#emblemata

[clawmarks]

Symbola - Mscr. Dresd. F.83, Bd.3 - Octavius de Strada - c.1587-1588 - via Staats und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB)

[shisasan]

Illustration from Atalanta fugiens by Michael Maier, first published in 1618 in Oppenheim, one of the most renowned emblem books of the hermetic-alchemical tradition. Combining fifty engravings with epigrams, fugues, and discourses, it was designed as a meditation on transformation. This emblem depicts the element of Air, “in whose breath the philosopher’s stone is conceived”, a reminder that in alchemy, creation begins not in matter, but in the unseen.

[thesobsister]

La Doctrine des Moeurs ripped off, not to put too fine a point on it, Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana, a collection of quotations from Horace and other authors accompanied by 103 engravings.

This one speaks to how one might escape vice and follow virtue:

Si tu veux triompher du vice Qui combat iour & nuict peur te vaincre le coeur Fuy, mais comme le Parthe; & pour eſtre vainqueur; Vſe tantoſ de force, & tantoſt d'artifice.

[riesenfeldcenter]

It’s turnip time!

An imaginary turnip with time, that is.

The intricate, fantastical visual aids in Johannes Buno’s Memoriale Institutionum Juris don’t make much sense to us but they sure are a lot of fun.

This copy comes to us from the library of German jurist Hermann Kantorowicz and is featured in our new exhibit, Tools of the Profession: Law Books and the History of Legal Education.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ramsey Dukes, Austin Osman Spare - SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic - Nigel Grey-Turner - 1979

[geritsel]

Pieter van der Heyden - Die Blau Schuyte (Ship of Fools, Ship of Perdition)

[lespalimpsestes]

Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri (Immortality won through literary pursuits), emblem 132 in the book Emblemata by Andrea Alciato (Antwerp: Plantin [under the direction] of Raphelengius, 1608)

[ars-videndi]

Otto van Veen, Emblemata Horatiana, Bruxellis : Apud Franciscvm Foppens, M.DC.LXXXII 

First of the Brussels Foppens editions (1682) of Veen's enduringly popular Emblems from Horace (principally from the Odes and Satires), a classic of the emblematic literature, originally published, in Antwerp, in 1607, then reprinted in numerous editions with polyglot text, ensuring it a Europe-wide readership. Van Veen was among the most important Dutch emblematists of the 17th-century, as well as Antwerp's leading artist and dean of the painters' guild of St. Luke.

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