Reproduction only for non-commercial use.

© March 2004; revised 25 June 2008

Gallery Exhibit, Catalog Nos.  5 & 25 & 26 & 27 & 28 & 29 & 100
& 101 & 102 & 103 & 104 & 105 & 106 & 107 & 108 & 109 & 110 & 111

Emblem of the Athenian Society, 1692

13 verse sets at bottom of
the Athenian Society Emblem

A. behind y^e scenes sit mighty we

nor are we known nor will we be

the world and we exchanging thus

while we find chat for y^m they work for us

B. dy’e see that lady in^e y^e mask

wee’l tell ye what she comes to ask

tho an unconscionable task

us how her lover fast to bind

false as her selfe false as y^e faithless wind

C. that other brings her fav’rite flea

with golden fetters lock and key

if t’has a sting our thoughts does crave

or only a tongue as other females have

D. thinking our notions too jejune

some take their aime at madam moon

some bring hard queryes which we crack

and throw the gazeing world y^e kernels back

E. heres honest tarr who woud his crown afford

were he paid off ’ere he returns aboard

to know what he must ask in vain

when we shall be at y^e french again

F. euclid where art tho ’twas before despaird

now maist thou have thy circle squar’d

but art is long and thou must stay

nor Rome was built nor athens in a day

G. we know s^r, but too well your case

some powerfull faction right or wrong embrace

or starve and dye without a place!

H. avoid you rowt of noisy fools

once more you are not in our rules

could we but please y^e learned few

which send from far, we could dispence w^th you

I. whither, lost wretches! whither would you run

by guilt or by unhappy love undon!

what need you perish or despair

if you’d have aid an angel shows you where.

K. this query’s quickly understood

he only asks d’ye think his coffee good

yet woud croud in tho just by th’ door

or uowd heed take our letters in no more.

L. these dainty nutts i must not loose

nor burn my paws b your leave dear puss!

if those that put em there enquire

twas you not i that robb’d y^e fire

how sweet is interlopers hire!

M. all englands rarityes are gatherd here

from unknown earth fire water air

thousands agree in such a glorious strife

or else a moments work wou’d last a life

N. with beak and talons i infest

those cuckoes that invade my nest

and if minerva yet supply

my ancient gift in prophecy

all scab’d and old they in some

hollow tree shall dye

An Emblem of y^e Athenian Society. 1692. Engraved by Frederik Hendrik van Hove (ca. 1630–ca. 1715).

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As with today’s cyber-communities, the Athenian Society did not actually exist outside of the unique space created for it by ephemeral discourses.

Although this kind of imagined community — located within a network of correspondence which may or may not have been faked (at least to start with) — was dismissed in its day as a simple literary hoax, there is every reason to believe that John Dunton, bookseller, and his fellow collaborators created a real cultural phenomenon around the Athenian Society. For example, the antiquarian and naturalist, John Aubrey, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a close friend of both Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes, was an avid reader of the Athenian Mercury, even quoting from its pages in such manuscripts as his 1696 Miscellanies upon the Following Subjects.

In some ways, one could characterize Dunton’s picturing of this immaterial learned community as an early-modern exercise in branding. The emblem of the Athenian Society, which sold as a separate print and was prefixed to various Dunton publications, circulated much like a trademark. It essentialized the inessential, and gave a familiar look-and-feel to the strange literary dealings of the fictive society and its customer base (“the world and we exchanging thus / while we find chat for y^m they work for us”).

In other words, the emblem helped build the Athenian Society brand, which had enough buzz attaching to it that more and more correspondents (including women) joined in the public dialogue.

The emblem’s success as a brand was registered by Elkanah Settle in his misogynistic burlesque of the Athenian Society and its growing middle-class female readership (which Settle typecast in the character of “Dorothy Tickleteat, the Islington Milkmaid”) — a drama published anonymously in 1693 under the title

The new Athenian comedy: containing the politicks, oeconomicks, tacticks, crypticks, apocalypticks, stypticks, scepticks, pneumaticks, theologicks, poeticks, mathematicks, sophisticks, pragmaticks, dogmaticks, &c. of that most learned society.

Settle’s play was “more than a casual thrust at a successful periodical”; it was “the culmination of a carefully laid plot” (McEwen 77) designed to undermine the authority of the Athenian Society by means curiously similar to the 20th century’s “Sokal affair,” predicated on the publication of Alan Sokal’s hoax article in the journal Social Text in 1996.

Sokal’s piece purported to be a postmodern interpretation of the theory of quantum gravity; the fact that such “nonsense” was accepted for publication by a prominent journal was widely taken to demonstrate the prevalence in certain academic quarters of sloppy thinking about science.

(Jan Golinski, “Science peace?” n. pag.)

The 17th-century Settle affair began about two months before The New Athenian Comedy first appeared, when a letter from “Your Unknown Friend and Servant, W. T.” was published in the Athenian Mercury for Tuesday, 9 May 1693. With his correspondence, W. T. alerted the penny-sheet’s editors that an earlier published answer to a reader’s question “Whither the Wind goes after a Storm” had opened the Athenian Society to charges of blasphemy, and W. T. proposed to help “clear you from so malicious and undeserv’d Imputation” with a reasoned rebuttal of “this Mushrome Adversary” who so accused the Athenians. W. T. then argues on the Society’s behalf, bolstering his case with references to several published authors, including a particular passage on p. 48 of “the Learned Antiquary Mr. Ashmole in this Chymia Sacra.” In response, the unsuspecting editors of the Athenian Mercury published W. T.’s correspondence with grateful acknowledgment of “our Unknown Friends Civilities,” and the hoax was revealed in Settle’s New Athenian Comedy when the character, Freeman, establishes not only that the authorities cited in W. T.’s printed letters were fictitious, but that the editors’ “deep Athenian Universality ... your Boasted Antiquity-Wisdom,” which let such errors pass without comment or correction, had lost all credibility.

In setting the scene for the Athenians’ eventual unmasking as inauthentic scholars, Settle has the character Obadiah Grub (a caricature of Samuel Wesley) describe the Society’s new brand of “Universall Learning,”

... we must say for our Society, that we are (take us together) the whole Bodlaean of Learning, Universall, as you well observe, being the very Crest of our Scutcheon.

