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Alciati's Emblems in Renaissance France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Daniel Russell
Daniel Russell*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

By the 1580s Andrea Alciati's reputation was firmly established in France, and for the French there was no doubt that he deserved an honored place among the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. In 1583, Jean de la Gessée placed Alciati between Dorat and Muret as a model to be imitated in Latin and translated into French by aspiring young poets. And hyperbole is too mild a word to describe André Thevet's feverish hymn of praise in his Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). Thevet and most of his other biographers through the end of the seventeenth century remembered Alciati primarily as the jurist and teacher who attracted the attention of François Ier by his brilliant successes at the University of Bourges around 1530. Yet no biographer could entirely neglect his collection of emblems, for they exercised immense influence throughout Europe over a period of more than two hundred years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Winter 1981 , pp. 534 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1981

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References

1 de la Gessée, Jean, Les Premières Oeuvres (Antwerp, 1583), II, 450ff.Google Scholar The Thevet has been reprinted with an introduction by Rouben C. Cholakian (Delmar, N.Y., 1973).

2 For an example from the seventeenth century, see Bullart, Isaac, Académie des sciences et des arts (Bruxelles, 1682).Google Scholar The most thorough modern biography is Viard, P. E.'s André Alciat (Paris, 1926)Google Scholar; unfortunately, it concentrates almost exclusively on his career as a jurist. For his development of the emblems, see Green, Henry, Andrea Alciati and his Books of Emblems (1872; rpt. New York, 1973)Google Scholar, and Miedema, Hessel, “The Term Emblema in Alciati,” JWCI, 31 (1968), 234–250.Google Scholar

3 For examples of emblems composed by students in the classe de rhétorique of Jesuit collèges, see De Backer-Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus. Many have been preserved in manuscripts at the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne in Bruxelles, and others may be found in two manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Mss. Latins 10170 and 10171).

4 For a discussion of this edition, see Holger Homann's chapter on Alciati in Studien zur Emblematik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Utrecht, 1971), pp. 25-40. For complete bibliographical data concerning the emblems, see Green, and also Duplessis, Georges, Les Emblèmes d'Alciat (Paris, 1884).Google Scholar

5 Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1549.

6 See Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L'Apparition du livre, new edition (Paris, 1970. pp. 150ff.

7 These sturdy books had a very long useful life; could it be that the Lyons market had been saturated? In any event, there was a lull in activity in France until a new generation of Parisian editions began to appear in the 1570s.

8 Macé Bonhomme used the same frames and illustrations for several 1549 editions of the Italian and Spanish versions as for Aneau's French translation. A copy of one of the Italian editions was displayed in the exhibit “The Renaissance at Illinois” organized in conjunction with the Central Renaissance Conference, April, 1980, at the University of Illinois. The catalogue of that exhibit contains an illustration of the dolphin-and-anchor emblem from this book (reproduced, however, without its frame).

9 de La Perrière, Guillaume, Le Théâtre des bons engins (Paris: Denys Janot, 1539)Google Scholar; Corrozet, Gilles, L'Hécatomgraphie (Paris: Denys Janot, 1540)Google Scholar; Guéroult, Guillaume, Le Premier Livre des emblèmes (Lyons: Balthasar Arnoullet, 1550)Google Scholar; Aneau, Barthelémy, L'Imagination poétique (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1552)Google Scholar; de La Perrière, Guillaume, La Morosophie (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1553)Google Scholar; and Coustau, Pierre, Le Pegme (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1555).Google Scholar Another Lyons printer, Jean de Tournes, also published the first anthology of courtly devices, Claude Paradin's very successful Devises héroiques, in 1551.

10 Lyons: Pierre Beguin, 1555. For a survey of emblems in the French anthologies, see Lachèvre, Frédéric, Bibliographic des recueils collectifs de poésies du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1922).Google Scholar

11 Paris: Dion, à Prato, 1571. The first widely known edition with the commentaries was Omnia Andreae Alciati V. C. Emblemata adiectis commentariis et scholiis … (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1573).

12 Paris:J. Richer, 1583.

13 I have consulted this rare version in a copy of the 1615 edition at the University of Minnesota; there is also a copy at the Arsenal.

14 B. N. ms. fr. 9186, fol. 304. For a discussion of this composition, see Mâle, Emile, L'Art religieux en France à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1925), pp. 311–317 Google Scholar, and Tuve, Rosemond, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, 1966), pp. 73–77.Google Scholar

15 Baude, Henri, Dictz moraulx pour faire tapisserie, ed. Scoumanne, A. (Geneva and Lille, 1959)Google Scholar and Frank, Grace and Minor, Dorothy, eds., Proverbes en rime (Baltimore, 1937)Google Scholar; this is an edition of the Walters Art Gallery ms. 514.

