Volume 1 (2017)

Preface to Volume 1

In Memoriam

Memories of Daniel S. Russell Memories of Gabriel Hornstein

Articles

Sara Smart
Fashioning the Great Elector: The Iconography of the Berlin Triumphal Entries of 1677 and 1678

This study is at the interface of emblem and festival studies and assesses the application of emblems within the triumphal entry. It is based on four reports that belong to the genre of the festival account and describe two entries into Berlin celebrating the military success of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg. The analysis establishes how the constituent elements of the entry, above all triumphal architecture, inscriptions, emblems, and statues, cohere to deliver a multifaceted message. Through their interaction these elements present a carefully articulated vision of Brandenburg’s authority and define the representation of Friedrich Wilhelm as the Great Elector.

Liana De Girolami Cheney
Four Imprese by Bernardina Poccetti for the Ceiling of the Loggia of the Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi in Florence

This essay is composed of two sections. The first section provides a brief account of decorative cycles in Florentine palaces during the mid-sixteenth century. The second section addresses four topics: 1) the history of the Palazzo Marzichi-Lenzi in Florence; 2) the formation of this palace’s cassettoni ceiling, found in the loggia; 3) the imprese that comprise the ceiling’s cassettoni; and 4) the iconography of four imprese used by Bernardino Barbatelli (known as Il Poccetti) for his work on the loggia’s cassettoni in 1585-the Medusa, the Siren, the coral tree, and the rudder.

William C. McDonald
Standing atop a Dying World: Observing a Printer’s Device of Franz Behem

Johann Arnold’s De chalcographiae inventione (1541) contains a device of the printer Franz Behem: an image of a female figure balancing on an orb accompanied by a Christian eschatological text and a religious motto. Identified here as Concupiscentia, the figure recalls Occasio, goddess of opportunity, who is well represented in the contemporary pictorial tradition (Cratander, Alciato). Behem’s device conflates Occasio and Concupiscentia in order to appropriate a figure popular in humanist circles for a Christian audience. The concordance here of motto, image, and text makes this device intentionally monovalent and emblematic of lucid printers’ insignia that Arnold advocates in the poem proper.

Jantina Ellens
“Skrue up the Heightened Pegs of Thy Sublime Theorboe” Tuning the Senses in Quarles’s Emblemes (1635)

The prefatory elements of Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1635) urge readers to study the book’s spiritual lessons as if training to play a theorbo, an oversized lute. Quarles’s characterization of Emblemes as a theorbo commits his emblematic methodology to the same theoretical considerations as those associated with the musical instrument -namely, the fulfillment of the principles of harmony-balancing the reader’s experience of the text against the preset baseline of divinely ordained harmonics. Drawing upon evidence from early modern musicology, religious discourse, and the debates about the senses, this study demonstrates how Quarles manipulates the theorbo’s emblematic significance as an exemplar of divine harmonics in order to tune his readers’ souls to his devotional goals.”

Joseph E. Chorpenning
Ars laudandi, Francis de Sales’s Picture of St. Joseph’s Sanctification, and Its Emblematic Adaptation by Adrien Gambart

In early modern Catholicism, epideictic oratory or panegyric, known in Latin as ars laudandi, was the preferred literary genre for preaching about the saints. Francis de Sales’s 1622 sermon “The Virtues of St. Joseph” — one of the most popular and famous ever preached on the saint–is an outstanding example of this genre. Primary in epideictic preaching is seeing and thus picturing, and accordingly Francis employs two similitudes-the palm tree and the sun and two mirrors-to structure and to unify his discourse. Decades later, the latter similitude shapes the hagiographical discourse about Francis himself for the celebrations of his beatification (1661) and canonization (1665). This study argues, among other points, that these celebrations also pertain to the genre of epideictic oratory, or ars laudandi.

Yona Pinson
Hans Holbein the Younger’s Marginal Drawings for Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Basel, 1515): Pre-Emblematic Patterns

A generation before the publication of Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (Augsburg, 1531), which established the emblem as a literary and aesthetic convention, Sebastian Brant had already adopted a pre-emblematic structure in his seminal didactic work Das Narrenschiff [The Ship of Fools] (Basel, 1494). As a publisher and author, Brant attached great importance to visual imagery, regarding it not only as an instructive tool but also as a means to reach a larger urban audience. Anticipating the later genre of emblems books, Brant conceived his moralistic treatise in its entirety-text and picture.’ This study investigates Hans Holbein’s drawings for Myconius’s illustrated edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1515) in the context of Brant’s Ship of Fools, discussing the emblematic organization of these pre-emblematic works.

Notices

Michael Bath
The Proofs of Antonio Tempestas Engravings for Historia Septem Infantium de Lara: A Correction

Mara R. Wade
Emblemata Politica in Context: Georg Rem’s Manuscript at the Newberry Library

Reviews

Paulette Choné, ed.
Laville et la coquille: Huit essais d’emblématique
by Valérie Hayaert

Stefaan Hautekeete and Joris van Grieken.
Emblemata Evangelica. Hans Bol
by Alexandre Vanautgaerden

John W. OMalley.
Art, Controversy, and the Jesuits: The Imago Primi Saeculi (1640)
by Mara R. Wade

Anne Rolet.
Les Questions symboliques d’Achille Bocchi: Symbolicae questiones, 1555
by Valérie Hayaert

[Giorgio de Sepi]
The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus: A Facsimile of the 1678 Amsterdam Edition of Giorgio de Sepis Description of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum
by Mara R. Wade

Volume Index