(Elkanah Settle, The New Athenian Comedy 21)

the quality of which is indicated by specious references from its professors of poetry (Grub is listed in the Dramatis Personae as “Divinity and Poetry Professor of the Society”) to such weighty alchemical treatises as Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, as when Grub avers:

As for Mr. Ashmole, that more modern English Pen, I am of opinion that nothing has made so Elaborate an Extraction of the quintessence and spirit of Divinity as his Chymia Sacra have done.

(Settle, The New Athenian Comedy 21)

It is, of course, quickly revealed that the Society’s “Universall Learning” whereby “no Art nor Mystery, Depth nor Shallow, Writer or Authour comes amiss to you” (Settle 21) is all a fraud — an “errant Romance.”

Judging by the thrust of his play, Elkanah Settle was most troubled by the Athenian Society’s successful promotion of a faceless universality. The Society’s redistribution of learning from anonymous sources to Everyman and Everywoman — the Athenian Mercury was marketed to “all men and both Sexes,” both the apprentice and the servingmaid — via a new communications technology which concealed the identities of those who asked the questions and those who answerered them, brought to the fore cultural anxieties about uncontrolled public speech and its potential for political dissent. The Athenian Mercury’s impersonal “ask-the-experts” format was a popular innovation that threatened educational hierarchies along with traditional controls over what was learned, why, and by whom.

In Volume I, No. 1 of the Athenian Mercury, Dunton explained the new information brand:

The Design is briefly, to satisfy all ingenious and curious Enquirers in to Speculations, Divine, Moral and Natural, &c. and to remove those Difficulties and Dissatisfactions, that shame or fear of appearing ridiculous by asking Questions, may cause several Persons to labour under, who now have opportunities of being resolv’d in any Question without knowing their Informer.

(Athenian Mercury I.1; qtd. in McEwen 23)

Questions were invited by means of the following notice:

All Persons whatever may be resolved gratis in any Question that their own satisfaction or Curiosity shall prompt ’em to, if they send their Questions by a Penny Post Letter to Mr. Smith at his Coffee-house in Stocks-Market in the Poultry, where orders are given for the Reception of such Letters, and care shall be taken for their Resolution by the next Weekly Paper after their sending.

(Athenian Mercury I.1; qtd. in McEwen 26)

Just one week later, the editors were purportedly so deluged with letters from correspondents that they asked readers, in No. 2 of the Athenian Mercury, to hold back on their questions:

In this number, the second and last of the weekly issues, appeared the first of many requests to the readers to wait for further notice before sending any more questions, hinting that there was a backlog of four thousand. Three weeks and six numbers later, new questions were once more invited (I.8, Sat 18 Apr [16]91). Whether the editors were actually so swamped at such an early date cannot be ascertained, but their request gave the impression of a wide circulation and great public interest.

(Gilbert McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House 26–7)

Elkanah Settle rightly located Dunton’s clever consolidation of the new educational brand in the Athenian Society’s emblem, which Settle explicitly critiqued in the Preface to his New Athenian Comedy:

’Tis true our generous Athenians have lately vouchsafed to give us some small Lineaments of theirs in Miniature, in a Sculp before their Young Students Library. But there alas, they are pleased to wrap their Faces in Mosaic Veils, very magisterially intimating that they are Persons that daily converse so near with Divinity, that their shining Faces are too dazling for humane View, and therefore no less kindly than modestly, thus like Bays his Morning Pictur’d in a Cloud. I confess Mr. Engraver has made a pretty Jolly Company of ’em: but there indeed the Painter is a little too poetical; and our Athenians have a little strain’d a point: For when the true Muster Roll of that not overnumerous Society shall be examined, for supply of that defect, you must consider that the Veil’d Faces are by way of Faggots to fill up the Troop: And in that fair Convention of divine Enthusiasts you must not take ’em all for the Boanerges of Wit, the Organs of Thunder, but like Guns in a Fireship, a Tire of painted wooden Tools to make up the Show.

(Settle, The New Athenian Comedy a1^v)

Van Hove’s engraving did indeed put an institutional “face” on the Athenian Society which was, in reality, a self-organizing learned society, convened by a bookseller — a small

... club of self-styled learned men who met at Smith’s coffee house ... made up of Dunton, Wesley, and a third brother-in-law, Richard Sault, with Dr John Norris making occasional contributions.

(Helen Berry, n. pag.)

What role Dunton’s beloved wife and savvy business partner, Elizabeth, who managed her husband’s bookshop, played in the Society is not known, but her influence was surely a factor in Dunton’s decision to become “the first bookseller to realize the market potential among female readers” (Berry, n. pag.), some of whom are pictured in the emblem. The Duntons would go on to publish a woman’s book of poetry in 1696 (Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Poems on Several Occasions), and Rowe earlier contributed poems to the Athenian Mercury, by whose editors she was styled “Philomela, the Pindarick Lady.”

With his critical prefatory remarks, Elkanah Settle links the power of the printed image with the demagoguery of Boanergism, arguing that the Athenian Society emblem encouraged a mass audience to “build Alters to the Unknown” (The New Athenian Comedy a1^v). This suspicion of the persuasive role of unexamined images was an inevitable outcome of the age’s rhetorical training, with its stress on visual memory.

According to Lord Bacon, Emblems are of use in the art of memory, as sensible objects strike the mind stronger than what is intellectual. Thus, it is easier to retain the image of a sportsman hunting a hare, of an apothecary ranging his boxes, an orator making a speech, a boy repeating verses, or a player acting his part; than the corresponding notions of invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and action. Works abr. Vol. 1. p. 136. and Vol. 2. p. 475. Vol. 3. p. 106.

(1753 Supplement to Chambers’ Cyclopaedia,
edited by George Lewis Scott, et al.,
vol. 1, sv Emblem)

Playwrights and poets such as Settle — who himself staged elaborate public spectacles, tapping “the contemporary vogue for heroic and operatic drama” with his extravagant production of operas during the 1690s; producing a series of popular entertainments at Bartholomew Fair; and, in his capacity as London’s “city poet,” designing the annual pageants for the lord mayor’s show in 1691–5, 1698–1702, and 1708 (Abigail Williams, n. pag.) — were all too aware of the way in which a well-presented and widely-circulated image took hold in the social psyche.

As Dunton himself would later observe, Settle’s play, which lacked any competing spectacle of its own, was no match for the power of the Athenian brand, which veiled the identity of the Athenians and their correspondents in seductive mystery and promised consumers a constant supply of “novelties” (Dunton repeatedly defined “Athenianism” as the love of novelty).

