the firm Logitech had developed such an instrument in the past. It was of poor quality and in most cases produced crooked images that were hard to stitch together. However, taking the scanner to the book when taking the book to the scanner proves difficult, would seem a logical step to undertake. This calls for the development of a high quality portable hand scanner, with portable light frame that could eventually be fitted with a thin flexible scanning lamp, one that could reach parts of the page that are difficult to access without inflicting considerable damage to the spine. The “stitching back together” process could then be done using Adobe Photoshop CS4. 25 http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/about/access.asp. (Accessed September 2009). 26 Idem. 27 http://www.diglib.org/dlfhomepage.htm. (idem). 28 See: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/. (Accessed January 2009). 29 http://www.openarchives.org/. (Accessed February 2009). 30 http://www.niso.org/home. 31 http://www.imls.gov/. 32 http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm. 33 http://www.vraweb.org/. 34 http://www.diglib.org/standards/tei.htm. 35 http://emblems.let.uu.nl/index.html. (Accessed August 2009). 36 See Stronks and Boot 2007. The volume has also been published in America in 2008: (Chicago: University of Chicago. Press, 2008). 37 http://emblems.let.uu.nl/project_project_info.html#cred. (Accessed September 2009). 38 The access to which is unfortunately accompanied most times by the appearance of a pop-up window from an internet company trying to sell you something. 39 Also developed in the Netherlands, Iconclass is a subject-specific classification system; it is a hierarchically ordered collection of definitions of objects, persons, events and abstract ideas that can be the subject of an image. Art historians, researchers and curators use it to describe, classify and examine the subject of images represented in various media such as paintings, drawings and photographs. It was developed by Henri van de Waal at the University of Leiden. Explanations are drawn from the Iconclass website, situated at: http://www.iconclass.nl/. (Accessed July 2009). 40 http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~emblem/dig-cpl.html#kap5.1. (Accessed September 2009). 41 http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~emblem/emblmaske.html. 42 http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/. (idem). 43 One could also mention the Ferguson Collection, also the object of a webpage on the Glasgow emblem site: http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/ferguson/ferguson.html, as well as the Hunterian Art Gallery, which “houses an important print collection of direct relevance to emblem research,” and which can be found here:

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http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk/. (idem). 44 http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/maxwell.htm. (idem). 45 http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/centre.htm. (idem). 46 The website having last been updated in October 2006, this information might not be accurate anymore at the time of printing. 47 http://www.italianemblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/. (Accessed August 2009). 48 http://www.italianemblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/objectives.php. (idem). 49 http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/. (idem). The project’s staff comprises Alison Adams, Brian Aitken, Graeme Cannon, Stephen Rawles, Joanna Royle, Gillian Smith, David Weston. 50 See: http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/research.htm. (Accessed April 2009). 51 http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES/. (Accessed March 2009). 52 The expression is from McGann 2001, xi. See also Bridges 2003. 53 http://www.conferences.uiuc.edu/conferences/conference.asp?ID=329 (Accessed July 2008). 54 Friedlander, Amy, Asking Questions and Building a Research Agenda for Digital Scholarship, in: Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship, http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf, 5, (Accessed April 2009). 55 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/VRE%20roadmap%20v4.pdf, p.3-4. (Accessed May 2009). 56 See note 2. (Accessed April 2009). 57 http://www.huygensinstituut.knaw.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie w&id=173&Itemid=48&lang=en , (Accessed April 2009). 58 See, for example, http://emblems.let.uu.nl/he1616.html, (Accessed April 2009). 59 McGann 2005, 114. 60 http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,473529-2,00.html, (Accessed April 2009). At the London Book Fair the myth that e-books will eventually destroy the market for the education and academic books, “had no impact on print sales […]While the e-texts were ‘heavily used,’ figures showed that print sales, analyzed using Nielsen statistics, and coupled with a formula for natural attrition of print sales, remained steady.” In addition, Hazel Woodward, university librarian and press director at Cranford University, said the study laid to rest the myth of a so-called “Google” generation, as use of the e-textbooks was strong across all age groups. This said, the call for an electronic book reader, a “book IPod”, is heard louder and louder these days. Amazon, with the Kindle, hopes to develop book equivalent of the ITunes Store. See: http://www.cyberpresse.ca/arts/livres/200909/30/01-906862-ebooks-le-quebecdans-le-coup.php. (Accessed September 2009).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rubem Amaral Jr. is a graduate in Law who, before his retirement from the diplomatic corps, served two missions as Brazilian foreign ambassador. He has published articles in journals and edited volumes, including a translation into Portuguese of Jorge Manrique’s Coplas (1984). In 2000 he edited Cancioneiro Devoto Quinhentista da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (Cod. 3069); Emblemática Lusitana e os Emblemas de Vasco Mousinho de Castelbranco, (the latter re-edited by Lisbon University in 2005); and in 2001 Empresas Heróicas e Amorosas Lusitanas. He serves on the scientific committee of the Sociedad Española de Emblemática. Philip Attwood is Curator of Medals at the British Museum. His catalogue of Italian Medals, c.1530-1600, in British Public Collections was published by the British Museum Press in 2003, and in 2009 he coauthored Medals of Dishonour, the catalogue of an exhibition held at the British Museum. For many years he has edited The Medal, the international journal of the British Art Medal Society. He is currently the Society’s president and the UK delegate to the Fédération Internationale de la Médaille d’Art (FIDEM). Professor Alvan Bregman is Rare Book Collections Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Having earned his PhD and MLS degrees at the University of Toronto, he is the author of Emblemata: The Emblem Books of Andrea Alciato (2007), as well as of articles that have appeared in The Book Collector and in Medical History. Dr María Castañeda de la Paz is an ethno-historian and researcher at the Institute of Anthropological Investigations, UNAM, Mexico. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of the Americas in Puebla, where she teaches courses on Central Mexican codices and ethno-history. Her doctorate is from Leiden University and the University of Seville where she worked on Central Mexican pictographic documents. She has published the book La peregrinación de los culhuaque-mexitin (Mapa de Sigüenza). Un documento de origen tenochca (2006), and many other

