Iconography on the Nature and Inspiration of Poetry in Renaissance Emblem Literature

Abstract

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.