Emblematics

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Emblematics is the Renaissance and baroque art of the emblem: a printed form in three parts — a brief motto, a symbolic picture, and a verse that turns the two into a single thought — designed so that word and image complete each other. For roughly two centuries it was among the most popular kinds of book in Europe, and one branch of it became the principal visual language of alchemy.

The “In astrologos” emblem — motto, picture of the falling Icarus, and epigram together — from the first edition of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531), woodcut attributed to Jörg Breu. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The genre has an unusually clean starting point. In 1531 the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, a Milanese jurist, appeared at Augsburg: Latin epigrams set to woodcuts, each beneath a short heading. The first edition was not of Alciato’s making. The Augsburg printer Heinrich Steyner set it from a manuscript of Latin epigrams that Alciato had dedicated to his friend Conrad Peutinger and circulated privately, and supplied ninety-eight woodcuts — attributed to Jörg Breu — whose crudeness their author disliked. He took the work in hand for the authorized Paris edition that Christian Wechel issued in 1534 as the Emblematum libellus, and from there the book ran through some hundred and seventy editions, was imitated in every major European language, and fixed the threefold anatomy that theorists came to treat as canonical — inscriptio, pictura, subscriptio. The word emblema, borrowed from the Greek for an inlaid or applied ornament, named the operation exactly: a meaning set into a page the way a mosaic tessera is set into a floor, the three members locked so that none is complete alone. The motto names a precept too compressed to act on; the picture shows a scene too mute to interpret; the epigram, read against both, releases the sense that neither held. Reading an emblem is therefore an act of construction, not reception — the eye assembles a proposition the page only suggests, and the satisfaction of the form is the click of three parts resolving into one.

Behind the fashion stood a conviction the humanists had drawn from the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, a late-antique Greek treatise recovered in 1419 on the island of Andros by Cristoforo Buondelmonti and carried to Florence, where it excited Marsilio Ficino and his circle long before it reached print in the Aldine edition of 1505. The book offered one hundred eighty-nine readings of Egyptian signs, each glossing a hieroglyph as a self-contained picture-thought: the hare for openness because it never closes its eyes, the vulture for the mother, the ouroboros-serpent for the cosmos that feeds on itself. To readers who did not yet know that Egyptian writing was largely phonetic, this looked like proof that the hieroglyph was a script of pure idea — images that delivered wisdom directly, legible to the prepared mind without the detour of ordinary language, and concealing it from the unprepared by the same stroke. That double promise of disclosure-and-concealment was the deep appeal. It belonged to the wider Renaissance recovery of an ancient theology in which Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum were read as a wisdom older than Plato, transmitted through veils to those fit to part them — a milieu of Neoplatonism, Christian Kabbalah, and Renaissance magic in which the visible sign was held to participate in what it figured. Pierio Valeriano’s vast Hieroglyphica of 1556 swelled the slim original into an encyclopedia of significant images, and the emblem was, among other things, an attempt to write in that hieroglyphic key in the new medium of the printed page.

The genre and its uses

Most emblem books were moral, amatory, or devotional. The form proved endlessly portable: an emblem could carry a Stoic commonplace, a lover’s complaint, a courtier’s impresa, a child’s lesson in Latin, or a point of doctrine, and the same plate could be re-captioned to mean opposite things across a confessional line. The emblem must be distinguished from its neighbors. It is not heraldry, whose charges are inherited tokens of lineage rather than constructed arguments; and it is not the impresa or device, the single personal image-and-motto of one individual, from which the emblem differs by being general, repeatable, and addressed to any reader. Where the impresa says who its bearer is, the emblem says what is the case.