16 New York Public Library ms. 422, pp. 5-6.

17 On Alciati and the Greek Anthology, see Hutton, James, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, 1935).Google Scholar

18 Steyner may have issued as many as five editions of this version between 1531 and 1534, but it was quickly and definitively supplanted by Wechel's version.

19 These versions may be conveniently compared in Green's facsimile edition of several important early editions of the emblems, or selections from them, Andrtat Alciati Emblematum Flumen abundans; or, Akiati's Emblems in their Full Stream (Manchester and London, 1871).

20 Cf. Tiemann, Barbara, “Sebastien Brant und das frühe Emblem in Frankreich,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fuer Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 47(1973), 598–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 “The Term ‘emblème’ in Sixteenth-Century France,” Neophilologus, 59 (1975), 337-351. The OED attests Lydgate's use of the word “embleme” in Chorle & Byrde as early as 1430. But in all the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions I have seen of this poem, the word in question is in fact not “emblemes” but “problemes.”

22 E.g. Coleman, Dorothy, “Les Emblesmes dans la Délie de M. Scève,” Studi Francesi, 22(1964), 1–15.Google Scholar

23 I have taken the useful and particularly appropriate terminology for the motto (inscriptio), illustration (pictura), and verse text (subscriptio) of the emblem from the introduction to Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schone's Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1967).

24 I am following the numbering generally considered to be standard. It dates from Barthelémy Aneau's organization of the emblems by subject in the early Macé Bonhomme editions, of which the first was issued in 1548.

25 On this emblem, cf. Erasmus, , Adagia, I, 1, 98 Google Scholar, Stultus stulta Ioquitur. It has been suggested to me that dressing this male figure as a scholar from the 1534 edition on may be intended to remind the reader of the scholar satirized at the beginning of the Narremchiff.

26 Alciati took up these possibilities elsewhere (Non vulganda consilia, 22, and Garrulitas, 70).

27 De Gaignières’ album is at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Dép. des Est. Pc 18 Rés.).

28 The château has been described by François Gebelin in Les Châteaux de la Renaissance (Paris, 1927), pp. 86-87; Louis Audiat compiled detailed descriptions of the motifs and deciphered the inscriptions in his Epigraphie santone et aunisienne (Niort, 1875), pp. 225-236.

29 The emblematist Gilles Corrozet did the French quatrains for Holbein's Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones. Such other emblematists as Claude Paradin, Guillaume Guéroult and Gabriello Symeoni also collaborated in the production of similar versions of the Figures de la Bible. For bibliographical data, see Bran, Robert, Le Livre français illustre de la Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1969).Google Scholar

30 The style in decorative frames apparently changed around the turn of the century with the publication of the Books of Hours by Vostre, Kerver and others. Henceforth, the Renaissance architectural frame would be favored over the late medieval manuscript model that illustrated books had followed in the fifteenth century. On this question, see Brun, and also Febvre and Martin, pp. 133ff.

31 E.g. Plantin's 1574 edition or the 1615 de Tournes edition referred to above.

32 Paris: G. Corrozet, 1571, fol. 20v.

33 1540; rpt. Ilkley and London, 1974, sig. E-iiv.

34 I have tried to show some of the ways this was done in “Du Bellay's Emblematic Vision of Rome,” Yale French Studies, 47 (1972), 98-109.

35 Poésies, ed. Ruchon and Boase (Geneva, 1949), p. 198

36 Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Sessions, Barbara F. (New York, 1961), pp. 307–309.Google Scholar

37 The emblematic nature of the sonnets in the Antiquitez de Rome is confirmed to some extent in Jan van der Noodt's Theatre auquel sont exposés et monstrés les inconveniens & miseres qui suiventjes mondains et vicieus (London, 1569), where the sonnets of the Songe are converted into actual emblems by the addition of appropriate illustrations.

38 Miseres, v. 936; Princes, v. 580. The sixteenth-century reader could, of course, have recalled from Erasmus’ Parabolae (1514), or again, even from Pliny's Naturalis historia (8, 109), that beavers bite off their own genitals when pursued because they know these are the reason why they are hunted. The great number of editions of the Emblems suggests, however, that Alciati's book was a more likely source of such information. For the relation between emblems and fables, see Tiemann, Barbara, Fabel und Emblem. Giles Corrozet und die französische Renaissance-Fabel (Munich, 1974).Google Scholar

39 B. N. ms. fr. 19.143. For information concerning Bouquet, see Graham, V. E. and Johnson, W. McAllister, The Paris Entries of Charles IX and Elisabeth of Austria (Toronto, 1974).Google Scholar

40 For examples of this use of emblematics, consult the album compiled by Pierre de L'Estoile, Les Belles Figures et drolleries de la Ligue, in Mémoires-journaux, vol. 4 (Paris, 1876).