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Contributors

articles and chapters. Her current project concerns the Central Mexican indigenous nobility during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dr Jennifer J. Craig recently completed her doctorate in Renaissance Literature at Glasgow University, where she previously received a MLitt in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She has co-edited a collection of essays for CSP entitled R|EVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change from Ben Jonson to Angela Carter (2009), and her doctoral thesis on the emblem tradition in Ben Jonson’s Jacobean masques and entertainments is pending publication. She is currently a graduate teaching assistant at Glasgow University. Professor Peter M. Daly is past president of the Society for Emblem Studies, Professor Emeritus, and former Chair of the Department of German Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He formerly taught at the universities of Zurich, New Brunwsick, Saskatchewan at Regina, Manitoba, and Tennessee at Chattannooga. He has numerous publications on German and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the European emblem tradition, and on contemporary advertising. He is co-editor with G. Richard Dimler of the illustrated bibliographies The Jesuit Series (1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, and 2007), and is founding co-editor of Emblematica, “AMS Studies in the Emblem,” and the Brepols series “Imago Figurata”. He recently edited A Companion to Emblem Studies (2007), published an edition of the Held translation of Alciato (2007), and finished a book on Alciato in England. He is preparing a volume of essays on Alciato’s emblems with Denis Drysdall, and another volume of essays on Emblems of Death with Monica Calabritto. Having completed An Annotated Bibliography of Emblem Studies 1990-1999, he is currently working on a bibliography for the following decades and a book on Shakespeare’s Symbolic Visuality. Bernard Deschamps has taught German literature and culture at McGill University, Montreal, and at the Université de Montréal. His field of research includes Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, emblems, and the new web technologies. Dr Cristina Fontcuberta i Famadas is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Barcelona where she teaches courses in the fields of Art Theory and Art of the Modern Period. Her first book, Imatges d’atac. Art i conflicte als segles XVI i XVII, will appear in 2010. In addition to authoring several journal and book articles, she has recently worked collaboratively on a new catalogue of the works of Federico Zuccari

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(Innocente e Calunniato. Federico Zuccari (1539/40-1609) e le vendette d’artista) published by the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. She is a member of the research group Art i religió a Catalunya durant els segles XVI i XVII. L’impacte de la contrareforma en l’arquitectura i les arts visuals. Dr Brigitte Friant-Kessler is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Valenciennes. She is a French Sterne scholar who has specialized in word and image studies, and has published several articles on Sterne as well as on the circulation of illustrated fiction in the Enlightenment. She holds a PhD from the University of Montpellier and has been collaborating for four years with W.B. Gerard on a bibliography of illustrated editions of Sterne. More recently, she has begun to look at illustrators, journalism and graphic satire during the late Regency period in England, as well as at film adaptations of Tristram Shandy. Professor Michael J. Giordano teaches French in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Wayne State University, Detroit. He has published on emblematics, Scève, Du Bellay, Montaigne, and Béroalde de Verville. His current projects are on the related cultural expressions brought together by anatomical blazon, the literary approaches to Agnolo Bronzino’s portraits, and a project on the satirical procedures shared by Béroalde de Verville’s Le Moyen de parvenir and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. His Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie will appear in 2010. Professor Hiroaki Ito is Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Saitama University, Japan. He is author of the monograph Kiso no Hyosyogaku: Enburemu e no Syotai [Conceit and Image: Introduction to Emblematica] (2007), and translator into Japanese of Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus [1531 Augsburg/1534 Paris versions] (2000); Otto Vaenius, Amorum emblemata (2009); Mario Praz, Studi sul concettismo (1998); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (2005); and Linda Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli, letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (2007). Dr Justyna KiliaĔczyk-ZiĊba is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Among her publications is an edition of the oldest Kraków guidebook, and a book on a Renaissance Polish printer, Czcionką i piórem. Jan Januszowski w roli pisarza i táumacza (2007). She is interested in the history of the book,