This Play was a poor Performance, writ however, on Purpose to expose us, but fail’d so far in the Design of it, that it promoted ours. ... Mr. Settle’s Genius was quite run out toward the conclusion of the Third Act, and cou’d not carry it an Inch farther....

(John Dunton, Life and Errors 257–8;
qtd. in McEwen 77)

Significantly, the Athenian Mercury had launched without any accompanying brand, which was Dunton’s inspired creation over time as his “Athenian Project” took shape in dialogue with a growing audience:

The Athenian Society as a public image did not exist at the very beginning. There was no mention in the Mercury of a learned society until the periodical had existed for over a year, and then only after two “outsiders” had provided the basis for it. The first was Jonathan Swift, whose Ode to the Athenian Society he sent to Dunton on St. Valentine’s Day, 1692; it was published in the Fifth Supplement, most probably on All Fool’s Day. The second was Charles Gildon, whose anonymous History of the Athenian Society, published late in May 1692, expanded and ornamented the myth of an all-knowing Athenian Society, first celebrated by Swift’s Ode as the “great Unknown ... far exalted Men,” Protean in the “Variety of Shapes” they assumed “to please and satisfie Mankind.”

For the first year, however, Dunton and his two principal writers worked anonymously, not yet having been “identified” as the Athenian Society. Neither questions nor answers were signed. In the columns of the Mercury Dunton was referred to as “our Bookseller,” and at the bottom of the verso page the publisher was indicated as “P. Smart,” from Volume One, No. 1, through Volume Two, No. 15.

The periodical first mentioned the qualifications of its writers on Tuesday 5 May 1691 (I.13), when it was announced that “We have now taken into our Society a Civilian, a Doctor in Physick, and a Chyrurgeon, on purpose to be more serviceable to the Age; wherefore we think fit to give Notice that all the most nice Physical, Chyrurgical, Anatomical, and Law Questions ... shall also have their Answer either in Single Numbers, or at the end of every Volume.” Medical and legal questions, never became numerous, however, and seldom required or received a highly technical answer. The original three writers were certainly “masters” of this part of the design, as well as of their obvious specialties, and the legal and medical Athenians were most probably fictitious.

To Wesley fell questions on religion, history, “chronology,” and literature; to Sault, those on mathematics, surveying, physics, and astronomy. Questions on courtship, marriage, and social behavior were no one’s special domain, nor were those on apparitions, witchcraft, and other manifestations of the supernatural and the marvelous. Contributions by Dunton himself are sometimes recognizable by their style and subject. He was sympathetic toward the problems of apprentices, and interested in all kinds of social questions.

(McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House 24–25)

It was not until a year later, in May 1692, that the folio-sized “An Emblem of y^e Athenian Society,” with its creative appropriation of ancient and modern icons of learning (Athens, Rome, Oxford, and Cambridge), first appeared as the frontispiece to Dunton’s Young Students Library. The emblem, which was well cut and printed, made clever use of conventional forms of mockery and Restoration-era wit. The comedies of manners attacking “the corrupt Custom of the Age” (as Charles Gildon phrased it) which had flourished on the Restoration stage were here given new visual form. Similarly, the cavalier contempt for the crowd (“you rowt of noisy fools”) that we find in much of the age’s popular literature — especially from hack writers and journalists and dramatists — was both stimulated and constrained by the contradictory need to please the “rowt” as well as “y^e learned few” (verse set H). By century-end this sort of social satire had become a commonplace literary conceit which audiences most likely expected and knew how to interpret.

The Athenian Society emblem also effectively incorporated familiar topoi from astrology and the ever-popular almanacs. While acknowledging that some correspondents “bring hard queryes which we crack / and throw the gazeing world y^e kernels back” (verse set D), the Athenian Society’s style of sociable science primarily catered to correspondents’ interests in prognostication and the desire for expert guidance on matters of daily life. This was the stock-in-trade of the astrologers, many of whom were skilled mathematicians. In a world of vicissitude — a state of being which was never far from public consciousness throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods — predictions of what the future might hold, or of the probable outcome of a particular course of human action, were sought after by peasant and prince alike. From the low-born to the high-born, everyone had need of helps for preparing oneself to meet changing circumstances.

In addition, there was the rich visual culture of the emblem genre itself to be tapped, and the Athenian Society print drew effectively on this as well. Emblems, with their didactic juxtapositions of visual and verbal symbolic languages, were still a popular genre in the 1690s, and were used to encode everything from political dissent, to a synopsis of the arts & sciences, to the most profound moral lessons in the art of living well.

While the Athenian Society’s emblem would hardly constitute what Edgar Wind has called a “great symbol” (see below), it was a good symbol, I think, and serviceable to the commercial enterprise for which it was designed. Furthermore, with its clean use of lettered callouts and extensive (albeit suitably ambiguous) gloss, it contributed to the evolution of iconographic methods then underway.

The Emblem Tradition

The emblem tradition was launched in 1531 with Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber. Alciato (1492–1550) was a distinguished Milanese legal scholar and jurist whose book of emblems passed through over 150 editions by the end of the 18th century, and inspired so many imitations that there were over 2,000 editions of emblem collections published in Europe before 1700.

As conceived by Alciato, the emblem had a tripartite form, combining a title or motto with an image and a moralizing, epigrammatic verse. Luce Giard has argued that emblematic literature, with its complex interplay of visual and verbal and “compounding of levels of abstraction within the order of representation,” helped promote the “new configuration of knowledge whence would come our modern cast of mind.” With the emblem, writes Giard,

... the image is king. It speaks and makes sense, while the secondary, illustrative role now goes to the text which accompanies it. Eye and spirit engage in extraordinary mental gymnastics, an incessant coming and going between two registers of signs: figures and words. The emblem’s compounding of levels of abstraction within the order of representation is something on which all sides drew: Counter-Reformers made use of it, and so did the Reformers, despite their hostility towards the cult of images. The Jesuits did not hesitate to turn emblems into a pedagogical and apologetical tool and taught their pupils how to compose them.... The success of emblem books was only one of the routes by which the printed image established a hold on intellectual life. Images of all sorts abounded in Renaissance publications: their readers had grown accustomed to study texts which were inseparable from their illustrations. The discourse of words finds an answer in that of the image, in a series of visual prompts which participate in the construction of meaning. The eye learns to move between two systems of signs, images are now an integral part of a knowledge.

