Emblem Books:
An Introduction to the Collection
Emblem books are books of symbolic pictures accompanied by explanatory texts; the aim of the emblem itself is to give symbolic expression to a moral adage. Emblems are a genre of considerable interest to scholars and historians of both literature and the visual arts. Among the contributors to the emblem books (mostly produced from 1531 to 1700) were some of the most famous artists and poets of the day.
Rare Books and Manuscripts's collection of emblem books comprises some 550 titles in Dutch, French, German, Italian, English, Spanish, and Latin. It is primarily a working collection, assembled to permit investigation of emblematic literature and its influence on many fields. Although an attempt has been made to collect certain outstanding rare editions, the aim has not been completeness but rather the gathering of representative examples to provide a basis for all but the most specialized of emblem studies.
The collection began when Arthur O. Lewis, Jr., Associate Dean Emeritus of the College of the Liberal Arts, was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare and the emblem writers, Emblem Books and English Drama; A Preliminary Survey, 1581-1600 (Penn State, 1951). He was already working at Penn State and had no special need for monetary support of his work, so he turned over a grant of $850 to the University Libraries. That he had no need to spend all of his grant money in those wonderful times is extraordinary, but even more extraordinary is how far the $850 went. In 1954, the Libraries published a pamphlet on the collection, explaining its purpose and listing dozens of emblem books bought with that money. The following excerpt is from Dr. Lewis's text.
Although they are unfamiliar to most twentieth-century readers, emblem books were a vigorously flourishing form of literature throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From 1531 to 1700, well over three thousand separate editions-in a dozen languages and by more than seven hundred authors-were published. Among contributors to the texts and illustrations of these books were some of the most important artists, poets, and scholars of the day. As a result, emblem books offer a fascinating view of the scholarship, moral teachings, and aesthetic tastes of the Renaissance.
An emblem is basically a combination of picture, motto, and a verse or prose passage intended to teach a lesson of one kind or another. Drawing upon the familiar materials of fable, mythology, history, science, and literature, the emblem writers illustrated proverbial sayings and moral teachings with pictures and verses. For example, a popular early emblem was that of a stork bearing its parent on its back and feeding it tidbits. The verse explained that the old bird had taken care of her offspring when it was young and was now receiving a reward for her devotion. The motto Gratia referendam (grace returning) was thus explained and illustrated.
Early illustrated books such as the many editions of Sebastian Brandt's Narrenschiff, Aesop's Fables, illustrated Bibles, various versions of The Dance of Death, the Aldine editions of Ovid, the 1481 edition of Dante, and, above all, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo provided models for the combination of pictures and verse that the emblematists used. These books, combined with the medieval habit of allegory and the Renaissance love of heraldry, produced a literary atmosphere suitable for emblematic writing. This atmosphere--and the resulting popularity of emblem books--persisted well into the eighteenth century.
In recent years, scholars in many disciplines have recognized that the literally thousands of engravings, wood blocks, and etchings in emblem books constitute an unparalleled source not only for the study of daily life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also for extraordinary insights into what the intellectuals of the times viewed as a necessary adjunct to heraldry, social life, politics, philosophy, and moral behavior. Emblems are cultural artifacts that can be used in the analysis of reading practices, printing history, Elizabethan popular culture, the use of allegory, and the relationship of word to image.
One of the most famous handbooks of symbols and allegories in the history of art and literature is Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, first published in Italy in 1593. Ripa's compendium was a result of his study of antique mythology, Egyptian pictorial writing, and Christian allegory. He made use of the great classical writers for his ideas, including Aristotle, Ovid, Homer, and Pliny, and he also studied the herbals, encyclopedias, and bestiaries of the Middle Ages, in which aspects of the natural world were given symbolic meanings related to the teachings of the church.
In Ripa's time, there was fairly common agreement on the way in which ideas and personifications could be represented visually. By 1709, when the Iconologia was translated and published in an English edition called Moral Emblems, its icononography was already so thoroughly accepted that painters, sculptors, poets, and orators could rely on it as a lexicon of the virtues and vices, the seasons, the emotions, and nearly all aspects of the visible world. While the book was intended to be used mostly by writers and speakers as a source for metaphors and similes, it became useful to artists in their visual representations of ideas and concepts. The book is a handbook of iconography, and it is still one of the most valuable source books for the study of images and symbols in art.
The great art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as "that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form. Iconography is a description and classification of images much as ethnology is a description and classification of human races" [Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York, 1955, pp. 26-32]. Ripa's handbook of iconography is a list of concepts (hypocrisy, history, and humility, for example) arranged in alphabetical order. For each concept there is a verbal description of the allegorical figure proposed by Ripa to embody the concept, giving the type and color of the clothing, the various symbols, and the reasons--often supported by references to literature--why these were chosen. Quarreling[sic] for example (Figure 67) is "a Man arm'd, in a fighting Posture, with a fiery Face. Quarelling being between two, or more, and therefore holds his Sword as if he would make a Pass at somebody; with a Cat and a Dog at his Heels, as if they would fight. The Cat and the Dog signifie that Quarelling proceeds from being of a contrary Nature, one to another."
Ripa's Iconologia remains one of the standard reference works for the representation of abstract ideas in visual terms. To see the entire contents of emblems and texts of the 1709 English edition, visit the Ripa Project Web site.
Images from some of Rare Books and Manuscripts's collection of English emblem books can be found on the English Emblem Books Project Web site.