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Contributors

Renaissance literature and emblematics. Currently she is working on the symbolism, iconography and ideological inspiration of Polish printers’ devices, and preparing an edition of a Polish sixteenth-century translation of the Tabula Cebetis. Dr Elisabeth Klecker is Assistant Professor of Classics, Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies at the University of Vienna. Her doctoral thesis dealt with poems in praise of Homer and Virgil by Italian humanists. She specializes in the field of Neo-Latin studies with a focus on Austrian NeoLatin literature of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Her fields of interest include epic poetry, as well as various combinations of word and image (ecphrasis, pattern poetry, emblematics). Dr Klecker is currently working on a project exploring the role of Latin in Baroque Vienna, especially the use of Latin on (mostly emblematic) media of imperial selfrepresentation and propaganda in the public space. Pedro Germano Leal is a doctoral student at the Centre for Emblem Studies, Glasgow University. He is author of “Escrituras Filosóficas: de la confusión entre emblemas y jeroglíficos”, in Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Emblemática (forthcoming); O Espelho dos Hieróglifos: da ruína das letras egípcias à sua reinvenção quimérica entre os séc. XV e XVII (2008); and “Hieroglifica Barroca: subsídios para a idéia literária da escrita nos séc. XVI/XVII” in Colóquio Barroco, ed. Francisco Ivan da Silva (2008). Dr Simon McKeown is Keeper of Rare Books at Marlborough College, where he teaches in the English and History of Art departments. He has written some twenty-five journal articles and book chapters on aspects of Renaissance culture, and his books include Emblematic Paintings from Sweden’s Age of Greatness (2006); and the edited volumes The Emblem in Scandinavia and the Baltic (2006, with Mara Wade); and Reading and Writing the Swedish Renaissance (2009). He sits on the editorial board of the journal Emblematica, and has served on the research committee of the Swedish State Trophy Collection. He is currently working on a book about Otto Vaenius. Professor John Manning is Chair of the English Department at Purdue North University, Indiana. He was formerly Professor at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and Reader at the Queen’s University of Belfast. His books include The Emblem (2002), an edition of the first English emblem book, Thomas Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees (1988), and facsimile

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editions of Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1989), and Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1996). Professor Manning has written extensively on Shakespeare—notably Hamlet—, Spenser, Renaissance iconography, and epigrammatic culture. Dr Anna Maranini is a Lecturer and Directeur des Recherches at the University of Bologna. She investigates and teaches on the perception and reception of the Latin world in Renaissance literature, ethics, epigraphy, symbolism and arts, and on printed and annotated book history. Her main field of research includes the study of classical and medieval traditions and their persistence in modern cultures and languages. Her recent books include Così morì l’uranoscopo. Tradizioni, allegorie e simboli di un’Idea da Platone a Camerario (2005); and Emblemi d’amore dal Petrarca ai Gesuiti (2005). Dr Eirwen E.C. Nicholson read History and History of Art at Cambridge (Trinity Hall: cf. Arthur Middleton). Following a PhD (Edinburgh, 1994) in the historiography of the English Political Print 1640-1840, she has published widely on aspects of visual-political culture in the “long eighteenth century”. She resides in Virginia. Dr Michel R. Oudijk is a philologist of Mexican indigenous texts, who received his doctorate at Leiden University and currently works at the Institute of Philological Investigations, UNAM, Mexico. He has worked and published extensively on Zapotec pictographic and alphabetic documents. Recently, Dr Oudijk’s research has focused on the indigenous participation in the Conquest of Mexico. His books on this subject are Indian Conquistadors (2007) with Laura Matthew, and La conquista de Mesoamérica (2008) with Matthew Restall. He is currently developing a webpage for the publication and philological analysis of Mesoamerican indigenous texts called Wiki-Filología. Professor Yona Pinson is Chair of Art History at the Yoland and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University, and former Head of Department. Her research and publications focus on Late Medieval and Northern Renaissance Art, mainly iconographical topics; comparative iconography; the works of Bosch and Bruegel the Elder, and issues regarding word and image in prints, paintings and emblems books. She is author of The Fools’ Journey. A Myth of Obsession in Northern Renaissance Art (2009), and of various articles published in Gazette des Beaux–Arts; Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts; Artibus et Historiae;

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Contributors

Studies in Iconography; Assaph. Studies in Art History; Source: Notes in the History of Art; Emblematica: An International Journal for Emblem Studies; and Word and Image. Dr Seraina Plotke is Assistant Lecturer in German Medieval Studies at the University of Basel. Her publications include Gereimte Bilder. Visuelle Poesie im 17. Jahrhundert (2009), and numerous journal publications in the field of emblematics, pattern poetry, and the interplay between visual/verbal conceits and music. Dr Johnathan H. Pope recently completed his PhD at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, with a dissertation entitled “An Anatomy of the Soul in English Renaissance Religious Poetry.” In addition, he has published “Religion and Anatomy in John Banister’s Historie of Man (1578)” in the journal LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History. Dr Pope is currently teaching English literature at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. Deanna Smid is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis, entitled, “‘The World in Man’s Heart’: The Faculty of Imagination in Early Modern English Literature”, under the supervision of Mary V. Silcox. Her most recent publication is an essay, “The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz”, which will be published in 2010 in the forthcoming Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory. Lien Roggen is a researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven where she is preparing her thesis “Writing and Pushing Back Frontiers in the Service of the Counter-Reformation. The Oeuvre of Adriaen Poirters (1605-1674) from the Perspective of Counter-Reformation Publication Strategies of the Jesuits in the Provincia Flandro-Belgica”, under the supervision of Professor Marc Van Vaeck and Professor Toon Van Houdt. This research is part of a larger VNC-project run by her home university and the University of Utrecht on the religious emblem tradition in the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the light of Hermann Hugo’s Pia Desideria. Professor Alison M. Saunders is Carnegie Professor of French at Aberdeen University. Her main research interests lie in the field of

