Abstract
This white paper briefly outlines two co-dependent research initiatives: ‘Global Emblems’ and ‘Transmission and Intermediality: the impact of the emblematic culture in Ibero-America’. Both projects are in their initial stage of development, at Brown University.
 ▪ ‘Global Emblems’ is set to map, document and study the presence of emblems in material culture, around the world, and cross-link these occurrences with pre-existing digital collections of emblem books. The database will be fed by an international network of specialists, which is already active, with members in over ten countries and the support of the Society for Emblem Studies. The platform will allow searches by concepts (using Iconclass classification system) and a number of locations will allow users to ‘visit’ them through Virtual Reality (360 annotated photos). The database will be systematically studied through ‘thematic clusters’.
 Although at first glance the focus on emblems may seem narrow, emblems have a broad geographical and historical spread, which can be traced, and that provides the necessary data for the kind of analytical and interpretative study required in the second research initiative, which illustrates the importance of emblems within the wider frame of Latin American cultural history.
 ▪ ‘Transmission and Intermediality: the impact of the emblematic culture on the Early Americas’ will analyse the data from ‘Global Emblems’ in order to understand the role of emblems in the colonial process in the Americas. More specifically, this project will look at the ‘pictorial dispute’ in the New World, by examining the ‘pictorial turn’ from the ‘catecismos jeroglíficos’ to the displayed emblems in the 17th-century (many of them resulting from the remediation of European prints), and the ideological, political and sociological implications around the presence of these emblems in buildings and early-modern festivals.
Highlights
One can say that there is space for a study aiming at challenging the idea that ‘displayed emblems’ are somehow secondary to print ones: and there is evidence that this misconception has deterred the development of the field
Given its relationship with architecture, a number of loci will be photographed in 360 technologies, which will be annotated from ‘within’. This will allow students and scholars to visit these places through virtual reality, allowing them to see, at first hand, how an emblem painted in a church in Spain appears in a church in Peru – and how the different environments and iconographic programmes can affect the meaning
▪ ‘Transmission and Intermediality’: coordinated by Dr Pedro Germano Leal, concerning the theoretical issues emerging from the transmission of emblems and their transition between print and material cultures, with a study case focused on the cultural exchanges between Europe and the Americas);
Summary
An emblem can be defined as an artistic composition that combines pictures and poetry in order to produce a third, very intricate meaning. Since Alciato’s, emblem authors endorsed the use of emblem books as a source for ‘displayed emblems’, painted on the walls and ceilings of public and religious buildings; carved in altars and furniture; used widely as part of the iconographic programme of early-modern festivals (royal entries, marriages, exequies and births, canonizations, celebrations of patron saints, etc.); and so on This is true in the Americas, where emblems were only rarely printed, but present in the material culture all over the continent – much in debt to the Jesuits sponsorship of the genre. No systematic attempt has been made to map this phenomenon around the globe, in order to visualise its presence Essential questions, such as: which emblems were more popular in material culture, where and why? The objective is to understand what I have previously referred as the ‘pictorial turn’ in the New World, from the Franciscan use of ‘Testerian Manuscripts’ as a medium of communication with native peoples, to the widespread Jesuit use of emblems for a similar purpose: creating a hybrid identity by means of the powerful rhetorical combination of images and texts, art and literature (Leal 2017; Leal 2020)
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