February 09, 2003
Emblemata
Futile effort.
A dog gazes at the moon by night, as if at a mirror. And seeing himself, he believes another dog is in the moon. So he barks; but his ineffectual voice is carried away in vain by the winds, and Diana pursues her course without hearing.
So runs the text, translated from the original Latin of Emblem 165 in Andrea Alciato's Eblematum Liber or Book of Emblems.
Alciato's book had enormous influence and popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a collection of 212 Latin emblem poems, each consisting of a motto (a proverb or other short enigmatic expression), a picture, and an epigrammatic text. Alciato's book was first published in 1531, and was expanded in various editions during the author's lifetime. It began a craze for emblem poetry that lasted for several centuries.
A contemporary English imitation clarifies the intended meaning, or perhaps overclarifies it, as the attraction of emblem-books would, I guess, have been due to a combination of picture, poem, and puzzle, with a meaning or moral to be teased out by the reader. I spent an hour or two this week revisiting these images, and, whilst some of them seem hopelessly opaque in their meaning, and others rather banal, there are many which remain thought-provoking, or instructive. I may return to some other examples in entries to come. I wonder, by the way, as people see a man in the moon, would dogs indeed see a dog in the moon?
The links page at the Alciato site led me on to a few other interesting places, one of which, project mnemosyne, links, in turn, to a rich, searchable collection of mediaeval manuscript miniatures. From their highlights section under the heading of Labours of the Month, one finds the following examples amongst those grouped under February.
February's labours then, not surprisingly, were all about keeping oneself warm. Brrr. Another of the links leads to the University of Mannheim's MATEO pages, which include a painstakingly scanned collecton of old, rare books. One such, Bibliotheca chalcographica, hoc est Virtute et eruditione clarorum Virorum Imagines, is a collection of engravings from the renowned de Bry publishing stable, which portrays important humanist figures. Among them, sure enough, is Alciato...