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sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, and in particular in emblematics. She has published monographs on the blason poetique in France and on both sixteenth-century French emblem books and seventeenthcentury French emblem books. Together with Alison Adams and Stephen Rawles, Professor Saunders has published a two-volume Bibliography of French Emblem Books. Professor Ojars Sparitis is Professor of the Latvian Academy of Arts and Head of the Department for Doctoral Studies. He lectures on the History of Art in Latvia, religious architecture and art, the theory of styles in art, the history of the applied arts, aspects of Renaissance culture, problems of the Reformation and confessionalization, questions concerning the protection and conservation of cultural heritage, and emblematics. He is author of eleven monographs, and more than 170 publications on history and theory of art and architecture, and aspects of typology. He has substantial knowledge of conservation issues, having written over sixty scientific articles on the protection of cultural heritage. Professor Sparitis has held guest lectureships in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Germany, and Poland. He is a member of the research group “Die baltischen Lande im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung” in association with the universities of Tübingen and Greifswald. Professor James Tanis held the position of Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries and Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1996. Among his many publications are the books Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies (1967); The Die is Cast (1979); Bookbinding in America, 1680-1910 (edited with John Dooley, 1983); Images of Discord: A Graphic Interpretation of the Opening Decade of the Eighty Years’ War (with Daniel Horst, 1994); and Leaves of Gold: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections (2006).

INDEX

Adams, Alison 201, 528, 534-535, 542 Addison, Joseph 360 Adolfzoon, Christopher 145-146 Aeschylus 339 Aesop 268-269, 376 Agricola, Daniel 69-75 Águila, Jerónimo del 287, 295 Albrecht of Austria 34 Albrecht of Brandenburg 162 Alciato, Andrea xvi-xviii, 3-17, 2225, 35, 48, 69, 75, 99, 101, 113120, 236-237, 339-342, 376377, 384, 401-402, 405-406, 426, 439, 525, 527-528, 539, 542 Alexander VI 2 Alvarado, Pedro de 283, 290 Amardel, Gaston 54-56 Ambrose 216, 218 Amsdorf, Nicholas von 137 Andries, Judocus 187 Aneau, Barthélemy 3 Anna Ioanovna of Russia 506 Anne of Denmark 401 Anne of Great Britain 143 Archilochus 14 Archimedes 466 Aretino, Pietro 12, 139 Aristotle 339-340, 341, 345, 439 Arwaker, Edmund 529 Asselbergs, Florine 287 Athenaeus 13 Attwood, Philip 136 Augustine 71, 84, 216, 218 Aulus Gellius 156 Ausonius 404 Averoldi, Altobello 30 Avianus 341

Ayres, Philip 530 Bacon, Francis 104 Badajoz, Gutierre de 285 Bade, Josse 82-89 Badius, Conrad 158-160 Banister, John 439-441 Barbeau Gardiner, Anne 146 Barber, Elizabeth 486 Barber, John Warner 483, 486 Bargagli, Scipione 32, 36 Bateman, Stephen 440 Bath, Michael xv, 430-431, 439, 443-444, 464, 523-524, 528, 530 Bauer, Barbara 529 Baumlin, James 428 Bautista, Domingo Hernández 320 Becerril, Arzate 328 Bellamy, Edward 484 Belli, Valerio 22-23 Bembo, Pietro 22-23, 35 Benavides, Marco Mantova 25 Benedict 345 Benlowes, Edward 433-434 Bèze, Theodore de 16 Biron, Dorothea 505 Biron, Peter 501, 505, 509 Blount, William 530 Bocchi, Achille 29-31, 35, 99, 116118 Boethius 341 Bohme, Jacob 105 Boleyn, Anne 421 Bollandus, Joannes 173 Bolzani, Urbano 30 Boniface 175 Boodt, Anselme 101 Boot, Peter 536, 541, 545 Borghini, Vincenzo 31-32, 36

