Emblematic
Nicolas Barker
The Comely Frontispiece M. Corbett and R.W. Lightbown (Routledge £11.95) The Duke of Burgundy is in council. To him enters Rouge Sanglier, the specious herald of William de la Marck, the Wild Boar of the Ardennes. The Duke, suspicious, sets his own herald to question him. Confronted by Toison d'Or with 'an ancient coat' and required to blazon it, Rouge Sanglier is dumb. But Le Glorieux, the Duke's jester, bustles up: 'I will help the good fellow', he says; 'This, my lords and masters, represents the cat looking out at the dairy window'. There is a general laugh, but Toison d'Or, not amused, explains that the right answer is 'Sable, a musion passant or, oppressed with a trellis gules, cloue of the second'.
In Quentin Durward and even more in The Antiquary, Scott poked fun at those, especially antiquaries like himself, who become too absorbed in 'the language' to remember its purpose, namely, to get you to your destination. It is not a mistake that students of the emblem 'language', which so cross-fertilised literature and art in the 16th and 17th centuries, are likely to make. The streets are alternatively absurdly broad and straight or impossibly narrow and winding; the cul-de-sac and one-way system abound; too often you end up where you starled, like Alice in the looking-glass garden.
The authors of this unusual book on an unfamiliar aspect of emblemology, the engraved title-page, are well aware of these difficulties. Their introduction, a masterpiece of brevity and learning, shows how the language was built up and interpreted, from ancient myth to an event described in the book itself. Further, they give hostages to fortune by describing and analysing 20 title pages from Dr Dee's General and Rare Memorials 1577, advocating such a navy as would defeat the Armada, to Hobbes's Leviathan 1651. It is no small achievement to bring off, as they do, a satisfactory explanation of these complex images, and no belittlement of their learning and good sense to ask, sometimes, who is meant to benefit from it.
It all started with printing. Without the means of multiplying duplicate images, no pictorial language can exist. Printers' devices (if not simply the sign of their premises — the Golden Stag, the Red Pale and so on) were the first printed emblems. Ultimately, 200 years later, printing killed the emblem, but that is another story. The pictorial sources preceded printing; they came from the same Northern Mannerist sources that are exemplified in the massproduced Flemish books of hours with their stylized architecture and draperies and trompe l'oeil borders. Its detail, however, reflects Italian classical mannerism, with a new range — an obelisk balanced on a shell, for example — of irrationality. The language itself is an odd mixture, rooted partly in the Middle Ages, in chivalric heraldry and allegories sacred and profane from the Cardinal Virtues to Physiologus, and partly in new-discovered antiquity, in classical mythology and Egyptian hieroglyphs (the Greeks, who never understood them, made them into Neo-platonist mysteries, mediated through the bogus-Egyptian Horapollo), and in remains, from temples to coins and medals (the authors neglect gems, an equally important source).
This bizarre mixture of visual imagery and verbal conceit crystallised in two forms: the impresa or device and the emblem, one specific, the other general. The two strands, spun respectively by Paolo Giovio (Dialogo dell' imprese 1555) and Andrea Alciati (Emblemata 1531) came together in the engraved title-page. The first of these books was the forerunner of a host of picture books, all on related subjects and all published within a decade: Giovio 1555, Ruscelli 1556 and 1566, Paradin 1557, Symeoni 1559, all on devices; Sambucus 1564, Aneau (Picta Poesis)1564, Junius 1565, on emblems; Valeriano's Hieroglyphica 1556; Du Choul 1556, Vico 1558 and Symeoni 1558 again on antiquities; Cartari 1556 on mythology. It is arguable that the appearance alone of this mass of books, mainly printed in Lyons and Venice, did more than their content to create the taste for the emblematic title-page and to dictate its form.
The engraved title-page had developed its own conventions by the time it was taken up in England. The architectural facade was the commonest design, not (the authors rightly point out) a doorway into the book, but a monument to it, a bas-relief deceit as the pilaster is to the pillar, like one of the transitory but splendid triumphal arches designed for the solemn entries that Renaissance monarchs affected. Dee's title-page was wood-cut, and the first engraved titlepage is for Richard Haydocke's translation of Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes 1598. Emblems needed fine copper-plate engraving, as Haydocke clearly recognised. He also put his finger on a problem missed here: 'Those which know any thing in these matters, cannot be ignorant, that Pictures cut in copper, beare an higher rate of charge, then in probabilitie a professed scholar can undertake'.
The authors see the title-page simply as a visual extension of the author's verbal message. Yet the picture was not plain: if not so obscure 'that neede a Sibilla to interprate it, nor so apparant that every rusticke may understand it'. The author might plan (and it is here suggested that after the first quarter of the 17th century, the general language of emblem was dropped in favour of the author's own conceit), and artists were certainly given exact instructions (no less than three sets survive for Rubens's design for the 1620 Plantin missal). But it was the customer who justified the great expense. The title-page, like the modern jacket, was a promotional device; its history, Professor Hellinga has truly said 'reflects the history of the distribution of books'. Pace the present authors, the author had as little to do with it as now with the modern jacket: few authors today would claim that as a pictorial extension of the text.
The engraved title, more or less emblematical, persisted into the 18th century. For more than a century it enlivened the rather drab appearance of English books. It was well worthwhile to explore it, and if the main question 'what was it for?' remains unanswered, the exploration has led us through some recondite and engaging paths to an art which, like Toison d'Or's heraldry, was never generally understood, but for that very reason commanded a wider interest than one might suspect.
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