(Luce Giard, “Remapping Knowledge,
Reshaping Institutions” 31)

Alciato borrowed the threefold form of the emblem, along with much of its content, from earlier Quattrocento arcana, which Alciato was determined to demystify. While retaining earlier artists’ use of cryptic symbols to suggest a thought by withholding it, Alciato trivialized the ancient mysteries these images unfolded by reformatting the whole as a series of moral anecdotes, idylls, and epigrams.

In effect, the Renaissance emblem became a genre of reification. Alciato’s introduction of explicit moralizing within a conventional literary frame converted what was supposed to be a life-long process (of self-discovery and accompanying initiation into divine truths) into a set of fixed platitudes, abstracted from the complex and changing totality of an individual’s lifepath. The reified moral could be studied, like all other things, in isolation.

As Edgar Wind has complained, after the emblem, symbolism became an “irritating sort of learned game,” whereby readers — such as the busy Politian, whose list of “little employments” included “the invention of cryptic symbols for lovers, which would be understood by the lovers only, and ‘exercise in vain the conjectures of others’” (Wind 164) — sought to invent and decipher aenigmata.

Nonetheless, Wind has also described the lasting rhetorical value of an emblem skillfully deployed as a “sophistic device,” arguing that the best examples of the art form are capable of releasing “a counterplay of imagination and thought by which each becomes an irritant to the other, and both may grow.” In skilled hands, Wind argues, allegory can be so much more than simply “what it is reputed to be — an artifice by which a set of ideas are attached, one by one, to a set of images”; hence, “persuasive allegory” does more than just duplicate.

If a thought is intricate and difficult to follow, it needs to be fastened to a transparent image from which it may derive a borrowed simplicity. On the other hand, if an idea is plain there is an advantage in tracing it through a rich design which may help to disguise its bareness.

(Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance 27)

For Edgar Wind, the medallion crafted for the Florentine humanist, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), was a fine example of the symbol raised to a universal art form: “the image has an inherent eloquence ... it speaks the universal language of the imagination,” especially to “experienced men,” even if they have chosen to reject it. With this claim, Wind was responding to E. M. Forster’s contention that “if a work of art parades a mystifying element, it is to that extent not a work of art, ‘not an immortal Muse but a Sphinx who dies as soon as her riddles are answered’.” Countered Wind,

Certainly there are symbols which fit this admirable description. They disturb us as long as we do not understand them, and bore us as soon as we do. The winged eyes and ears that flutter around an Allegory of Fame by Filarete, who associated them with the “winged words” of Homer, are a good example of what Mr Forster means. But Alberti’s winged eye is a contrary instance. It shows that a great symbol is the reverse of a sphinx; it is more alive when its riddle is answered.

(Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance 235)

All

mystical images, because they retain a certain articulation by which they are distinguished as “hedges” or umbraculae, belong to an intermediate state, which invites further “complication” above, and further “explication” below. They are never final in the sense of a literal statement, which would fix the mind to a given point; nor are they final in the sense of the mystical Absolute in which all images would vanish. Rather they keep the mind in continued suspense by presenting the paradox of an “inherent transcendence”; they persistently hint at more than they say.

(Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance 206)

Even with the emblem’s defining preference for detailed explication, there is a sense in which all early-modern emblematic art, because rooted in an aesthetic of mystery, continued to function as a rhetoric of suggestion. In general, 17th-century print culture mirrored the age’s preference for a double rhetoric of conceal+reveal, where truths could be veiled but still communicated by being made so obvious that they were overlooked (still a sound principle of cryptography) and multiple audiences could be addressed at different levels with the exact same message because the symbolism unfolded different meanings to different groups.

A good example of this would be the expert manipulation of political symbolism in the famous emblematic frontispiece, designed by William Marshall, for the best-selling Eikon Basilike or the Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published in 1649. Purportedly authored by Charles I himself, the Eikon Basilike was widely held to be an extraordinarily moving and persuasive account — from the royalist point of view — of the regicide.

Title page (letterpress) for Elkanah Settle’s The New Athenian Comedy

The drama was published anonymously in 1693, with the Epistle Dedicatory signed with the initials “E. S.” There is no record of any performance, and Gilbert McEwen argues that “The wordiness of the text and its lack of the kind of ‘spectacle’ found in Settle’s more successful works, such as the Fairy Queen (1693), an operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggest that the author did not have performance in mind.” (77)

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Frontispiece portrait of John Dunton (1659–1732), printed with The Life and Errors of John Dunton in 1705

Engraved by M. Van der Gucht, after a drawing by E. Knight.

Integrates the emblem of Dunton’s propagandistic newspaper, Pegasus with News (40 numbers published in 1696, during the hiatus separating vols. 19 and 20 of the Athenian Mercury), in the lozenge at bottom center. As conceived by Dunton, the Pegasus brand combined news told from a Williamite (vs. Jacobite) political perspective with the occasional literary essay, its particular mix of political journalism and entertainment symbolized by a messenger who could go through the air, riding on Pegasus, yet still call at Parnassus “and oblige the lovers of the Nine Sisters with a line from the Muses, to let the World know the sentiments of that Speculative and Sublime Society, as to the Publick Transactions” (I.1; qtd. in McEwen 212).

The verses below Dunton’s portrait read: “ATHENIANISM was John Dunton’s thought. / And in these features to Perfection brought; / For Knight and Gucht that Mystick Art did find, / To paint John’s PROJECTS person, and his Mind. / They with the likeness, warmth and Grace do give, And make his Picture seem to think and live: / And’s Heraldry he from the Muses farms, / For PEGASUS shou’d be a Poet’s Arms.”

The Pegasus brand shared its central theme with the Athenian Mercury, which Dunton described in a 1691 issue as “signifying a Messenger” — “Mercuries” being a “proper Title for the single Papers, which run about to Coffee houses and elsewhere, to seek out Athenians” (Athenian Mercury I.12.1; qtd. in McEwen 28). (In Greek/Roman mythology, Hermes or Mercury, the “loyal messenger,” is also the god of eloquence, intellect & imagination.)

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Title page (letterpress) for the Athenian Society’s 1692 publication, The Young-Students-Library

This encyclopedic introduction to the new science (“from the year sixty five, to this time”) included the Athenian Society emblem as its frontispiece.

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Impresa (or personal device) of the Florentine humanist, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)

The winged eye is glossed in the typically cryptical style of Florentine Neoplatonism, employing the Ciceronian device, QUID TUM (in English: What Then?), to powerful effect as a memento to live mindfully.

