Reading Alciato's Emblems: Whose Idea Were the Pictures?

A book of emblems looks, at first, like a picture book with captions. Each page carries a short Latin heading, a woodcut, and a few lines of verse. Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), a Milanese jurist and one of the most respected legal scholars of his century, is remembered as the founder of the form; the University of Glasgow's emblem project, which has digitised twenty-two editions of his book, borrows an old tag and calls him its pater et princeps, father and chief.¹

Here is the difficulty that makes the book worth approaching slowly. The first edition came out in Augsburg on 28 February 1531 from the printer Heinrich Steyner. It held 104 emblems, 97 of them with woodcuts. And according to the Glasgow editors, "It would seem that Alciato himself had nothing to do with this series of editions."² His poems had been passing among friends in manuscript, "probably unillustrated"; it was his friend the Augsburg humanist Conrad Peutinger who, on their account, "commissioned the woodcuts."²

So the genre whose defining feature is the marriage of word and image seems to have begun with an author who supplied only the words. That raises the question this introduction is organised around: what exactly is an emblem, and where does its meaning live?

From a Sheaf of Epigrams to a Page Design

The word itself points away from pictures. Emblema comes from Greek and means a piece of inlay or mosaic, an ornament set into something else.³ Alciato's poems are epigrams: short, pointed Latin verses of the kind humanists wrote as a learned pastime, often reworking ancient material, as the fox emblem below does. Each describes or addresses some object, animal, god, or scene, and draws a moral from it. In that sense the picture was always in them, but as something the words asked you to imagine.

The Augsburg printing made the imagined picture literal, and not always well. The Glasgow editors judge the 1531 woodcuts "often of inferior workmanship, and at times ill-suited to their context," and note that in the layout "no attempt is made to establish the kind of logical arrangement" of the parts on the page.²

Alciato's response tells us what he thought was at stake. He did not disown the illustrated format. He moved the book to Paris, where Christian Wechel printed a new edition in 1534; Wechel's dedicatory letter, as Glasgow summarises it, makes clear that "Alciato had involved himself in the preparation, correcting errors found in Steyner editions."⁴ The Paris book had 113 emblems, all illustrated with new woodcuts, and it fixed a layout: "the motto or title, the pictura below that, and then the subscriptio or verse text," with "each emblem beginning on a fresh page." The editors conclude that it "set the standard for clear presentation of emblems."⁴

Those three terms are the working vocabulary. The motto (also called the inscriptio) is the heading. The pictura is the image. The subscriptio is the epigram beneath. The collection went on growing to more than two hundred emblems and was reprinted for well over a century.³ Whoever first had the idea of illustrating it, the form that readers and imitators inherited was the three-part page, and Alciato put his authority behind it.

First Example: The Fox and the Mask

Take the emblem headed Mentem non formam plus pollere, which the Glasgow translators render "Intelligence matters, not beauty."⁵ The epigram, in their translation from the 1534 Paris edition, runs:

"A fox, entering the store-room of a theatrical producer, found an actor's mask, skilfully shaped, so finely fashioned that the spirit alone was missing, in all else it seemed alive. Taking it up, the fox addressed it - What a head is this, but it has no brain!"⁵

The story is not Alciato's invention. The Glasgow notes trace it to the Roman fabulist Phaedrus (Fables 1.7) and to Aesop.⁵ What the emblem adds is a division of labour. The motto states a general proposition and no story. The woodcut, catalogued as a fox holding an actor's mask, shows a puzzling scene and no proposition.⁵ Neither is complete. The epigram is what connects them: it tells you what the fox is doing and lets the fox deliver the punchline, at which point the abstract heading acquires a face, or rather a mask.

This is the basic emblematic experience, and it is a small exercise in delayed understanding. You see an odd image, you read a terse claim, and the poem makes each explain the other.

Second Example: The Scholar Who Says Nothing

The relation can be more interesting than illustration. Consider In silentium, "Silence," present already in 1531.⁶ The epigram, in the Glasgow translation:

"When he is silent, the fool differs no whit from the wise. It is tongue and voice that betray his stupidity. Let him therefore put his finger to his lips and so mark silence, and turn himself into Egyptian Harpocrates."⁶

Harpocrates needs a gloss, which the editors supply: he is Horus, son of Isis, a god "often represented as an infant with his finger held to his mouth as a sign of silence and economy of words," with Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris cited as the classical authority.⁶

Now the picture. It does not show an Egyptian child-god. The Glasgow catalogue describes the 1531 woodcut as a scholar seated at a table in a study with his finger raised to his lips, before an open book, in a modest room with a window, candlestick, and bench; the 1534 Paris cut is likewise "a scholar with a finger to his lips in front of an open book, in a small room."⁶⁷

What follows is my reading rather than anything the sources state. Seen alone, the image commends the quiet of the learned: a wise man keeping his counsel. The poem is slyer. Its subject is the fool, whose best chance of passing for wise is to keep his mouth shut. Put the two together and the scholar in the woodcut becomes ambiguous. Is he wise, or is he taking the poem's advice? The emblem does not say, which is precisely the joke: if the epigram is right, you cannot tell from outside. Here the picture is not repeating the text. It is supplying one half of an irony.

That is a tempting place to overstate the case, so a caution. It would be too simple to say that every emblem hides a puzzle, or that artists and author planned such effects together. For the earliest editions we have seen that they did not. Some woodcuts simply show what the poem mentions. The more careful claim is that the form makes this kind of interplay possible, and that readers from the 1530s onward were invited to look for it.

Where the Meaning Lives

The opening question can now be answered, with its limits. An emblem is not an illustrated poem and not a captioned picture. It is a page on which a heading, an image, and an epigram each hold part of the sense, so that the reader has to do the assembling. On the evidence of the Glasgow editors, Alciato wrote the verbal parts first and others added the images; but he then supervised an edition in which the three parts were given a fixed and deliberate arrangement. The genre was, in that sense, a collaboration between a scholar's manuscript and the printing shop, and the reader completes it.

How to Begin

Alciato at Glasgow presents each emblem with a facsimile of the page, a transcription, and an English translation.¹ Start with the 1534 Paris edition, since its layout is the one the tradition adopted. For each emblem, try this order: look at the picture and guess; read the motto and guess again; then read the epigram and see what changes. After that, open the same emblem in the 1531 Augsburg edition and compare the woodcut. The differences between the two will teach you more about how emblems work than any definition.