Emblematic ecstasy

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

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It was he, therefore, who created this emblem (and there are others also signed "Grotius" or "H._G." in the border - cf. fols. 6, 7, 16 and 19). Heinsius "simply" composed the lines of Dutch poetry, which in the present volume have been eliminated and replaced by new French verse. The present love emblems are thus typical of the technique of citing and adapting earlier inventions. Such borrowings gave the well-informed reader the additional, today one might say intertextual pleasure of recognizing the original source and with this the satisfaction of identifying the particular type of variation. (...)

In the 16th century these devices became the subject of their own literature, and many were adopted into emblem books, as demonstrated by our own booklet (cf. fols. 6, 18, 23, 24). Both devices and emblems frequently took their motifs from The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, a collection of symbols that had been discovered in 1419 on an island in the Greek Cyclades and brought to Italy. Ascribed to Horapollo, the Hieroglyphics was believed to document the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egyptian picture writing. Out of this there evolved a separate system of symbolic imagery, known as Renaissance hieroglyphics. One of its motifs, which found its way into the design of heraldic devices and from there into the emblem literature, is the salamander, which appears on folio 18 in our booklet. (...)

After love emblems, personifications make up the next largest group of illustrations in this anthology. Here represented in several series of engravings (fols. 28-35, 92-111, 118-120, 139-142), personification is the form of allegorical representation with probably the longest tradition in the history of Western culture. As its name suggests, personification is a method of illustrating an abstract idea, otherwise visually impossible to depict, in the shape of a human figure. We are all familiar with such personifications, even if they are falling out of use in modern times. The personification of Justice as a woman with her eyes blindfolded, wielding a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other, is still familiar, however, as it can frequently be seen adorning old law courts. Justice indeed offers an excellent demonstration of how the system works: the femaleness of her figure reflects the grammatical gender of the word (derived from the Latin justitia); her blindfold represents the duty to pass unbiased judgement without respect of person and according only to the facts; her scales symbolize the measured process of arriving at a verdict by carefully weighing up every factor relevant to the case; and her sword indicates the sentences that the court can pronounce. Something that requires a great many words to describe and characterize can thus be expressed in a single, comprehensible image which is easily grasped by the imagination and intellect. (...)

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