604 Borromeo, Charles 216, 218 Boskam, Jan 141 Botticelli, Sandro 422-423 Bourghesius, Joannes 172 Bracciolini, Poggio 2 Brandhorst, Hans 536, 541 Brant, Sebastian 69, 82-89 Brienza, Susan 469 Brisaboa, Nieves Rodríguez 535 Bruin, Claas 206 Bruno, Giordano 406 Bry, Theodor de 138 Budé, Guillaume 412 Burgos, Juan de 285 Burgueño, Fernando 284-285, 288290 Burke, Peter 2, 141 Cabot, John 485 Caburacci, Francesco 36 Caicedo, Lope Ochoa de 318 Caldecott, Randolph 483 Caldwell, Dorigen 528 Callot, Jacques 503 Calvin, Jean 164, 186, 219-220 Calvo, Francesco 7, 113 Cambi, Giambattista 30 Camden, William 530 Camerarius, Joachim 26, 120-121, 379, 526 Camilli, Camillo 380 Campbell, William 352 Capaccio, Giulio Cesare 101, 121, 378 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 160 Caro, Annibal 27-29 Cartari, Vincenzo 404 Cartier, Etienne 138 Castañeda de la Paz, Mária 320, 328 Castillejo, Juan de 317 Castillo, Bernal Díaz del 326 Castro, García 328 Catherine of Aragon 421 Catherine de’Medici 424 Catherine II of Russia 505, 507, 509

Index Cats, Jacob 157, 182-183, 187 Cattaneo, Danese 22-23 Catton, Charles 472, 474 Catullus 11 Caussin, Nicolas 105 Cautley, George Spencer xviii Cavino, Giovanni da 24 Caxton, William 376 Cellini, Benvenuto 22-23 Ceos, Simonides de 104 Cesarini, Gabriello 380 Cesati, Alessandro 27-28 Chamberlin, Russell 8-9 Charles I of England 203, 353 Charles II of England 145-146, 203, 353 Charles the Bold of France 413 Charles, 3rd Duke of Bourbon 416420 Charles V of Spain 33-34, 138, 147, 238, 291-294, 318, 321, 412-419 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor 236-245 Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel 202 Charlotte von Lieven 509 Cho, Kwang Soon 375 Choné, Paulette 473 Christina of Sweden 155 Cicero 466 Clement VII 412 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 141 Collins, Samuel 439 Colonna, Francesco 99, 114, 403 Columbus, Christopher 483-486 Columbus, Thomas 469 Comenius, Johan Amos 104 Commines, Laurent de 500-512 Conti, Natale 401-402 Contile, Luca 36, 380 Contzen, Adam 339 Cook, Diane 412 Cooke, Charles 470-474 Corbauld, Peter 471, 474 Córdoba, Francisco Hernández de 318-328

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet Córdoba, Francisco Ruis de 318328 Cornazzano, Aldigiero 380 Corrozet, Gilles 467-468 Cortés, Hernán 283, 290-295, 321322 Cosimo de’Medici 10, 26, 30-32, 36, 49 Cousin, Jean 98 Cousteau, Pierre 526 Covarrubias, Sebastían de 49, 526 Cowper, William 444-445, 448 Cramer, Daniel 11 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 139 Crane, Walter 483-489 Crinitus, Petrus 339 Cromwell, Oliver 356 Crooke, Helkiah 439-442, 445, 453 Cusanus, Nicolaus 406 Dalí, Salvatore503 Daly, Peter M. 7, 105, 374, 439441, 464, 473, 528, 535 Damianus, Jacobus 172 Daniel, Samuel 379 Daniell, David 159 Davidson, Clifford 441 De la Gardie, Magnus Gabriel 155157, 162-164 Debussy, Claude 506 Dekoninck, Ralph 173-175 Deloynes, François 162 Desprez, Louis Jean 510 Diderot, Denis 98 Dimler, G. Richard 179, 181, 529 Dionysius the Areopagita 343 Dolce, Lodovico 23, 34-36, 487 Domenichi, Lodovico 25-27, 31, 36 Dornau, Gaspar 15-16 Drayton, John 357 Drayton, William Henry 350-351, 356-362 Drexel, Jeremias 524, 530 Drouyn, Jehan 82-89 Drysdall, Denis 542 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 7, 14, 140

605

Dürer, Albrecht 99, 105, 161, 503504 Edward VI of England 159 Ehrenstrahl, David Klöcker 156158, 164 Eleonora da Toledo 26 Elizabeth of Bohemia 202-203 Elizabeth I of England 139-140, 147, 159-160 Ellenius, Allan 157-158 Encate, Domingo Ruis Lospe 317322 Engelgrave, Henricus 381-382 Erasmus, Desiderius 6-7, 12, 114, 119, 161-162, 378, 412 Eric the Red 485 Erizzo, Sebastiano 51, 53 Eugene of Savoy 243 Eusebius 49 Faerni, Gabriel 377 Farnese, Alessandro, Duke of Alba 28, 33, 139, 141 Ferdinand I of Austria 31, 186 Ferdinand of Spain 486 Ferdinando de’Medici 32, 36 Feutchtenberg, Matthias Joseph 236 Filiberto, Emanuale 28 Findlen, Paula 2 Finney, Gretchen L. 433-434 Flötner, Peter 138 Fludd, Robert 105 Francesco de’Medici 31 François I of France 28, 53, 412, 415-416, 423 Frantz, David O. 2 Frederick III of Denmark 203 Frederick V of the Palatine 202-203 Freeman, Rosemary 429-430, 440 Freitag, Arnold 381 Frellon, Jean 50 Friedlander, Amy 543-544 Friedrich, Caspar David 510 Frobenius, Johannes 113, 119, 161 Fruytiers, Philippe 173 Fumaroli, Marc 173-175 Furtmeyer, Berthold 85