Centuries later, Robert Hooke would describe Alberti as “the Vitruvius of his Time: He being a Scholar, an excellent Painter, Sculptor and Mechanist, and an excellent Architect.”

Reinforcing the visual arguments of the Eikon Basilike emblem was the bilingual gloss directly below (with Latin on the left, English on the right).

The English verses read:

Though clogg’d with weights of miseries

Palm-like Depress’d, I higher rise.

And as th’unmoved Rock out-grave’s

The boistrous Windes and rageing waves:

So triumph I. And shine more bright

In sad Affliction’s Darksom night.

That Splendid, but yet toilsom Crown

Regardlessly I trample down.

With joie I take this Crown of thorn,

Though sharp, yet easie to be born.

That heav’nlie Crown, already mine,

I View with eies of Faith divine.

I slight vain things; and do embrace

Glorie, the just reward of Grace.

Frontispiece to Eikon Basilike, 1649. Design by William Marshall.

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Lois Potter has identified the royalist codes at play in this best-known and most influential of all images then in circulation of Charles I: the motif of light shining in darkness, and the intermingling of favorite royal and Christian paradoxes (the palm tree which grows the more for being weighed down; the rock unmoved in the stormy sea; the crown of thorns which will become a crown of glory). Plus, Marshall’s design made adroit use of an emblematic style (newly out of favor with such portrait artists as Sir Peter Lely) which placed the contradictory concepts side-by-side, “exploiting the grotesqueness that results from their coexistence.” (Potter 68)

This particular layout was new with some of the 1649 editions of Eikon Basilike. None of the 1648 editions include the “Explanation of the Embleme” and some of the editions of 1649 feature different layouts of graphic and gloss more suited to what we now call a “landscape” page orientation.

Authorship of the immensely popular Eikon Basilike continued to be disputed for decades after its sensational publication within a few days of the king’s execution in January 1649. In 1692, Anthony Walker’s

A true account of the author of a book entituled Eikon basilike or, The pourtraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings: proved to be written by Dr. Gauden, late Bishop of Worcester. With an answer to all objections made by Dr. Hollingsworth and others. Published for publick satisfaction, by Anthony Walker, D.D. late rector of Fyfield in Essex. With an attestation under the hand of the late Earl of Anglesey to the same purpose....

was printed for the London bookseller, Nathanael Ranew, operating under the sign of “the Kings-Arms in St. Paul’s Church-Yard,” and claimed to have settled the question of the work’s authorship once and for all.

But by then, the Eikon Basilike print had taken on a life of its own. It had become a potent cultural symbol, and was still capable of inspiring political passions, on all sides.

Yet another style of emblem developed to allow memorable synopses of the various arts & sciences, along with other common practices and cultural values authors wished to popularize. Typically, such emblems would be themed, and published in a single book, as in Alciato, where emblems were originally organized into 19 categories: virtues, vices, nature, astrology, love, fortune, honor, the prince, the republic, life, death, friendship, enmity, vengeance, peace, knowledge, ignorance, marriage, and trees. These books of symbols were a forerunner of the collections of icons, themed images, and clip art that graphic designers purchase today, and they dominated the print culture of the day, as certain (loose) standards began to form around the widely disseminated symbols. The stock image of Prudence, for instance, or of History, was discernible in just about every variation on the theme.

The visual canon developed around Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593; illustrated, 1603), another book of symbols which would be repeatedly adapted for the next two centuries. Ripa’s original handbook, which passed through seven Italian editions during his own lifetime, continued to be issued long after his death, with editors adding more and more allegories to Ripa’s starting set, until they numbered over a thousand.

The influence of Ripa’s handbook on the visual culture at large was enormous. The “figvres hyerogliphiques” it contained “des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences, des causes naturelles, des humeurs differentes, & des passions humaines” were advertised as indispensable visual aids for all “oratevrs, poetes, sculpteurs, peintres, ingenieurs, autheurs de medailled, de deuises, de ballets, & de poëmes dramatiques” who wished to appropriately embellish their discourses, as Jean Baudoin put it on the title page of his French edition of the Inconologie in 1644.

Certainly, no designer could ignore the newly-established canon. Robert Hooke, for instance, had recourse to the Arundel Library’s “Cesari Ripa of Iconologia” in April 1673, and no doubt, what he found there, had some influence on his later design of an identity for the Christ Church Hospital Mathematical-School for Boys in January 1674. Hooke described his graphic design for this ill-fated institution in a diary entry for 21 January 1674:

With Lem at Sessions house. At Christ Church hospitall. Delivered in design for badge. Which was two in compassing a prospect with a crown over and a Labell under in the CC was written Ambit et fovet in the Label a Carolo II data fuit in the prospect was a blewcoat boy attended by Geometry Arithmetic and Astronomy with hac via itur ad astra. At a distance the Herculean piller past through with a ship and trans . . . . . . . . over and far off terra incognita. At Mr. Garway with Mr. Hill who came and Read over my paper. DH....

Two days later, Hooke records that “My badge agreed upon and proposalls.”

While various Italian editions of Ripa’s Iconologia circulated in England, the first English edition of Ripa’s book of emblems did not appear until 1709, as edited by Pierce Tempest and illustrated by Isaac Fuller. Tempest’s edition of the Iconologia included “Three Hundred Twenty-six Humane Figures, with their Explanations,” representing his choice selection of the “Virtues, Vices, Passions, Arts, Humours, Elements and Celestial Bodies; As Design’d by The Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Modern Italians,” all advertised as “Useful for Orators, Poets, Painters, Sculptors, and all Lovers of Ingenuity.”

The following emblem for the art of printing (“Stampa” in the original Italian) is from Tempest’s 1709 English edition of the Iconologia. The image was one of four on a page, with gloss on the facing page.

In 1650, Virginia Ferrar (along with her older cousin, Mary Collett, and her father, John Ferrar) bound 200 printed copies of the popular Eikon Basilike in the workshop at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire. The books were intended for sale in the Americas, especially the British colony of Virginia.

We surmise that Virginia Ferrar learned the art of book-binding from the “daughter of a Cambridge bookbinder” (probably the daughter of Thomas or John Buck, brothers who were printers and bookbinders active in Cambridge ca. 1625–1670) who lived in the manor house at Little Gidding for about a year.

