Andrea Alciato’s Emblems in Script and Print, 17th C.
These two works exemplify the popular genre of the emblem book and its evolution over the course of a century, from Andrea Alciato’s foundational printed work to a later manuscript revival. Though comprised of the same text with some edits, these two volumes bookend the height of Renaissance fascination with emblem books, which combined images, mottos, and text to reimagine classical literature, as in Alciato’s original emblem book, or to expound on all kinds of philosophical questions and virtues, as seen in another of JHU’s emblem books presented by Pierre Bourgeois to Susanne de Verité in 1628.
Andrea Alciato was a legal jurist and leading humanist in French intellectual circles, but he rocketed to fame with his Emblemata, a book of Latin verses and accompanying woodcuts that founded the entirely new—and exceptionally popular—genre of the emblem book. The work quickly became a best seller, appearing in over one hundred and fifty printed editions and translations by the early seventeenth century and widely recognized today as the pioneer of a new genre. Few literary genres and associated book formats demonstrate the mores of the Renaissance as well as the emblem book does, inspired by intellectual and cultural reclamation of the classical world and made possible through the invention of the printing press and allied technological advancements of the graphic arts. Alciato’s book modeled this harmony of ancient and modern through print. The Emblemata connected a classical adage or motto (inscriptio) with an emblematic image (pictura) and a longer explanatory verse or epigrammatic text (subscriptio). The full meaning of each emblem combined word with image, igniting the reader’s imagination with all manner of complex interpretations.
Alciato first compiled his classically inspired epigrammatic Latin verses in manuscript and circulated them among his friends and colleagues in France and Milan from 1518. It was not until Heinrich Steiner had the novel idea not only to print Alciato’s epigrams but also to place them alongside woodcut illustrations that the author catapulted to fame along with his new emblem book, first published in 1531. Despite—or perhaps because of—its unfamiliar format, the Emblemata circulated in French, Italian, Latin, German, and Spanish and inspired a striking proliferation of emblem books over the next century.
Robelin de Nevers’s manuscript represents one of many reinterpretations of Alciato’s famous book, here a scribal rather than a printed adaptation. Written entirely in French and dating to the late seventeenth century, it remained unfinished when it was primitively bound in an old vellum legal document. Its latter-day compiler is named simply as “Robelin” of the Château de la Vaivre in Nevers, France. The work contains a handwritten and hand-illustrated near re-creation of the 1549 Lyon print edition of Alciato’s text, along with other literary excerpts culled from well-known French poets such as Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Guillaume du Bartas, and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. Further excerpts from the much-reprinted travel book of the famed French explorer Jacques de Villamont, Les Voyages du seigneur du Villamont (1595) extend the content from high to popular literature.
Robelin’s grisaille style of pen-and-ink-wash illustrations sometimes simplifies the details of the earlier woodcut. In the case of his entry on “Silence,” for example, Robelin omits an inkpot and a projecting entablature just over the door that appear in the 1549 engraving. The accompanying text celebrates the wisdom of silence, invoking the ancient Egyptian divinity Harpocrates described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as “the god who enjoins silence with his finger on his lips.” In later centuries this traditional admonition to silence of course emerged as the universal “shushing” gesture toward people who are speaking too loudly in quiet study sections of libraries.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Claudie Balavoine, “Les emblems d’Alciat: Sens et contresens,” in Balavoine et al., L’Emblème à Renaissance (Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1988), 49–60; Karl Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, “Introduction: Emblems and the Natural World (ca. 1530–1700),” in Enenkel and Smith (eds.), Emblems and the Natural World (Brill, 2017), 1–40; Alison Saunders, “Alciata, the Precursor of the French Emblematists,” in The Sixteenth-Century French Emblem Book (Libraire Droz, 1988), esp. 97–108; Ludwig Volkmann and Robin Raybould, “Emblematics and Its Derivatives: Imprese and Devices,” in Hieroglyph, Emblem, and Renaissance Pictography (Brill, 2018), 84–132. Glasgow University, Stirling Maxwell Emblem Book Collection, Digital Project: https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/.
