by Truman Cunningham
From the early sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, emblem books displayed moral, political, and religious lessons with small woodcut images and a few lines of poetry. They were extremely popular in both Catholic and Protestant Europe, and across all levels of (literate) society. For many years, historians have struggled to explain this popularity, attributing it to eye-catching illustrations or mnemonic devices. One overlooked aspect of the emblem book, and especially the Emblematicum Liber of Andrea Alciati (1492-1550), is the author’s use of classical imagery. Illustrations of Zeus, Venus, Apollo, etc. introduced classical mythology, only just rediscovered by humanists like Alciati, to a wider audience. Greco-Roman figures became an alternative to Christian imagery: no less antique, but more adaptable for lack of dogmatic associations.
Nothing quite like the Emblematicum Liber existed before the 1530s, and Alciati was the origin and inspiration for dozens of similar emblem books after his time. He was not entirely without precedent, however, as more recent scholars have made clear. Russell calls attention to images of personified virtues in fifteenth century French manuscripts, as well as the practice of adding woodcut images to printed books of poetry in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Others, such as Enenkel, have made comparisons to Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Narrenschiff. Brant’s work would have been known to the Augsburg publisher Heinrich Steiner, who commissioned the accompanying woodcuts for Alciati’s first edition. As for the poetry (subscriptiones) and Latin mottos that Alciati devised himself, Russell suggests a French inspiration, while Hill compares Alciati’s enigmatic Latin phrases to those used by Italian condottieri.
In a broader northern Renaissance context, Alciati and the emblem books he spawned share considerable overlap with humanist genres like the specula principorum or conduct books like Il corteggiano, designed for an elite audience (Lovett). These books were designed to advise on behaviour in elite spaces and included lessons in moral and political thought as well as etiquette at a Renaissance court. Alciati’s moral lessons are well-suited to life at the court centers of the respublica litteraria, emphasizing common humanist themes of friendship, moral restraint, and deference toward one’s ruler. Alciati himself grew up near the court of the Sforza dukes of Milan and spent a decade in Augsburg with scholars close to Maximilian I (such as Conrad Peutinger, who, along with Francesco II Sforza, is the dedicatee of the Emblematicum).
At the same time, Alciati’s emblems share many elements with popular works of his day, including Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and the woodcut propaganda pieces of the early Reformation. Rabelais’ opus, the first book of which was published less than a year after the Emblematicum, is a work of satire rather than instruction, but is nonetheless dependent on the same surreal imagery. Compare the grotesque depictions of Rabelais’ eponymous giants with the cyclops on page B7v, or Panurge’s debate about marriage with Alciati’s images of marital fidelity on A5v and A8v (Brault). The use of woodcut printing, which became widespread in Germany only a few decades before Alciati’s work, spread humanist themes to a larger (and often less literate) audience than ever before. Hans Schäuffelein, the woodcutter responsible for the images in the first editions of the Emblematicum and a disciple of Dürer, was almost certainly aware of the propaganda storm that Cranach and Luther brought about in the 1520s (Williamson). Schäuffelein’s images are enigmatic to the modern eye. Sixteenth century readers, however, might have recognized the characters and themes even with a limited fluency in Latin, much like the figures of Christ and the Pope are immediately recognizable in Cranach’s Passional Christi und Antichristi series.
What are these emblems, then, that were inspired by elite humanism yet accessible to a mass audience? Alciati’s first editions of the Emblematicum list 112 devices, each with a motto (or sententia in Latin) above a simple woodcut image and followed by an explanatory verse (the subscriptio). The practice of “inlaying” the image between the motto and verse, invented by Alciati’s publisher Steiner, was the origin of the term “emblem”, from Greek εμβλημα (“inlayed”). Throughout the sixteenth century, emblems were anything but consistent in form, language or message, though Steiner’s form became the most common.
Generally speaking, Alciati’s emblems depict Classical figures, including Aesop’s fables, and elements of popular folklore, rather than Christian characters. Gods like Venus, Mars, and Zeus abound with animals, heroes, and mythological creatures to chastise vice and exemplify virtue. Christian themes are certainly present (see perhaps “Give unto Caesar…” on page D2v) but expressed by animals, rather than people, or in tandem with Classical themes. In the religiously charged atmosphere of Augsburg in the 1530s, perhaps this was a means of avoiding overt partisanship. It might also be reflective of Alciati’s intended readership, well-versed in stories and motifs from antiquity, the humanists who first read and imitated the Emblematicum had alternatives to the Bible on which to ground their metaphors.
Moral advice takes the place of Christian themes in the Emblematicum, and Alciati’s devices can be divided into a few categories based on the kind of advice they reflect. Some emblems offer general moral messages, such as Amicitia etiam post mortem durans (“Friendship lasting even beyond death”), emphasizing loyality, or Gratiam referendum (“Show gratitude”) reminding the reader of the importance of caring for one’s aged parents. Others are explicitly political, with messages that could be taken from Il principe. Page A5r, Non vulganda consilia, claims that a “ruse once known brings harm to its author”. Still others offer gnomic statements about the nature of the world, mementos mori, or specific lessons from history. Alius peccat, alius plectitur (“One sins and another is punished”) on page D5v is one such example.