606 Galen 139, 439 Galeotti, Pietro Paolo 31 Galileo, Galilei 404 Galle, Cornelius 73 Genette, Gérard 413 George III of Great Britain 353, 355 Giambologna 32 Gibson, Charles 286 Gilman, Ernest 430 Gimeno, Javier 147 Giovanni da Cavino 24 Giovio, Paolo 8, 24-27, 29-33, 49, 100, 379-380, 417 Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio 405 Godfrey, Edmund 143 Golding, Arthur 381 Gombrich, E.H. 28, 138 Gonson, John 359 Gonzaga, Ferrante 33 Goya, Francisco 503 Graf, Urs 70 Graham, David 534-535, 541-542 Green, Henry 3-7, 16-17, 374 Greenaway, Kate 483 Gregory of Nazianus 447 Grove, Laurence 528, 541-542 Guidiccioni, Giovanni 27-28 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 163 Gustavus III of Sweden 510 Guzmán, Nuño de 321-322 Hachenburg, Paul 203-205, 215 Hampden, John 144 Harms, Wolfgang 7 Harrach, Ferdinand Marquand 244 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp 527 Harvey, William 452 Haskett, Robert 288 Hawkins, E. 136, 142 Hayaert, Valérie 420 Healey, John 402 Heckscher, William S. 4, 524, 527528, 540 Heinsius, Daniel 181 Heisser, David 351, 356, 360 Held, Jeremias 528

Index Henkel, Arthur 540 Henri II of France 25, 424 Henri IV of France 138, 141 Henry VIII of England 158-159, 218, 413, 416, 420-421 Heraeus, Carl Gustav 244-245 Herodotus 343 Hitler, Adolf 508 Hoefnagel, Joris 487 Hogenberg, Franz 140 Holbein, Hans 161 Hollar, Wenceslaus 530 Höltgen, Karl Josef 202, 426, 434, 442-443, 450-451, 528, 529 Homer 14 Hooghe, Romeyn de 144 Höpel, Ingrid 202, 528 Horace 6, 103, 241, 340, 378, 382, 527 Horapollo 98, 103, 403 Horden, John 434, 441, 450 Horozco y Covarrubias, Juan de 59, 101 Howard, Catherine 413, 421 Hugo, Hermann 202, 443, 529, 539 Hunt, Lynn 2 Hyginus 340 Insolera Salviucci, Lydia 170, 181, 185-186 Ippolito d’Este 25 Isabella of Spain 486 Isselburg, Peter 237 Itztlolinqui, Juan de Guzmán 296 James I of Great Britain 16, 203, 400-406 James II of Great Britain 143-144, 352 Janson, Anthony F. 139 Januszowski, Jan 115-118 Jardine, Lisa 161-162 Jerome 160-164, 339 Joanna of Austria 31 Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg 236 Jones, Mark 136, 139-140, 142, 145

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet Jöns, Dietrich Walter 524 Jonson, Ben 400-408 Junius, Franciscus 156 Junius, Hadrianus xvi, 157, 377380, 403, 526 Jurieu, Pierre 142 Kanbishi 267-268 Karl I Ludwig of the Palatine 202 Karl II Ludwig of the Palatine (Philotheus) 201-222 Keiserling, Hermann 502 Kersting, Georg Friedrich 510 Kleiner, Salomon 238 Klur, Hans 138-139, 145 Knapp, Éva 529 Knoblauch, Johann 158 Kôkan, Shiba 265-269 Königsmarck, Hans Cristoffer von 155 L’Anglois, Pierre 101 La Tour, George de 160 LaMotte, Charles 16 Landwehr, John 201 Legeay, Jean Laurent 509 Lens, Bernard 144 Leo X 7, 137, 161 Leonardo da Vinci 103 Leoni, Leone 33-34 Lewalski, Barbara 529 Leysser, Cornelius 524 Lincoln, Abraham 488 Locke, John 353 Lockhart, James 287 Lombardi, Alfonso 22 Lopéz, Francisco 317 Lorch, Melchior 139 Loring, Charles G. 483 Louis XV of France 203, 208-209 Louis XIV of France 32, 136, 141142, 145, 148, 203, 208, 220221, 241 Louis XVIII of France 508 Loyola, Ignatius de 174, 176, 178, 181-182, 185-186 Luder, Jan 141

