Emblem, Renaissance Origin of

Abstract

Fortuitously created in 1531 when the Augsburg publisher Heinrich Steyner published an unauthorized collection of Latin epigrams by the legal scholar Andrea Alciato to which he had added woodcuts, the European emblem rapidly became a pan-European phenomenon that lasted some two centuries. As a bimedial construction in which a visual image combines with one or more textual fragments in a unique way to impose a moral lesson on the reader, the emblem is similar to other such Renaissance genres, including the device, the impresa, and the beast fable, but differs from them semiotically in several important respects. Modified emblematic forms quickly spread beyond the confines of the printed page to find a home in the applied arts. Emblems frequently appear on and in both public and private buildings, usually without the bulk of their accompanying text, no doubt with the purpose of signalling or bringing to mind the moral lessons the originals had conveyed and of linking them with the proprietor of the built space. As emblems moved from the realm of moral literature to that of design and pedagogy, many emblem books were dismembered for their woodcuts, and derivative compilations of visual emblematic material appeared late in the seventeenth century for use in the applied arts. Emblems and the emblematic reading process survive today in advertising, propaganda, flags, corporate logos, and elsewhere.