Volume 3 (2019)

Preface to Volume 3

In Memoriam

Memories of Barbara Bowen

Articles

Paulette Choné
Les Menus propos by Pierre Gringore (1521): The “Perfect Book” before Alciato

Les Menus propos by Pierre Gringore (Paris: Gilles Couteau, 1521) appeared before the first French printed emblem books. Pierre Gringore (1475-1539) belonged to the worlds of the theater, courts, literature, and the printed book. Before being admitted into the court of Duke Antoine of Lorraine as a herald, he was known in Paris as “Mere Sotte,” a personification of Madness anticipating Erasmus’s Encomium moriae, and worked as an author, actor, and producer of mystery plays and slapstick comedies. His intelligent collaboration among his roles as a poet, printer, and engraver led him to publish books that are almost emblem books. In this very deliberately structured book, Les Menus propos, the shape of the emblem, although not yet present, is poised to emerge.

Efthymia Priki
Pride and Punishment: Echoes of the Executioner Cupid from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Emblems

The textual and visual narrative unfolding in Book II of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili establishes the omnipotence of a mighty and violent Cupid, who severely punishes those who spurn love. The most striking visual examples of Cupid as an executioner are three woodcuts depicting Polia’s first vision, where Cupid appears tormenting two young women pulling his chariot. This article examines how this visual representation and its textual context relate to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblems on the tyranny of love, thus tracing the evolution of this motif and assessing the role of the Hypnerotomachia as an agent of influence.

Walter S. Melion
Analogies Known and Unknown in Sylvestro Pietrasanta, S.J.’s De symbolis heroïcis

Sylvestro Pietrasanta’s Nine Books of Heroic Symbols, a richly argued theoretical treatise on the impresa, consists of 281 heraldic devices that turn on visual comparationes [analogies] between similia [parallel cases] whose correlation is modeled on the conditional relation between a protasis and an apodosis. Pietrasanta states that he has selected devices belonging to famous persons, which contain familiar symbola approved by public opinion, and yet he also compares these devices to exotic, foreign artifacts, as unfamiliar as they are highly wrought and costly, here displayed to highlight their complex structure and texture. The analogies, he explains, will prove most delightful and instructive since they incorporate metaphors that mask the common sense of a signifying word, associating it with a signified thing that appears disguised. The power of Pietrasanta’s heroic symbols issue, then, as I shall demonstrate, from a curious combination of what is known and unknown, things nota and secreta.

Martina Dragonová
Emblematic Structures in Czech Catholic Sermons around 1700

This study focuses on emblems in Czech baroque conceptual preaching. It introduces the emblematic structural principles in Czech homiletics of the Baroque and describes their representative emblematic forms. Emblematic structures in these texts are presented through specific examples from baroque postills by preachers from three Catholic religious orders, namely the Theatines with Karel Račín, the Jesuits with Fabián Veselý, and the Franciscans with Damascén Marek. The study of emblematic preaching offers a new view on conceptual baroque sermons. The interpretation of the ecclesiastical texts against the background of the emblem books contributes to a deeper understanding of literary images, since baroque preachers very often used emblems that they found in emblem books such as Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber, Philippo Picinelli’s Mundus symbolicus, Johannes Bollandus’s Imago primi saeculi Societatis Jesu, and Heinrich Engelgrave’s Lux Evangelica.

Helmut Renders
J. E. Gossner’s Emblem Book “The Heart of Man” in Brazil: A Protestant and Pentecostal Perpetuation of the Catholic Reform’s Worldview

This article suggests that a relationship exists between the performative power of the religio cordis in Brazil and the sociological type “Brazilian” described as “cordial man” by Sergio Buarque de Holanda. It then relates this to the translation of Johann Evangelista Gossner’s book Das Herz des Menschen [literally “The Heart of Humankind,” often translated as The Heart of Man] (1812) by the Danish-born Presbyterian A. Jensen as Um Folheto célebre ou o Livrinho do Coração (1914), its Methodist edition, an independent Lutheran version (1932), and later Pentecostal (1954) and Baptist (1998) editions. Protestants and Pentecostals have interwoven an essentially Catholic colonial emblem tradition or colonial religious matrix into their own narrative, ignoring existing alternative versions of a Protestant religio cordis.

Dennis L. Drysdall
Pythagoras and the Cranes, or Prudence for Students

A chapter in the Parergon iuris and a “Praelectio” of 1539 show that Alciato developed his idea of prudence initially in the context of the classroom. The advice given to Mignault to seek the meaning of his emblems appears as a valid method of approach and as a useful tool of historical research in general.

Bernhard F. Scholz
The Fate of an Early Modern Honorific Epithet: Andrea Alciato as “Emblematum Pater et Princeps” in 1666 and after 1964

With the expression “emblematum pater et princeps” coined for Andrea Alciato around the middle of the seventeenth century, then forgotten for some three hundred years, and eventually resuscitated around the middle of the twentieth century, again to characterize Andrea Alciato, the question presents itself whether emblematum pater et princeps meant the same both times, or whether the two uses differed from each other because they involve different conceptual frameworks. This paper attempts to reconstruct (some of) the differences between the two uses by focusing on the different kinds of material inferences that respectively could, or can, be drawn while using that expression during the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.

Notices

Łukasz Konopa
Applied Emblematics in Lublin, Poland: Murals Based on Prints from the Emblemata Saecularia.

Reviews

Karl A.E. Enenkel.
The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510-1610,
by Michael Bath

Robert Wellington.
Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past,by Katerina Dolejsi

Marie Veillon.
Médailles des rois de France au XVIe siècle: représentation et imaginaire,
by Stephen Rawles

Vincent Robert-Nicoud.
The World Upside Down in I 6th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture,
by Johannes Frohlich

Laurent Hablot.
Manuel de héraldique emblématique médiévale,
by Elizabeth Black

Gabriele Ball et. al.,
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617-1680). Hundert fahre nach der Reformation,
by Mara R. Wade

Ludwig Volkmann.
Volkmann.Hieroglyph, Emblem, and Renaissance Pictography [Bilderschriften der Renaissance. Hieroglyphik und Emblematik in ihren Beziehungen und Fortwirkungen]. Trans. and ed. by Raybould, Robin,
by Anja Wolkenhauer

Volume Index