The two facing C’s used here by Hooke recalled a monogram of King Charles II. Alexander Pope made a less flattering reference to the same royal brand when, half a century later, he signed a mock proclamation to his Dunciad (titled “By Authority”) with back to back C’s.

Another allusion may have been to the columns of Hercules, which were first used to symbolize the new learning that would be taught at the Christ Church Hospital Mathematical-School for Boys in the allegorical engraved title page for Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (London, 1620). A C|C designation was sometimes used on maps to signify columna|columna, “the Columns of Hercules, which according to Classical tradition guarded the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean opposite Gades, and which some authorities said were located on an island or islands.” (Van Duzer & Dines, “The Only Mappamundi in a Bestiary Context: Cambridge, MS Fitzwilliam 254” 5–6)

Hooke would have been familiar with all 3 connotations.

The above gloss reads:

Fig. 282. Stampa: P R I N T I N G

A Woman in a white chequer’d Habit with the Letters of the Alphabet on it; holds a Trumpet in one Hand, round which is a Scroul inscrib’d UBIQUE; and in the other, the Sempervive, or House-leek, with the Word SEMPER on it: a Printing-press by her, with some Implements.

White shews that the Impression should be pure and correct. Chequer’d, to signifie the little Boxes for the Letters. UBIQUE signifies its being Famous EVERY WHERE.

Fig. 282, emblem for the art of Printing. Page 70 and facing from Pierce Tempest’s Iconologia: or, Moral Emblems, by Caesar Ripa (London, 1709).

There is not enough detail to tell whether the wooden press pictured here is of the old style, or the new style introduced for the “Publick benefit” to an English audience by Joseph Moxon in his Mechanick Exercises on Printing. Moxon described his “New-fashion’d” wooden press as the invention of Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571–1638), the famous Dutch printer-bookseller and publisher of geographical charts and maps, who had 9 such presses in his printing-house, each of which was named after one of the 9 muses:

But before I proceed, I think it not amiss to let you know who was the Inventer of this New-fashion’d Press, accounting my self so much oblig’d to his Ingeniety for the curiosity of this contrivance, that should I pass by this oppertunity without nameing him, I should be injurious to his Memory.

It was Willem Jansen Blaew of Amsterdam: a Man as well famous for good and great Printing, as for his many Astronomical and Geographical exhibitions to the World. In his Youth he was bred up to Joynery, and having learn’d his Trade, betook himself (according to the mode of Holland) to Travel, and his fortune leading him to Denmark, when the noble Tycho Brahe was about setting up his Astronomical Observatory, was entertain’d into his service for the making his Mathematical-Instruments to Observe withal; in which Instrument-making he shew’d himself so intelligent and curious, that according to the general report of many of his personal acquaintance, all or most of the Syderal Observations set forth in Tycho’s name, he was intrusted to make, as well as the Instruments.

And before these Observations were publish’d to the World, Tycho, to gratify Blaew, gave him the Copies of them, with which he came away to Amsterdam, and betook himself to the making of Globes, according to those Observations. But as his Trade increased, he found it necessary to deal in Geographical Maps and Books also, and grew so curious in Engraving, that many of his best Globes and Maps were Engraved by his own Hands; and by his conversation in Printing of Books at other Printing-houses, got such in-sight in this Art, that he set up a Printing-house of his own. And now finding inconveniencies in the obsolete Invention of the Press, He contrived a remedy to every inconvenience, and fabricated nine of these New-fashioned Presses, set them all on a row in his Printing-house, and call’d each Press by the name of one of the Muses.

(Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or, the
Doctrine of Handy-Works for 1683, Vol. 2,
Numb. IV, § 10, “Of the Press,” pp. 38–9)

Many a poet would have no doubt been dismayed by Blaeu’s worldly appropriation of the artist’s source of genius and divine inspiration, but the allegorical framework was already in place and widely available to all, largely because of the prevalence of emblematic discourses. In Greek mythology, the Muses were 9 inferior divinities (the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne) who presided over the fine and liberal arts:

Clio, the Muse of history
Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry
Thalia, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry
Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy
Terpsichore, the Muse of music and dancing
Erato, the Muse of erotic poetry
Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry and rhetoric
Urania, the Muse of astronomy
and Polyhymnia (or Polymnia), the Muse of sacred hymns and harmony.

Blaeu’s symbolic integration of the fine arts into his printshop, and their embodiment in the technologies of his trade, gave a significant spiritual coloring to the printer’s art and activities. Blaeu was one of the great early printers, passing on his values to the next generation along with his tools and inventions. In 1664, Filips von Zesen remarked on the “Nine Muses” in the workshop of Blaeu’s son, Joan. (Davis & Carter, Mechanick Exercises 48)

If Harold Bailey is correct in locating the traces of a primitive Gnostic symbolism in the emblematic printers’ marks and paper-marks associated with the Huguenot-run paper mills (and Bailey argues that in Europe, paper-making was primarily a French art, introduced into England and Scotland by French refugees), there were doubtless other visual messages, beyond those being explicated for commercial purposes, hidden in the above emblem for Printing.

Even with the reduced mystery of the fixed gloss, which Ripa and his subsequent editors compiled from the writings of the usual list of authorities, there was still an ethical imperative inscribed in the very practice of the trade itself, which our modern iconography has since lost. As Tempest’s title clearly stated, the Iconologia was first and foremost a collection of “Moral Emblems.” In a holdover from the earlier symbolism, human labor in the arts & sciences continued to be represented as a moral, and potentially redeeming, act.

Today, the standard icon for printing has become a miniature laser printer. The one appearing on the toolbar of the software program I’m using now is a little green rectangle, set in perspective, with a sheet of lined paper issuing from the top. With the advent of cheap desktop printers, printing is no longer the complicated, communal practice it once was, and our modern icon encodes this fact: the human printer has been displaced by her technologies. Still, the age-old moral questions attaching to human labor in the arts & sciences persist, even as they have become less visible.

An even more ancient art than printing — engraving — received an emblematic treatment in the frontispiece to John Evelyn’s Sculptura (London, 1662). Evelyn, who did the design himself, personified the engraver’s art as a thoughtful young woman surrounded, as was typical, by identifiable tools of the trade.

(above LEFT) 17th-century personification of Sculptura as chalcography (the art of engraving on copper or brass). Frontispiece engraving by A. Hertochs (fl. 1652–61) after a design by John Evelyn.

