The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem, written by Peter M. Daly

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Walter S Melion, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2015-12-26
• Publisher: Brill
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: 2015 author(s)
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/2/3/article-p471_5.xml
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Journal of Jesuit Studies
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 3
• Start Page: 471
• End Page: 480
• Keywords: theoretical implications; Peter Daly; historigraphy; church history; emblematic construction; emblem triplex; semantic priority; theology and world Christianity; emblem texutal and pictorial parts; interpretation
• Research Categories: Religion, History of; Theology; Art History

Abstract

This volume of essays by the great emblem scholar and bibliographer Peter Daly centers on questions of emblematic construction and interpretation: simply put, “how emblems were actually read” (3) by their early modern audiences. Concomitantly, he explores the theoretical implications of the various plausible responses provided in the book’s ten chapters. Along the way, Daly astutely summarizes the state of the field on a number of important topics: the historiography of emblem studies in the twentieth century, extending from Mario Praz’s Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1939; 2nd ed., London: Warburg Institute, 1964) and William Heckscher and Karl-August Wirth’s Emblem, Emblembuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1959) to Rosemary Freeman’s English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) and Albrecht Schöne’s introduction of Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967); the contested status of the emblem triplex, comprising an inscriptio (either titular or in the form of a motto), a pictura (usually pictorial, though sometimes exclusively verbal), and a subscriptio (often but not always epigrammatic), the tripartite format of which proves anything but prescriptive for the history of the emblem; the argumentative and hermeneutic relation amongst the emblem’s textual and pictorial parts, whose mutual interaction leaves open the issue of semantic priority; and, of special significance to readers of this journal, the pastoral and/or political functions of the various types of emblem book produced by Jesuit authors, both individual and corporate, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.