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Iconography on the Nature and Inspiration of Poetry in Renaissance Emblem Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert J. Clements  and
Arthur O. Lewis
Robert J. Clements
Affiliation:
New York University, New York 3, N. Y.
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Extract

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1955 , pp. 781 - 804
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

Note 1 in page 781 “Problems of Emblem Literature,” JEGP, xlv (1946), 33.

Note 2 in page 781 Ε. N. S. Thompson, Literary Bypaths of the Renaissance (New Haven, 1924), p. 29.

Note 3 in page 782 Iconologia (Milan, 1602), p. 215. Dates appended parenthetically to titles of emblem books in the body of the text are those of 1st eds. and so do not always correspond to dates of eds. available to us and referred to in the footnotes. First printing dates have been verified in Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (London, 1947), Vol. ii: Bibliography.

Note 4 in page 783 Iconologia (Venice, 1669), p. 493.

Note 5 in page 783 Giovanni Pierio Valeriano, Collectanea Hieroglyphica (Lyon, 1626), Emblem : “Apollo Fidicen.”

Note 6 in page 783 Eugène Droulers, Dictionnaire des attributs, allégories, emblèmes et symboles (Turnhout, n.d.), p. 180.

Note 7 in page 784 Page 217. The description of the allegorical form of lyric poetry appears in the 1669 ed. (Venice), p. 403, although not in that of 1602. The 1st ed. of this work was in 1593.

Note 8 in page 784 Plato, Phaedo, 85B, 185; Republic, 620A; Palatine Anthology vii.19; Horapollo ii.39. The 1st ed. of Horapollo was by Aldus (Venice, 1515). See the critical ed. of the Hiero-glyphica by F. Sbordone (Naples, 1940).

Note 9 in page 784 R. J. Clements, Critical Theory and Practice of the Pléiade (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 150–163.

Note 10 in page 784 Geronimo Ruscelli, Le imprese illuslri (Venice, 1580), p. 153.

Note 11 in page 785 Madrid, 1610, Centuria ii, Emblem 8. On Cycnus see Ovid, Metamorphoses ii.367.

Note 12 in page 785 “Emblem Books and English Drama,” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State Univ., 1951), p. 89.

Note 13 in page 785 “Olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus (falso, ut arbitrer aliquot experimentis).”

Note 14 in page 785 See D'Arcy Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Birds (London, 1936), p. 184; Paulus Cassel, Der Schwan in Sage und Leben (Berlin, 1863), passim.

Note 15 in page 785 Œuvres, ed. by Lefranc (Paris, 1931), v, 160.

Note 16 in page 785 Iconologia (Milan, 1602), pp. 216–217.

Note 17 in page 786 Basel, 1567, p. 164r.

Note 18 in page 787 Icônes symbolicae, p. 93.

Note 19 in page 787 Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1914–19), v, 44; Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poemata (Geneva, 1581), i, 42; Pontus de Tyard, Discours philosophiques (Paris, 1587), fol 8r.

Note 20 in page 788 Page 153. Ruscelli admittedly derives from Ariosto, Orlando Furioso xxxv.14, 15, 21 22, 23.

Note 21 in page 788 Quoted in Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), p. 73.

Note 22 in page 789 J. J. Boissard, Icones virorum illustrium (Frankfurt, 1598), ii, 86; iii, 196. The comp] ment to Johannes Hussus skirts close to a pun on anser and Anser.

Note 23 in page 789 Capaccio, iii, 12; Paulus Maccius, Emblemata (Bologna, 1628), p. 320.

Note 24 in page 789 Emblemata (Antwerp, 1577), p. 669.

Note 25 in page 790 1602 ed., pp. 216–217.

Note 26 in page 790 Jean Baudoin, Iconologie (Amsterdam, 1698), p. 204. (First éd.: Paris, 1644.)

Note 27 in page 790 Emblemata (Leyden, 1575), p. 141.

Note 28 in page 790 Emblemas moralizadas (Madrid, 1599), p. 18“.

Note 29 in page 790 Lebey de Batilly and J. J. Boissard, Emblemata (Frankfurt, 1596), p. 0 1.

Note 30 in page 791 Middelburgi, 1618, liminary verse.

Note 31 in page 791 Ε. H. Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch,” Speculum, xviii (1943), 155–197.

Note 32 in page 791 J. J. Boissard, Icones, i, 82.

Note 33 in page 793 R. J. Clements, “The Cult of the Poet in Renaissance Emblem Literature,” PMLA, lix (1944), 672–685; “Condemnation of the Poetic Profession in Renaissance Emblem Literature,” SP, xliii (1946), 214–216, 219–220; “Pen and Sword in Renaissance Emblem Literature,” MLQ, v (1944), 137–138 (Homer and Achilles as symbols of ways of life).

Note 34 in page 794 Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (London, 1866), pp. 402–103.

Note 35 in page 794 On the Sublime (London, 1932), p. 127.

Note 36 in page 794 Picta poesis (Lyon, 1552), p. 17.

Note 37 in page 796 Paris, 1647, p. 22.

Note 38 in page 796 Minerva Britanna (London, 1611), p. 188.

Note 39 in page 796 Juan de Horozco y Covaruvias, Emblemas morales (Agrigenti, 1601), Book iv, Emble v; Sebastián Covaruvias Horozco, Emblemas morales (Madrid, 1610), Centuria i, Emblem 40.

Note 40 in page 798 A Collection of Emblèmes (London, 1635), p. 105. Although the reference to Banks and his horse would seem a play on mountebanks, Professor Don Cameron Allen points out that Banks and his horse Morocco were part of the contemporary scene in Wither's day.

Note 41 in page 798 Horatii emblemala (Antwerp, 1612), p. 2.

Note 42 in page 799 Jean Antoine de Baïf, Œuvres en rime (Paris, 1881–90), iv, 395.

Note 43 in page 799 Van Veen, p. 158.

Note 44 in page 799 Vida, Ars poelica i.285 ff.

Note 45 in page 799 In Desportes, Œuvres (Paris, 1858), pp. 5, 6–7. Compare also Du Bartas' Uranie, in The Works of Du Bartas (Chapel Hill, 1938), ii, 172.

Note 46 in page 799 Note 18 above.

Note 47 in page 799 Oies iv.8.

Note 48 in page 800 Juan de Horozco y Covaruvias, Emblemas morales (Segovia, 1591), p. 76v. (See also Valeriano, p. 349.)

Note 49 in page 801 Ed. of 1669, Emblem: “Poesia.”

Note 50 in page 801 M. le Roy, Sieur de Gomberville, Le Théâtre moral de la vie humaine (Brussels, 1678), p. 126.

Note 51 in page 802 Droulers, p. 180.

Note 52 in page 803 Alciati, p. 128. It was a commonplace in the Renaissance that Homer was a tippler who encouraged the drinking of wine.

Note 53 in page 803 Otto Van Veen, Teatro moral de toda la philosophie, (Brussels, 1669), p. 156.

Note 54 in page 804 Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, vv. 408–411.

Note 54 in page 804 For the translations and adaptations of the Horatian Van Veen, see Mario Praz, Studies, ii, 168–170.