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Andrea Alciato
Il libro degli Emblemi
secondo le edizioni del 1531 e del 1534
[The Emblem Book in the 1513 and 1534 editions]
Edited by Mino Gabriele
Milano, Adelphi, 2009
Isbn 978-88-459-2441-5
Warning: The images that appear in this post are facsimiles of the 1534 Paris edition of the Emblemata. The Glasgow University Library has digitized and put online for free consultation specimens of 22 different editions of the work. To see all the pictures, it is enough to click here (...) http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/books.php?id=A34b&o= and select the option Go straight to the first facsimile of this book.
[1] Text of the strip:
"The combination of images and words, so pervasive today, actually has a much more ancient and noble history than what we tend to believe, as well as authoritative parents, so celebrated in the past and now neglected. Among them is certainly to be included Andrea Alciato, an eminent scholar, humanist, an "austere and uncompromising" jurist, among the most distinguished law experts of the sixteenth century. His Emblematum liber (1531), gallery of human situations transfigured in metaphors and in admirable 'hieroglyph' symbols, originally aimed to convey - similarly to the Adagia by Erasmus - a wealth of wisdom and morality, through an effective verbal and iconographic display of high concepts or simple thoughts. Instead, it became the archetype of a genre of literature that not only experienced an extraordinary success in Europe since its birth, but exercised a decisive influence, becoming an unavoidable reference, if you want to understand much of successive art and literature.
The Book of Emblems is proposed here for the first time in an edition that will give full satisfaction to the scholars, who has since long denounced such an unexplained editorial vacuum. It will be an exciting discovery for all the other readers: in addition to the Latin text - critically established on the basis of the comparison between the first two editions (1531 and 1534) - the volume hosts the translation, the illustrations of two other critical prints (1560, 1621) and an extensive commentary, which identifies the speculative and iconology sources of each emblem. It will thus be possible to find the roots from which a brilliantly simple idea sprang: to create words from which images can flourish and vice versa, in a marriage of ethics and philosophy, where you listen to the picture and you see the word."
[2] Andrea Alciato (1492-1550) was primarily a famous jurist, and if he is still remembered as such in the studies of the history of law, it is true that his name was and remains inextricably tied to this peculiar book, published for the first time in Augsburg in 1531 and then reprinted and enriched with new materials on countless occasions. It is considered a milestone in the history of Renaissance literature on Emblems and Endeavours. Gabriele provides now a truly remarkable modern edition, with the primary objective of studying the sources from which Alciato drew both in the conception of the work as well as in the iconology of individual emblems.
[3] A first problem arises immediately: did Alciato really want to publish a booklet like the one printed by Heinrich Steyner in Augsburg in 1531? Apparently not, if it is true that Alciato complained on several occasions of this edition "full of mistakes" and disowned it, to prepare a proper and correct edition, published by Chrétien Wechel in Paris in 1534. In fact, already in 1522 Alciato communicates by letter to a friend that he had composed, essentially in his spare time, a "book of epigrams entitled Emblemata, in each of which he describes something, that means with elegance something drawn from history and natural world, and from which painters, goldsmiths, and casters could achieve the kind of objects that we call shields [crests or badges] and we either attach to hats or carry as signs" (pp. XV-XVI). The booklet, most likely, was a manuscript, since we have not had any bibliographic evidence, and certainly had no images. If anything, just as the author told us, the epigrams had to stimulate the circles of artists and artisans to forge artefacts, which would be inspired by them. Always very likely (it is often argued, as we see, on the basis of conjectures, but those by Gabriele seem to be entirely reasonable) Alciato worked at these epigrams since he was young, as it is made evident by a more in-depth examination of certain emblems (see pages XXII-XXIII). He continued working on them even after the publication of the "first authorised edition" (1534), so that the latest edition (1550) approved by Alciato before his death and printed by Guillaume Rouille and Macé Bonhomme in Lyons showed a significantly larger number of emblems. The fact is that indeed in 1531 the printer Heinrich Steyner sorted the Emblematum liber out of his presses, a book in 16° of only 44 pages, which however contained a fundamental change with respect to what provided by Alciato in 1522: the inclusion of a series of woodcut vignettes (of poor quality, however) illustrating the individual epigrams (104 epigrams in total, including six without vignette). The success was immediate, so much so that in a few years four reprints were made. Mind you, it was a pirated edition, and it is certainly not the place to be shocked or to think that it was a very strange situation at the time. To quote a contemporaneous case is in fact very easy: just think of the very successful pirate editions of the works of Sebastiano Serlio by Coecke van Aelst (Krista de Jonge, Les éditions du Traité de Serlio par Pieter Coecke van Aelst - The editions of Serlio’s Treatise by Pieter Coecke van Aelst - in Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon. Architecture et