Proscenium Vitæ Humanæ

I do enjoy perusing the enigmatic engravings of the kind found in old emblem-books, and am delighted whenever I happen upon one of these volumes as scanned or photographed and presented on-line. I was very happy indeed, then, when I discovered that the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, have, as part of their Emblemata Online project, digitised several dozen emblem-books from their extensive collection and have made them available for all to browse.

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The present images are a small handful I lifted from one of these books: Johann Theodor de Bry’s Proscenium vitæ humanæ sive Emblematum Secularium, which was published in Frankfurt, in 1627. This one caught my eye first only because I was familiar with De Bry’s name, having read about him, and his association with the physician, alchemist and author Michael Maier in Yates’ The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and in Klossowski de Rola’s The Golden Game.

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As is the case in the books that De Bry published for Maier, and for Robert Fludd, the engravings here are very finely-executed, and are highly-charged with allegorical meanings which, although guessable in some instances, are at least as often bafflingly opaque. Some of them echo that particular kind of weirdness one associates with Brueghel and Bosch: look closely at the seventh of these emblems, in particular.

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Click on the images to open larger, pop-up versions of the same. Click on the pop-ups, in turn, to link back to the relevant pages at the Herzog August Library site.

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Posted by misteraitch at March 29, 2004 04:29 PM | TrackBack