This advice, moral, political, and otherwise, is directed toward a readership literate in both Greek and Latin, familiar with non-Christian archetypes, and scholarly enough to adopt maxims like doctos doctis obloqui nefas esse (“one doctor shouldn’t squabble with another”). Alciati makes this explicit in a short preface addressed to the reader: “Most candid reader”, he begins, “we desire to hand over to you, the learned, these more illustrious inventions.” This, combined with Alciati’s previously mentioned dedication to Conrad Peutinger (clarissimus vir, a “most learned man”), led Saunders to claim his work was “a form of intellectual diversion, created originally by one scholar for the amusement of another” (p. 117). Alciati’s addresses to his readership and dedication to Peutinger imply that he never intended the Liber to be read much beyond a small network of well-educated humanist scholars.
Alciati’s Emblematicum was anything but a privately circulated humanist amusement, however. Within the first decade of publishing, the Emblematicum was translated into at least half a dozen European languages. It underwent nineteen printings in the sixteenth century and inspired at least seven copycat works in France alone. Its popular appeal was such that Hill suggests the imprese genre of Italy, featuring more enigmatic mottoes and obscure images, was invented by noblemen in response to the popular fascination with emblemology.
Alciati’s emblems and those of his successors took on a more didactic role in the popular consciousness. Goegelin suggests that part of the reinterpretation of Alciati as a text of moral instruction came about because his images were readily memorizable, with bizarre images and ironic turns of phrase sticking in the mind. Following Yates’ work on the Renaissance ars memorativa, Goegelin claims the “ars emblematica” operated according to a similar mnemonic principle. Orators could draw on the library of images presented in a work like the Emblematica in order to illustrate points on the spot, “very much like entering into a memorial site.” The easy memorization of the emblems, intended for Alciati’s humanist colleagues to recite in oratory, became one reason for their enduring popularity.
Another, perhaps more significant reason was the humanist rediscovery of an alternative symbolic corpus in the form of Greco-Roman art. For nearly a century, Europeans north of the Alps had been engaged in the project of recovering antiquity through new historical, philological, and archaeological methods. Among Northern humanists, knowledge of Greek religious and philosophical thought became much more widespread in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, largely because of new Latin translations of Plato’s dialogues. Alciati himself was well acquainted with most of these ancient texts and taught them as a professor at Bourges from 1535-1539 (Phillipson). Alciati was part of a much larger classical revival, but one that had not emerged from select circles around courts in Italy and Germany.
The use of Classical images in Alciati’s emblems was both liberating from the long-established Christian representations of virtue, and firmly grounded in another ancient past. As Saunders claims, the “newly acquired access to a variety of ancient symbolic traditions […] served as additional backgrounds of authority against which surprisingly new variant interpretations could be developed” (p. 118). Humanists had long used Classical motifs for this purpose, such as the anti-papal German interpretation of Tacitus in the second half of the fifteenth century, but the easy-to-digest images in the Emblematica brought antiquity to the public consciousness for the first time. Schäuffelein’s one- or two-figure woodcuts, combined with Alciati’s explanatory verse, made the symbolic roles of gods and heroes clear to their readership. But unlike in antiquity, where the gods’ roles were static, Alciati’s book allowed a retooling of the ancient characters to fit sixteenth century moral and political standards. Literate early modern Europeans were familiar with characters like Hercules and Venus but had few associations with them until Alciati introduced stories and motifs to accompany them.
The scholarly consensus that the Emblematicum was an “amusement for scholars”, which accidentally became popular beyond Alciati’s humanist circle is broadly convincing for textual and biographical reasons. Alciati wrote for a highly learned audience, heirs to a humanist tradition that was already mature in Augsburg. What many emblem scholars don’t answer well is the cause of its explosive popularity outside of these circles. Goegelin, and other ars memorativa specialists like Heckscher, offer some insight in the sheer bizarreness of its images and their propensity to linger in the mind. But even the “art of memory” approach misses the importance of Alciati’s Classical references. The emblems, part written word and part image, bridged the elite literary culture of Erasmus and the popular art of the woodcut. At the same time, they resurrected the characters and images of the ancient past, not as static icons, but as dynamic subjects of interpretation.
Truman Cunningham is an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews studying modern history and philosophy. He is interested primarily in early modern political and religious thought. When he isn’t writing, Truman carves woodblock prints and volunteers for the St Andrews History Society.
Edited by Rajosmita Roy
Featured image: Omnia d. And. Alciati Emblemata 1566, Public Domain, National Library in Warsaw.
