Emblematic ecstasy

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

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The Emblematum liber is nonetheless Alciato's intellectual achievement, for he prefaced each poem with a short caption summarizing the message conveyed by the verse. The publisher in turn also added woodcut illustrations by the Augsburg artist Jörg Breu. The result was an attractive three-part form comprising a short, pithy motto (or lemma) at the top, a picture and a text expounding the lesson delivered by the motto and the scene portrayed in the picture. This text is ideally formulated in lines of verse but may also be composed in prose.

This technique of combining a symbolic image with a definition of its hidden meaning is perhaps best illustrated with an example. From the Anthologia Graeca Alciato took a six-line poem (Anth. Graec. IX, 221) which belongs to the genre of ekphrasis, a description - in particular of pictures or sculptures - undertaken as an exercise in rhetorical excellence (fol. 7). In this case the poem describes a scene carved as a cameo onto a stone. Cupid, depicted as a young boy, is driving two mighty lions with one nonchalant hand and thereby symbolizes the power of love. No one can shield himself from this power. Alciato has captioned the poem with a brief motto of just three words: Potentissimus affectus amor - Love is the most powerful passion. The artist depicts Cupid, who with his eyes bound represents blind love, driving a chariot pulled by two lions. All three components combine to make up the specific significance of the emblem as a whole. (...)

First to appear was the booklet Théâtre d'Amour (Theatre of Love). The original title - which still shows through onto the back of the page (cf. detail of the title page) - was printed within a heart-shaped cartouche. It was subsequently painted over in red and a new title, Badineriees d'Amour (Jestings on Love) written in gold on top. There follow some introductory pages, two of them intended to hold owners' coats of arms (fols. 2 and 3). Such coats of arms were indeed inserted, but were unfortunately removed again by later owners of the volume. These are followed by a series of 24 emblems (fols. 4-27), representing a revised copy of the very first book of emblems ever to be devoted solely to the subject of love. This had been published in Amsterdam in 1601 under the title Quaeris quid sit amor? (You want to know what Love is?) and comprised a collection of copperplate engravings by Jacob II de Gheyn accompanied by verses in Dutch penned by Daniel Heinsius, a humanist scholar born in Ghent and from 1603 working in Leiden as a professor and librarian. Published anonymously in the original edition, where Heinsius signs himself only under the pseudonym of "Theocritus a Ganda" (Daniel of Ghent), the verses were reprinted unchanged in Heinsius' 1616 anthology of Nederduytsche Poemata.

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