Andrea Alciato and the Birth of the Emblem Book

In 1531 the printer Heinrich Steyner published in Augsburg a small Latin book that would give its name to an entire genre: the Emblematum liber of the Milanese jurist Andrea Alciato. Each page combined a short motto, a woodcut image and an epigram explaining its meaning. This simple formula had enormous success and gave the Renaissance and the Baroque a common visual language, which alchemy and occult philosophy would also adopt.

A jurist with a passion for antiquity

Alciato, born in 1492, was one of the most famous law professors of his time and taught in France and Italy, at Bourges, Pavia, Bologna and Ferrara. He also cultivated Latin poetry and the translation of the Greek epigrams of the Anthology, from which he drew many ideas for his own compositions. In his intentions the emblems were probably learned verses; it was the publishers who turned them into an illustrated book.

The first Augsburg edition, in fact, came out with woodcuts added by the printer, which the author does not seem to have supervised. A few years later, in 1534, the Parisian publisher Chrétien Wechel issued a more careful version, with images better matched to the texts. From then on the book was constantly reprinted, enlarged and translated, with more than a hundred editions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Motto, figure, epigram

The structure of the emblem became canonical. At the top the motto, also called the inscriptio, a short and often enigmatic phrase; in the centre the pictura, that is, the image; below it the subscriptio, the epigram that unravelled the relation between word and figure. The reader was invited to a small exercise of interpretation: the image alone was obscure, the text alone was abstract, and only together did they reveal a moral truth.

Alciato himself called his compositions by the term emblema, which in Greek and Latin denoted an applied ornament, such as an inlay or a mosaic panel set into a floor. The choice of word suggested that each figure was a small jewel to be set in the reader's memory, ready to be reused in conversation, in writing and in the decoration of houses and palaces.

The subjects were drawn from mythology, natural history, fable and daily life. A dolphin twined around an anchor, an elephant, a phoenix or a bare tree became symbols of prudence, fidelity, rebirth or transience. This repertoire passed quickly into the decorative arts, painting, tapestries and the ephemeral architecture of court festivals.

Hieroglyphs and hidden wisdom

Emblematics also fed on the myth of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1419 the Florentine traveller Cristoforo Buondelmonti had acquired on the island of Andros a manuscript of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, a late antique text that claimed to explain the symbolic meaning of Egyptian signs. Printed by Aldus Manutius in 1505, the book convinced humanists that the ancient priests had entrusted their wisdom to images understandable only to initiates.

This idea of knowledge hidden in figures linked the emblem to the world of Hermeticism. In the following century alchemical authors such as Michael Maier built entire books on Alciato's model, applying it to the secrets of transformation. Thus an invention born among jurists and men of letters became one of the most refined instruments of European esoteric iconography.