imprimerie. Volume 1. Le Traité d’Architecture de Sebastiano Serlio. Une grande entreprise éditoriale au XVIe siècle – Sebastiano Serlio in Lyon. Architecture and printing, Volume 1. The Treaty of Architecture by Sebastiano Serlio. A great editorial endeavour in the XVI century). It is not known how Steyner had come into possession of the manuscripts of the Emblemata (some assumptions can be found on p. XXI). The fact is that Alciato certainly did not take it well; the inaccuracies, he said, were such and so many as to risk ruining his reputation and for this reason, probably, he began the publication of the first "official" edition in 1534 (the emblems had become 113): another resounding success, with already seventeen reprints carried out by 1545. It is a fact that the idea of accompanying the epigrams with illustrations might not have been by Alciato, but rather by Steyner, who would thus have implemented the Lombard lawyer's wish (who aimed at providing epigrams to be translated into picture). And indeed for this reason Alciato might have judged the edition of 1531 as humiliating: because, beyond the poor quality of the cartoons, some of them would have distorted the meaning of the epigrams. Hence the need for an official edition that just did not fail to provide the first illustrations of a superior quality, and often very different from those of Steyner (pages XXVII-XXXIV). Alciato, aware of the success of the opera, precisely because illustrated, would have been anyway induced to follow the approach of the publisher of 1531, thus establishing a structure that from that moment on would be typical of any Renaissance emblem: Title (inscriptio or motto, whatever you want to say), pictura or res picta, and subscriptio (description in verse of the subject).
[4] "This study takes into account the first two prints of the Emblematum liber, respectively, appeared in 1531 in Augsburg at Heinrich Steyner and in 1534 in Paris at Chrétien Wechel. It offers a critical edition of the text and an iconology comparison of images. Also later editions are however considered, whenever, in the comments, they are useful to better understand the meaning of individual emblems [...] The woodcuts that accompany each Emblem (located between the title and the epigram as the emblem scheme typically calls for) are two, since we both provide the cartoons of 1531 and those of 1534: the ones and the others have been attributed to various artists, but without any certainty; for those for 1534 one usually hears the name of Jean Mercure Jollat [...]. The illustrations that appear in the numerous editions of Emblemata, beginning with that of 1531, stuck to the verses by following a definite ekphrastic trace [note of the translator: the exact terms of the description of the images in the verses]. However, the different graphical interpretations that sometimes, in different prints, are found between cartoons that should represent the same epigram, are not surprising, since they are part of the stylistic freedom that naturally characterizes the execution by each artist, in this case by the designers and engravers at the service of different publishers and printers [...]. The iconology work done about it suggests that the only substantive figurative differences occur, in some cases, between the illustrations of the Steyner edition of 1531 and subsequent Wechel edition of 1534 ... We insert, for the iconology examination of this double woodcut series (usually at the end of the comment on each emblem), also the images of subsequent editions, in particular taking them from the one in Lyon due to Guillaume Rouille and Macé Bonhomme in 1550, considered the most authoritative one, as it was revised by Alciato himself before his death, and that of Johannes Thuilius of 1621, the largest and most comprehensive realised ever" (pp. LXXIII-LXXV).
[5] The influence of hieroglyphics on the world of emblems and endeavours is evident. In another one of his works, essentially coeval, (De verborum significatione – on the meaning of words) Alciato wrote: "Words mean, things are meant. However, sometimes even things mean, like the hieroglyphics of Horus and Chaeremon, a subject on which we have also written a book in verse, whose title is Emblemata" (pp. XLIII-XLIV). Well, the first of the two sources cited by Alciato is well known: it is Horapollo. The manuscript containing hieroglyphs of Horapollo was brought to Italy in 1422; it was written in Greek. Giorgio Valla translated it into Latin (still in manuscript form, in the middle of the fifteenth century). The first printed edition (in Greek) is 1505 (by Aldus Manutius); the first in Latin is in 1515 and was published in Augsburg. Two years later was edited in Bologna a second Latin edition, edited by Filippo Fasanini this time; and this Fasanini was professor at Bologna while Alciato studied there. Much less explicable is the reference to Chaeremon, of whom today we know that nothing has survived. We know it today, but back then the hieroglyphics contained in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna were ascribed to Chaeremon (this is a good occasion to remember that Mino Gabriele edited together with Marco Ariani an edition of the Hypnerotomachia published by Adelphi in this same series and then reprinted in "Gli Adelphi" in 2004).
[6] Within the volume are preserved three reviews that appeared in the newspapers when the work was published: they are respectively articles published at the signature of Valerio Magrelli in “Republica” on December 4
(http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/12/04/dagli-emblemi-ai-tatuaggi-metamorfosi-dei-simboli.html), of Gabriele Pedullà in “Il Sole 24 Ore” on 6 December Armando and by Armando Torno in “Corriere della Sera”on 10 December 2009
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