Emblems to Tapestries and Tapestries to Emblems: Contrasting Practice in England and France

Abstract

IN 1611, A SET OF FOUR LARGE tapestries was produced in Warwickshire depicting the Four Seasons. Originally designed by Francis Hyckes for Sir John Tracy of Toddington, they now adorn the walls of the Armoury in Hatfield House. Just over fifty years later, work was begun in France on another set of four large tapestries, also depicting the Four Seasons. This set, together with a similar one on the Four Elements, was the first project to be undertaken by the newly organised Gobelins manufacture in Paris, and the tapestries were intended for royal use. Intriguing contrasts emerge when the English and French works are compared. Such large tapestries often included a decorative border, framing the central subject, and this is the case with both the English and the French sets of tapestries on the seasons. But although both use emblems as decorative motifs in these borders, they do so very differently. The object of this article is twofold: first to demonstrate how the English tapestries use the emblematic borders purely for decoration, whereas in the French tapestries the borders relate to the central theme of the tapestry and also contribute to its further iconographic message. The second object is to look at the contrasting histories of the emblems in these tapestries. In the English tapestries, some, at least, of the emblems around the borders were taken from existing emblem books, where the combination of motto and figure was accompanied by an explanatory verse. As so often when craftsmen incorporated emblems into other forms of plastic arts, the text was not included in the tapestry. I But with the Gobelins tapestries we find the reverse procedure, with verses subsequently being added to the devices, which originally comprised simply figure and motto. Even before the tapestries were completed, the devices designed for the borders were collected together in book form, and transformed into complete emblems by the addition of short verses, contributed by members of the Petite Academie, thereby reversing the pattern of the Hatfield House emblems.2 In each ofthe four English tapestries the central subject is the gods and goddesses associated with the season, around which appear the works associated with that season, while at the top are reproduced the appropriate signs of the zodiac (see fig. 1, p. 42). The emblems around the borders of the four tapestries do not, however, apparently relate to the central theme. There are a large number of them, and many come from identifiable sources. The blind man carrying the lame man on his