John Cull

Emblema

      The literature of emblems and devices combines word and image in a playful and enigmatic manner in order to entertain, teach, and often, to communicate a moral message. The form's invention is attributed to Andrea Alciato, a jurisconsult from Milan whose best known work began as a simple collection of translated Greek epigrams. His Selecta epigrammata graeca, published in 1529, contains 30 epigrams translated from Greek to Latin, which would later make up part of his Emblematum Liber. Alciato, as a distraction from his labors as a jurist, continued to write epigrams that had an exemplary intention and were of a markedly visual nature, introduced by lapidary inscriptions recalling the Adagia of Erasmus. A collection of 105 of these compositions, which Alciato had dedicated and given to his friend Conrado Peutinger, was published in Augsburg, apparently without Alciatos's knowledge, by the printer Steiner in 1531, with the title Emblematum Liber. It was this printer who decided to illustrate each one of the compositions with a small engraving, thus giving rise to the tripartite emblematic structure of lemma-pictura-epigram, which has ever since been known as an emblem.

      Devices normally express the symbolic representation of a particular person, and contain fewer and less elaborate motifs than the emblem. The device contains several pictorial motifs in juxtaposition that present a visual enigma. The motto, usually in Latin, helps the reader to decipher the puzzle depicted in the image. Often, the meaning of both the motto and the visual element is made explicit in a verse or prose composition beneath the picture.

      The device included here is one of my own design. The Rev. Edward J. Vodoklys, S. J. (Classics) helped with the motto, which means "That which gives health sweetens life." The pictorial motifs include a hand that holds a branch of hops, a caduceus (the symbol of healing and the medical profession) and a barrel leaking its contents. I leave it to the reader to examine the poem to understand the meaning conveyed in my odd combination of the verbal and the visual!