607

Luther, Martin 7, 137, 139, 163, 176, 186, 219-220 Luyken, Jan 266-269 Luyken, Kaspar 266-269 Lyons, John D. 414 McFarlane, I.D. 412 McGann, Jerome 545 McKeown, Simon 434-435, 529 Maier, Michael 99 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné 142 Mannaerts, Rudi 180 Manning, John xvi, 4, 24, 438-440, 524, 530, 531 Mansueto, Donato 542 Manutius, Aldus 50, 113-114 Maresio, Florio 30-31, 35 Margaret of Austria 26, 28, 34 Margaret of France 28 Marguerite of Navarre 412, 423 Maria Theresia of Austria 239, 242-245 Marnef, Angelbert de 82 Marshall, William 158 Martial 4, 11-12 Martini, Luca 22 Mary I of England 34, 159 Mary II of Great Britain 143-144, 355 Mary of Modena 143 Masen, Jacob 344 Mathieu-Castellani, Gisle 528 Matlaccohuatzin, Francisco de Alvarado 290-291 Matthias, Christian 50 Maximilian I of Bavaria 99, 161 Mayr, Stephan Joseph 236 Mazzafirri, Michele 32-33 Medem, Christof Johann Friedrich von 505 Medem, Dorothea de 505 Melanchthon, Philip 164 Menander 23, 25 Mendos, Andrés 49 Meneses, López de 291

608 Ménestrier, Claude-François 97-98, 100-101, 103-105, 141, 145 Metsys, Quentin 119, 161 Middleton, Arthur 350-351, 356362 Mignault, Claude 101-102, 402, 403 Moctezuma II of Mexico 286, 289291 Moctezuma, Diego García de Mendoza 283, 328 Moctezuma, Martín Cortés 291 Mödersheim, Sabine 528 Moffitt, John F. 3, 6 Mondeville, Henri de 439 Montenay, Georgette de xvi, 7, 160, 201, 221-222, 381 Morante, Cristobál de 318 More, Thomas 12, 412-413 Morier, Henri 420 Morris, William 473, 483 Mulhausen, Ruth 412 Muraro, Michelangelo 139 Murner, Thomas 86 Musso, Cornelio 27 Nash, Frederick 380 Nashe, Thomas 14 Natalis, Michiel 184 Newen (von Newenstein), Johann Carl 244-245 Nezahualtecolotzin, Martín 290291 Nicholas V 8 Olson, Lester C. 351, 358, 360-361 Origen 218 O’Toole, Laurence 9 Ovid 10, 172, 340, 527 Padt-Brugge, Dionysius 157, 163 Palazzi, Giovanni 36 Palewski, Violette 501 Palmer, Thomas 440 Panofsky, Erwin 404 Panormita, Antonio 2, 9-13 Papebrochius, Daniel 171, 178 Paradin, Claude xvi, 48-51, 53-54, 60, 101, 377

Index Passeri, Marcantonio 24 Paster, Gail Kern 444 Patch, Thomas 466-470, 474 Patrick, Duncan 467 Paul III 4, 139, 177, 415 Paul IV 14 Paulson, Ronald 359, 472-473 Pausanius 405 Pelc, Janusz 529 Pérez, Gonzalo 35 Petrarch, Francesco 400, 404 Petri, Olau 164 Peutinger, Konrad 23 Phaedrus 341 Philip II of Spain 21, 28, 33-36, 139-140, 291, 293-294, 487 Philip III of Spain 34 Philip IV of Spain 468 Philip V of Spain 147, 243, 468 Philippe, Duc D’Orléans 203, 209 Philotheus – see Karl II Ludwig of the Palatine Pico della Mirandola 11 Piero della Francesca 468 Pierrepont, Barnard 136-137, 140 Pigna, Giovanni Battista 30 Pignoria, Lorenzo 340 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 503, 508, 510 Pittoni, Giovanni Battista 23, 487 Pius II 2 Plantin, Christophe 377 Plato 24, 413 Pliny the Elder 32, 117, 338-339 Plotinus 341, 414 Plutarch 338, 343-346, 403 Poggini, Domenico 25-26, 28, 35 Poggini, Gianpaolo 28, 34-35 Poirters, Adriaen 184-188 Pollard, Graham 26 Poncelet, Alfred 180 Porphyry 341 Porteman, Karel 179 Poza, Sagrario López 535 Prang, Louis 484, 488 Praz, Mario 73, 201

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet Pufendorf, Samuel von 202 Quarenghi, Giacomo 509 Quarles, Francis 202, 426-435, 438, 442-454 Queeexochil, Juan Bautista de 317319 Quintilian 117 Rabelais, François 465-466 Raimondi, Marcantonio 12 Rajan, Tilottama 431 Randall, Dale 430-431 Ranshitsu, Tsuji 266 Rascas, Pierre Antoine 141 Ravisy, Jean Tixier de 340 Rawles, Stephen 535 Regio, Raffaele 340 Reguera, Francisco Gómez de la 50 Rej, Mikolaj 120-121 Reticus, Joachimus 117 Reynolds-Cornell, Régine 528 Riario, Raffaele 162 Ricciardi, Antonio 341-342 Ripa, Cesare 15, 34, 36 Ripperda, Johan Wilhelm 243 Rödter, Gabriele Dorothea 529 Roettier, John 144 Roman, Danièle 56 Romano, Giulio 10, 12 Rosand, David 139 Roselli, Hanibal 117 Rouille, Guillaume 50 Rubens, Peter Paul 160, 178 Rudbeck, Olof 162 Rudolf II of Bohemia 155 Ruscelli, Girolamo 27, 29, 34 Ruspagiari, Alfonso 24 Russell, Daniel S. 414, 525, 528 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de 49, 100 Saddam Hussein 350 Sallust 114 Sambucus, Joannes xvi, 47-48, 377, 471, 526 Sanders, Norman 401 Sandoval, Gonzalo de 283, 321-322, 325-326