The form crossed the confessional divide of the age and was sharpened by it. Jesuit compilers turned the emblem to the guided meditation of the Spiritual Exercises, in which a composed image is fixed before the interior eye and worked upon — Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria of 1624, endlessly reprinted, set the winged soul-figure Anima pursuing divine Love through a sequence of plates. Protestant emblematists answered in the same currency, repurposing the apparatus of meditative imagery for a piety suspicious of images, so that the emblem book became a rare object that both confessions could prize for opposite reasons. Beneath the quarrel lay a shared assumption that would outlast it: that a deliberately built picture is a thing one reads, and that reading it rightly changes the reader. That assumption made the emblem the close kin of two older disciplines of image-work — allegorical exegesis, which reads the visible world and its scriptures as a tissue of figures pointing past themselves, and the art of memory, which lodges what must be remembered in vivid, charged images set in imagined places. The emblem stands between them: a small allegory built to be memorized, an image made to argue.

The alchemical emblem

The branch nearest the esoteric traditions is the alchemical emblem book of the early seventeenth century, produced largely around Frankfurt and its twice-yearly book fair, the entrepôt through which the illustrated Hermetic literature of the age moved. Here the hieroglyphic conviction behind Alciato met the secrecy native to alchemy, whose writers had veiled the work in Decknamen — cover-names — since antiquity, and the result was a literature in which the picture carried the doctrine and the prose only circled it. The iconography had been gathering for a century: Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, with its great theatrical engraved plates (Hamburg 1595, completed Hanau 1609), gave the genre its model of image-as-revelation, and the Twelve Keys ascribed to Basil Valentine furnished a fund of emblematic scenes that the next generation reworked.

The oratory-and-laboratory plate (“The First Stage of the Great Work”) from Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (1595), a model of the engraved image-as-revelation. — engraving attributed to Paullus van der Doort, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617, reissued 1618) is the genre’s most elaborate specimen and one of the strangest books of its century. Maier, a Holstein physician who had served the Emperor Rudolf II at Prague before his English years and his return to the Rhineland, designed it as fifty emblems, each binding five registers at once: a Latin motto, a copperplate engraving cut by Matthäus Merian to Maier’s specification, a Latin epigram in elegiac couplets with a German verse beside it, a page-long prose discursus, and a fugue for three voices in mensural notation. The fugue is the unprecedented stroke. Its parts are named from the myth that gives the book its title: Atalanta fugiens, the fleeing voice; Hippomenes sequens, the pursuing voice; and Pomum morans, the lingering golden apple held as a long cantus firmus. In Ovid’s tale the huntress Atalanta, who races her suitors on pain of death, is slowed by three golden apples Hippomenes drops in her path and so at last is overtaken; Maier reads the chase as the alchemical work itself — the volatile principle fleeing, the fixed pursuing, the fixative arresting the flight. The counterpoint does not illustrate the chase so much as enact it, the voices overtaking and delaying one another as the runners do. The book was thus addressed to eye, intellect, and ear together: an early attempt to make a doctrine legible across media at once, and on the printed record an attempt without analogue. Whether its modest fugues were ever sung in Maier’s lifetime is unknown; they may have been scores meant to be read rather than sounded.

Emblem 42 of Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617): the adept follows Nature’s footprints by the light of reading, reason, and experience. — engraving by Matthäus Merian, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Maier’s other folios extend the same project. The Symbola Aureae Mensae (Frankfurt, 1617) seats twelve alchemical sages of twelve nations — Hermes Trismegistus for Egypt, Maria the Jewess for the Hebrews, Morienus, Avicenna, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and the rest — at a single golden table, each in engraved portrait, building a transnational canon for the art in pictures before words. The workshop that made these books was as singular as their author. Johann Theodor de Bry, heir to a dynasty of Liège goldsmith-engravers, had shifted his press from Frankfurt to the Palatine town of Oppenheim around 1610, and there, with the printer Hieronymus Galler and the young Merian — who married de Bry’s daughter in 1617 — turned a firm known for illustrated travel folios into the print arm of the Hermetic-Rosicrucian culture flourishing under the Elector Friedrich V. It was the same press that issued the cosmological engravings of Robert Fludd, and the same network in which the manifestos of Rosicrucianism circulated; Maier became that movement’s most polished apologist. The collapse came fast: Oppenheim fell to Spanish troops in September 1620 and the Palatine cause was broken at the White Mountain that November, and the workshop’s Hermetic experiment did not survive the war.

