You have before you a photocopy of the famous engraving from the frontispiece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, ‘printed for Andrew Crooke at the Green Dragon in St. Paul's Church-yard’ in 1651. As has been rightly observed, this is ‘the most famous visual image in the history of modern political philosophy’ (Malcolm 1998, 124). Given that in those years emblematic literature had reached its apogee, it is reasonable to suppose that the author had intended to summarise in an image the entire content of the work (or at least its esoteric meaning) – the ‘idea of the work’, as is written in the engraving which Giambattista Vico chose for the frontispiece of his Scienza Nuova. And yet, despite experiencing a kind of acceleration in recent decades, the bibliography on this emblem par excellence of modern politics is relatively meagre. As happens every time that research is situated at the intersection of different disciplinary specialisations, the scholars who have confronted this task appear to move on a kind of terra incognita, whose navigation would necessitate combining the resources of iconology with those of what is arguably the most tenuous and uncertain discipline among the many taught in our universities: political philosophy. The knowledge that would be required here would be that of a science we could call iconologia philosophica; a science which perhaps existed between 1531 (the date of publication of Andrea Alciato's Emblemata) and 1627 (when Jacob Cats's Sinne- en minnebeelden appeared), but for which today we lack even the most elementary principles.

In my attempt to interpret the emblem, I will endeavour not to forget what it probably was in Hobbes's intentions: a door or a threshold that would lead, even if in a veiled manner, into the problematic nucleus of the book. This does not necessarily mean that I intend to advance an esoteric reading of Leviathan. Carl Schmitt, to whom we owe an important monograph on the book, indeed intimates on numerous occasions that Leviathan might be an esoteric book.