609

Sangallo, Francesco da 25 Saunders, Alison xvii, 528, 542 Saxl, Fritz 158 Scève, Maurice 215, 412-424, 468, 470 Schlick, Leopold 244 Scholtz, Bernhard F. 73-74, 524 Schön, Erhard 138 Schöne, Albrecht 73-74, 524, 540 Schoonhovius, Florentius 526 Schwoerer, Lois G. 143 Scribner, R.W. 139 Scudder, Horace 484 Seaman, David 543 Second, Jean 23-25 Sellingh, Hans Bengtsson 156-158, 161-164 Shaftesbury, 1st Earl of 352-353 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of 352-353, 359, 361 Shakespeare, William 11, 144, 374-386, 465 Shaw, George Bernard 483 Shiseki, So 265 Shomel, Noel 265 Siebeneicher, Mateusz 114-115 Signoretti, Gian Antonio 30 Silcox, Mary V. 528 Simeoni, Gabriel 49 Simonds, Peggy Muñoz 374-376 Skenazi, Cynthia 412 Smeltzing, Jan 141 Smollett, Tobias 473 Solórzano, Juan de 49 Sophocles 13 Soto, Hernándes de 526 Spanheim, Ezechiel 202 Spence, Joseph 360 Spenser, Edmund 34, 376, 402 Stäcker, Thomas 536 Starck, Philippe 60 Steelsius, Joannes 114-115 Steinhowel, Heinrich 268, 376 Sterne, Laurence 464-474 Stiernhielm, Georg 157, 163 Stobaeus, Andreas 163

610 Stronks, Els 536, 539 Sugg, Richard 440 Tallyrand, Charles Maurice 501 Tallyrand, Edmond de 501 Tehuetzquititzin, Diego de San Francisco 284, 292-295 Teresa of Ávila 216-218 Tertullian 87, 218, 339-340 Tezozomoc, Alvarado 292 Themistius 405 Theodoric the Great 155 Thomas, Sarah 545 Thomson, James 474 Thucidydes 341, 343, 346 Tibullus 11 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 503 Tirado, Juan 284-285, 288-289 Titian 138-139 Tollenaere, Joannes de 170, 173, 177 Tomitano, Bernardo 27, 35 Totoquihuaztli, Antonio Cortés 284, 287, 295 Trezzo, Jacopo da 34-35 Tüskes, Gabriel 529 Tyndale, William 164 Typotius, Jacobus 26, 33-34, 49 Uwens, Laurentius 184 Vaenius, Otto 6, 181, 382, 385, 405 Vaga, Perino del 27 Valdez Leal, Juan de 99 Valeriano Bolzani, Pierio 8, 12, 30-31, 35, 98, 101, 103, 339340, 342-343, 403 Valignano, Alessandro 264 Valla, Lorenzo 8-9 Van Abeele, Pieter 146 Van den Vondel, Joost 268-269 Van der Noot, Jan 7 Van Diepenbeeck, Abraham 184 Van Vaeck, Marc 181, 187 Vasari, Giorgio 22, 473 Veronese, Paolo 471 Vesalius, Andreas 139, 439, 442 Veyrac, Alain 56-59

Index Vicary, Thomas 439-440 Vico, Enea 31 Villafranca, Pedro 328 Villamil, Villar 292 Villava, Juan Francisco de 50 Vincartius, Joannes 172 Vincentino, Antonio 30 Virgil 10, 27, 215, 238, 240-241, 527 Visscher, Nicholas 146 Visser, Arnoud S.Q. 542 Vitelleschi, Muzio 172-173, 177 Vives, Juan Luis 340 Vossius, Isaac 155-156 Vouet, Simon 160 Wade, Mara R. 537, 544 Warham, William 162 Washington, George 488 Watson, Elisabeth See 30, 428 Webb, Peter 2 Wechel, André 50 Wechel, Chrétien 50 Werner, Joseph 142 Westerweel, Bart 530 Whitney, Geffrey xvi, 7, 14, 157, 160, 377-378, 381, 426, 439440, 531 Wietor, Hieronim 118-119 Wilhelm, J. Gerlacus 204 Wilhelmina Ernestine of Denmark 203 William III of Great Britain 143144, 352, 355-356 Williams, Gordon 2 Wind, Edgar 406 Wirth, Karl-August 524, 540 Wirzbieta, Maciej 118-121 Wither, George 100, 426, 442, 468-469, 471-472, 531 Wood, Stephanie 328 Wulfila 155-158, 160-164 Xavier, Francis 264 Yoshimune, Tokugawa 264 Young, Alan R. 530, 536 Yourcenar, Marguerite 502 Zamoyski, Jan 115-117

The International Emblem: From Incunabula to the Internet Zehnacker, Hubert 56 Zubrod, Johannes Peter 204-205

Zuccaro, Taddeo 28 Zwingli, Ulrich 164

611