Emblematic ecstasy

Excerpt from the book 'Théâtre d'amour. The garden of love and its delights'. By Carsten-Peter Warncke

Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The earliest of the engravings was printed in 1568, the latest in the 1610s, and almost all were executed by Netherlandish artists and destined for the international market. They include copies of works not just by famous Flemish masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also by Italians such as Agostino Carracci. The pictures are accompanied by lines of verse for the most part in French, although also in Latin - at that time the lingua franca of the educated classes - and Dutch. The care devoted to these verses is matched by the attention paid to the colouring: alongside the polychrome palette employed within each scene, the use of gold and silver heightening, in particular in the borders, is also striking. The engravings are thereby aimed at a very specific public: the wealthy and the educated. Those who did not keep a collection of copperplate engravings tucked away in a folder merely to look at occasionally, but who deployed decorative artistic means to show them off to their best advantage; those, too, who could read several languages and compose polyglot texts themselves, and who were able to understand what these pictures, with all their scholarly references, had to say. Contemporary readers first have to reacquaint themselves with this long-forgotten world of now largely obsolete cultural ideals, with their social demands and expectations, their standards and values, their conventions and distractions, their didacticisms and witticisms. The potent combination of word and image thereby emerges as an enduring focus of attention - a combination that characterizes, in however different a form, our own audiovisual civilization today.

The emblems
These are no simple scenes. For all their differences of form, motif and subject, the pictures in this anthology are united by their reference to a deeper meaning that lies behind and is expressed through the appearance of things. They are symbols and allegories, to modern scholars two distinct systems, but in those days seen as alternative ways of saying the same thing. For each of these modes of representation there evolved a wealth of artistic forms designed both to encode and to decipher the meaning of the scenes portrayed.

Making up the largest group in our anthology are love emblems, part of the emblem genre which flourished between the 16th and 18th century and which was typically exploited for its symbolic potential. As otherwise almost never the case in the history of art, the birth of the emblem as an artistic genre can be assigned to a precise date. In 1531 the offices of Heinrich Steyner in Augsburg published the Emblematum liber, a small book authored by Andrea Alciato, an Italian humanist and professor of jurisprudence at Lyons. Most of the texts sprang not from Alciato's own pen, however, but from a collection of ancient Greek poetry entitled the Anthologia Graeca.

Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]