On page 81 of his Chalcography, Evelyn notes: “... Nor must I here forget Mr. Hertoc who has grav’d the Frontispiece for EIKON BAZ. in fol. and that of this Treatise, with many other.” As far as I know, this is the only evidence there is associating Hertochs with the frontispiece engraving to the Eikon Basilike, which was designed and originally engraved by William Marshall. However, it is likely that Evelyn is correct in his assertion, since the best-selling Eikon Basilike was reprinted 57 times, requiring several new plates for the frontispiece: we know that Marshall himself re-engraved it seven times, and Robert Vaughan re-engraved it once. Hertochs may well have re-engraved it, too.

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(above RIGHT) Facing title page to Evelyn’s Sculptura, or, the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (London, 1662).

Evelyn’s crest is given at bottom, followed by the Latin motto: “XXXI. EXOD. XXXV. / Implevi cum Spiritu Dei, Sapientia, & Intelligentia, / & Scientia in omni Opere, &c.”

The reference here is to the Christian bible’s Exodus, chapt. 31, verses 3–5:

“And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, To devise cunning works, to work in gold and in silver, and in brass, And in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship.”

and to Exodus, chapt. 35, verses 31–33:

“And he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; And to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, And in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work.”

The motto makes a fitting tribute to engravers and to the author about to celebrate them and their “divine labours.” As Evelyn explains in his History, engraving originates with divinity: in the story of Moses “we have the Tables of stone, engraven by the Finger of GOD himself” (15). Furthermore, engraving was a divinely-sanctioned Adamic art: “Bibliander will have Letters and Sculpture from Adam,” used by Adam to prepare “a Volume of Plants,” as described by Thomas Aquinas, “though whither these Books of his were so miraculously found out, and preserv’d by the renouned Trismegistus, we leave to the more credulous.” (17, 12) From Adam, the art “descended to the AEgyptians by Misraim, and so was communicated to the Persians, Medes and Assyrians, thence to the Greeks, and finally to the Romans from whom it was deriv’d to us” (17–18).

As such, the commandment “Thou shalt not make to thy self any graven image” does not prohibit the engraver’s art — only engraving that has degenerated into idolatry.

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The image, and indeed the book itself, was intended to document “the dignity of these Arts” (Sculptura and Pictura), and to recommend that Sculptura be restored to its former glory as a Liberal Art, deserving of financial support and study by “Princes and Illustrious Persons,” male and female alike. (Evelyn 143) Evelyn’s book contains several passages with long lists of “examples sufficient to vindicate its dignity, and the value that has been set upon it” (132–3) by such recognized figures as Socrates and Plato, both of whom were learned in the “Art of Carving.” In one such passage (click here to open the text in a second window), Evelyn stresses the gentility and “universal” learning of the best engravers (both male and female), carefully noting that Sculptura was “of old so nobly reputed, that amongst the Greeks, a Slave might not be taught it.” (133) Here, and elsewhere, he couples verbal with visual rhetoric:

... it is worth the observation, that the Ages which did most excell in Eloquence, did also flourish most in these Arts, as in the time of Demosthenes and the same Cicero; and as they appear’d, so they commonly vanish’d together; and this remark is universal.

(John Evelyn, Sculptura 134)

using the longstanding status of the one to make more visible the important cultural role played by the other. Evelyn’s society was still phonocentric, and valued eloquence as the authentic sign of being — “speak, that I may see thee,” as the early 17th-century poet and playwright, Ben Jonson, nicely put it. Grammar dominated in the schools, and the role of the visual arts in building moral and mental character had become obscured. Evelyn knew it was important to remind his public that

Aristotle informes us that the Grecians did universally institute their Children in the Art of painting and Drawing, for an Oeconomique reason, there signified, as well as to produce proportions in the Mind ....

(Evelyn, Sculptura 132)

and he updated ancient wisdom for a modern audience by emphasizing that such an iconic aristocrat as the earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard (1585–1646), famed collector of the Arundel marbles and other treasures of antiquity, knew first-hand that noble character was born of training in the visual as well as verbal arts.

As the Rules of Measure and Proportion have an universal influence upon all the Actions of our lives; it was a memorable, and noble saying of a great Person of our Nation, discoursing to us once concerning the dignity of Painting, and the arts which attend it: That one who could not Designe a little, would never make an honest man ....

(Evelyn, Sculptura 103)

As such, the Greeks and Romans held “men of Art” in

... special veneration; but in none of their Courts, were men of Science carressed to that degree, as in that we have read of the Emperours of Japons at present, who does not only entertain, and nobly accommodate them, but never stirs abroad without their company. These great men sayes my Authour (meaning Physitians, Painters, Sculptors, Musitians, &c. quos propio nomine appellant Contuberniam Caesaris) march before the King whither he go forth in Litter or on Horseback; and being elected of Persons of the greatest birth in his Dominions, they alwayes continue at his Court, richly appointed with sallaries; but otherwise, to bear no office whatsoever which may in the least importune them ... as being therefore only chosen, to recreate and divert the Prince with their excellent conversation: These being men of the rarest parts, and endowments in his Empire, have pre-eminence in all places next the King ....

(Evelyn, Sculptura 114–5)

According to Evelyn, artists are similarly venerated by the Chinese, whose art of sculpture and chalcography (printed records engraven either on copper plates or cut into tablets of wood) is believed to date back 3700 years (from Evelyn’s point in time ca. 1662). Chinese “mastery” of the art is greatly esteemed by all, we are told, and chalcography “is yet in such esteem amongst them” that the artisan who compounds the ink for the press is not considered a “mechanick,” but is dignified with a liberal salary and “particular privileges.” (33)

Moreover, engraving is

... found in Mexico, and other places of the new world, where they Hieroglyphiz’d both their Thoughts, Histories and Inventions to posterity, not much unlike to the AEgy[p]tians, though in lesse durable, and permanent matter: The same likewise Jo. Laet affirmes of the Sculpture among the Acadiae, and those of Nova Francia; so natural (it seems) and useful was this art, even to the least civiliz’d amongst the Heathens.

(Evelyn, Sculptura 34)

Closer to home, Evelyn finds evidence of a traditional respect for “men of Art” in the courts of enlightened princes:

... the greatest Princes of Europe, have erected Academies, furnished with all conveniencies, for the exercise, and improvement of the Virtuosi: Such illustrious and noble Genius’s were Cosimo di Medicis, Francis the First, Carlo Borromeo, and others, who built, or appointed for them, Stately Appartiments even in their own Palaces, and under the same Roofe: procuring Models, and endowing them with Charters, Enfranchisements, and ample Honoraries; by which they attracted to their Courts, and Countries most of the refin’d, and extraordinary spirits in all the Arts and Sciences that were then celebrated throughout the World....

