Prognostic Fame and Didactic Use: Jesuit Emblem Books as Mirrors of Princes

Many researchers have emphasised the special use of inscriptions and texts in Tudor paintings. Especially in Elizabethan times, emblematic images emerge and contain texts which present riddles to their audience, address an implicit or explicit beholder, and also give information about their own function. The enigmatic double-sided portrait of Christopher Hatton serves as an outstanding example of the various relations that texts and images form in this era. Two elements of its composition will be discussed here: the inscription and the depiction of Father Time, both on the verso-side. One, a textual element, forms a unit with the other, a pictorial element. On their own and in combination, both built up a reference to emblem books and sources outside the picture and contextualise themselves in humanistic discourses about opportunity and time. Thus, their exclusive presentation forms a dialogue with the beholder and opens up a meta-level of artistic expression. The ancient pictorial tradition of the God Kairos is addressed in the combination, while it labels itself as a depiction of time. Overall, the object briefly examined in this study is an outstanding example of Elizabethan artistic culture and remains a desideratum in art history.

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Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture.

Sixteenth Century Journal ◽

10.2307/2542342 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 25 (4) ◽

pp. 1010

Author(s):

William E. Engel ◽

Michael Bath

Keyword(s):

Emblem Books

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The Emblem Books of Jeremias Drexel SJ in the Low Countries. Editions between 1622 and 1866

Imago Figurata. Studies - Emblematik und Kunst der Jesuiten in Bayern: Einfluss und Wirkung ◽

10.1484/m.ifstu-eb.4.2017086 ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 269-288

Author(s):

Paul Begheyn

Keyword(s):

Low Countries ◽

Emblem Books

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Word and Sign in Elizabethan Conflicts with the Devil

Albion A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies ◽

10.1017/s0095139000062724 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 238-256

Author(s):

Kathleen R. Sands

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Psychological Impact ◽

Elizabeth I ◽

The Sun ◽

Emblem Books ◽

Modern Mind ◽

Clifford Geertz ◽

Landed Gentry ◽

The Devil ◽

The Phoenix

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”

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