Genre, Sources, and Functions

The Emblem is no Longer Regarded as a no man’s land between literature and the graphic arts. Scholars in different disciplines now recognize the emblem as an important expression of the cultural life of the Renaissance and the Baroque, reflecting a panoply of interests, ranging from war to love, from religion to philosophy and politics, from the sciences and natural history to the occult, from social mores to encyclopedic knowledge, and from serious speculation to entertainment. Poets and preachers, writers and dramatists frequently employed emblems and emblem-like structures in speeches, sermons, and conversations as well as in written texts. Emblems and imprese were also used in the significant decoration of buildings and household wares; they helped to shape virtually every form of verbal and visual communication during the early modern period.

A typical emblem consists of a motto, a symbolic picture, and two or more brief texts. Their Latin terms are, respectively, inscriptio, pictura, and subscriptio, neutral labels that do not specify a particular form or function for the part so named. “Emblem” can be regarded as a mode of thought that combines picture and word into a meaning, or an art form that joins visual image and text. Attempts to define the genre of illustrated books, called “emblem books,” have been less than successful. If definitions are too narrow they exclude too much; if they are too wide they embrace too much. There is also the problem of normative definitions that may exclude works considered emblematic by their creators. The term itself and its various synonyms have undergone mutations of meaning and use, often differing from country to country or language to language. For some people the word emblem calls to mind the badges of schools, universities, armed services, coats of arms, and national symbols, which consist of a motto and a symbolic picture. Badges are often descendants of the emblem, survivors of a tradition of verbal and visual symbolism that was all-pervasive during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.

As a miniature form of allegory the emblem communicates through words and pictures simultaneously.