What it had built passed to Frankfurt. Johann Daniel Mylius’s Philosophia reformata (1622), issued by the publisher Lucas Jennis — who had already taken over most of Maier’s imprints — carried the same engraved repertoire into a standard reference: the king and queen of the conjunction, the green lion devouring the sun, the hermaphrodite of the united principles, the dragon or serpent biting its tail. Jennis would go on to gather this whole inheritance into the alchemical anthology that fixed the emblem-language for the rest of the century. The plates of Mylius, Maier, and their kindred form a closed vocabulary in which each figure is a word: the recurrence of the same images across unrelated books is the surest sign that the alchemical emblem had become a true pictorial grammar, learned and re-deployed rather than freshly invented.

Emblem 33 of Atalanta fugiens: the two-sexed figure of the united principles, lying as if dead and needing fire — one of the recurring images that made the alchemical emblem a shared pictorial vocabulary. — engraving by Matthäus Merian, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The alchemical writers were explicit that such pictures worked in both directions at once, disclosing the work to the worthy while veiling it from everyone else. What the plates actually encode is contested. Some readers, then and since, have taken them as laboratory instruction in disguise, the green lion a reagent and the bath a vessel; others as a discipline of meditation in which contemplating the image is itself the work, the transformation it depicts being the reader’s own. The books accommodate both readings and decline to arbitrate, and the form’s design — the deliberate refusal of any single literal key — is what keeps both readings permanently available.

Scholarship and sources

The emblem was nearly forgotten as a serious object until the twentieth century recovered it. Mario Praz’s Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, whose bibliography of emblem books remains the field’s foundation, restored the genre to literary history; Albrecht Schöne and Arthur Henkel’s great Emblemata handbook (1967) made its image-stock searchable; and Peter Daly’s Literature in the Light of the Emblem (1979) gave the form its modern theory as a way of reading. The genre’s documentary base is now largely open. The University of Glasgow, holder of the world’s largest emblem collection, has digitized twenty-two editions of Alciato — the pater et princeps of the form — at Alciato at Glasgow, where the unauthorized 1531 Augsburg book can be read against the authorized states that followed.

For the alchemical branch the indispensable apparatus is H. M. E. de Jong’s Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems (Brill, 1969), which traced the book emblem by emblem to Petrus Bonus, Sendivogius, Khunrath, and the Rosarium philosophorum tradition. The current state of scholarship is the digital edition led by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak, Furnace and Fugue (Brown University and University of Virginia Press, 2020), which presents all fifty emblems with the first complete sounded realization of the fugues and won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize; a fuller overview of the book’s structure and Ovidian frame is set out in the standard reference description of Atalanta Fugiens. It was Frances Yates who set Maier and the de Bry workshop at the center of the Palatine Rosicrucian story, and her work on the art of memory that placed the emblem within the longer history of the trained, image-building mind — the same lineage in which Giordano Bruno had pushed memory-images toward magical operation. C. G. Jung, reading Atalanta and the Symbola as an archive of recurrent figures, drew the alchemical emblem into a wholly different twentieth-century afterlife.

By the end of the eighteenth century new emblem books had become rarities. The expectation they trained, that a deliberately constructed image can carry doctrine, persisted in esoteric iconography long after the books themselves had passed to the collectors.

→ In the library: The Hermetic Museum (Waite, 1893) — English of the emblem-era alchemical compendium

→ Related: Alchemy · Lucas Jennis · Allegorical Exegesis · Art Of Memory Mnemonics · Hermes Trismegistus · Corpus Hermeticum · Robert Fludd · Rosicrucianism · Renaissance Magic · Neoplatonism · Christian Kabbalah · Giordano Bruno · Frances Yates