We know not how this Instance may in these days be interpreted; but certainly the Courts of Princes were in former Ages, compos’d of men of the greatest virtue and talents above the rest, and such as possess’d something of extraordinary (besides the wearing of fine cloaths, and making the bone mine) to recommend them. We insist not on Sculptors, and painters only, especially, as such men are now for the most part Vitious, or else of poor and mechanick spirits; but as those Antient and Noble Genius’s were heretofore accomplish’d; and such as of late were Raphael, Durer, Leon Alberti, Da Vinci, Rubens, and at present, Cavalier Bernini, &c. persons of most excellent endowments, and universally learned ....

(Evelyn, Sculptura 113–5)

This idea that the graphic arts degenerate when practiced without understanding (“universal learning”) by “mechanick spirits” is given visual form in Evelyn’s allegorical personification of Sculptura. Following Roman tradition, Evelyn’s frontispiece uses a female figure to elevate what had become a “mechanical art” to a fine, or “liberal art.” The gendered concept — nicely captured in a Michael Evans title, “Allegorical Women and Practical Men: the Iconography of the Artes Reconsidered” — served to decouple an art from “the realm of the material and of manual labor,” and to recast it as “an intellectual or spiritually significant activity”: “an abstract essence superior to the existence of [the] mere artists” who practiced it. (Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi 342) As Garrard notes, “It must remain an open question how female personifications originally came into being” (342), but the topos must have drawn its initial significance from a gendered division of labor whereby the bulk of publicly visible artisans in a given field were male. The female figure had to be a rare and unfamiliar sight in order to symbolize an Art, and not just represent artists.

Firstly, there was the category of representing Painting and Sculpture in the abstract. The earliest representations, from the thirteenth century onwards, showed men at work. But from the early sixteenth century onwards, Painting and Sculpture were personified as women holding suitable attributes ....

(Catherine King, “Looking a Sight” 382)

Significantly, Evelyn’s History turns from allegorical personifications to actual women sculptors, several of whom are listed among “the most renowned Gravers and their works.” Thus, the internationally-celebrated, “stupendious” Anna Maria van Schurman is mentioned multiple times (pp. 77, 83, and 132), along with her teacher Magdalena de Passe (p. 87), the “Florentine Sculptress” Propertia de’ Rossi (p. 52), Anna Vaiana (p. 58), Isabella Parasol (pp. 56–7), and Princess Louise (pp. 132–3). Evelyn’s list of women engravers is relatively short, of course, but is significant for its inclusion, and for the fact that Evelyn presents these women as “examples” of genteel practice — model artists to be looked to not only by other women, but by men as well. Evelyn agrees with earlier critics that the graphic arts should be “part of the Ladies Education” (132), and that the arts & sciences conceived, learned and performed as spiritual exercises (“divine labours”) are essential to human development.

The emblematic imaging of right conduct and practice took multiple forms, and the possibilities for the genre still have not been exhausted. Two suggestive models are found in Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere (which first appeared in 1555) and Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Nuremberg, 1658).

Bocchi (1488–1562), a Bolognese bureaucrat and academic who was knighted and created Count Palatine for his skill in the management of public affairs, never intended his emblematic interpretation of ancient mysteries for a popular audience. Nonetheless, his book, imbued with the spirit of old-style Quattrocento symbolism, became widely known, in large part due to the elegance of its illustrations. Bocchi’s emblems were in an altogether different vein than those found in the standard iconologies of Ripa or Alciato.

Bocchi’s Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere is a carefully crafted manual in the art of living, full of unfolding instructions for developing one’s full potential while on the life journey. Prudentia (wisdom applied to practice) was always held to be an indispensable habit of mind for those on this journey, and was imaged in four different forms by Bocchi: Prudentia Augusta, Prudentia circunspecta, Prudentia ex praeteritis, and Prudentia imperat libidini. (In contrast, Alciato required 13 emblems to explain the various attributes of Prudence, and still never achieved the clarity of Bocchi’s vision.) Of Bocchi’s four Prudentia emblems, Prudentia circunspecta, where a woman personifies the Renaissance moral ideal of adventurous prudence, is my favorite, and is reproduced below.

Engraved portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678)

Frontispiece to The Learned Maid; or, Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar? (London, 1659).

This was the 1st English translation, printed in London, of Anna Maria van Schurman’s Amica Dissertatio inter Annam Mariam Schurmanniam et Andr. Rivetum de capacitate ingenii muliebris ad scientias (Paris, 1638). Schurman’s influential work — a discourse upon the fitness of female genius for learning and for higher letters — was first Englished and printed in Leiden, 1639.

The frontispiece to the 1659 London edition is based on one of van Schurman’s engraved self-portraits, and purports to show Schurman at age 52, in 1659.

The Latin inscription — Cernitis hic picta nostros in imagine vultus: / Si negat ars forma, gratia vestra dabit. — was part of Schurman’s original portrait etching (dated 1640), and translates: See my likeness depicted in this portrait. May your favor perfect the work where art has failed.

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Another engraved portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), grouped with 2 other famous Dutch painters, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jacob Bakker

The woman Evelyn referred to as “the Learned Anna Schurman” is here shown with an owl — an emblematic attribute of the goddess Minerva.

Printed in Jacob Campo Weyerman’s history of Dutch painting, De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen, met een uytbreyding over de schilder-konst der ouden, door Jacob Campo Weyerman, konst-schilder. Verrykt met de Konterfeytsels der Voornaamste Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen, cierlyk in koper gesnede door J. Houbraken (’s Gravenhage, 1729).

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Engraved portrait of Achille Bocchi (1488–1562)

Frontispiece to Bocchi’s Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere (1555)

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Symb. CVIII, Prudentia circunspecta. Pp. 228–9 from Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum Quaestionum de Universo Genere (Bologna, 1574).

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With its two mottoes — “Cognosce, Elige, Matura” and “Acumine, Ratione, Diligentia Bearier Quiuis Potest” — Bocchi’s Prudentia is a rich concept, indeed. There are the familiar motifs associated with the Renaissance ideal of elasticity of conduct: the stormy sea of life, or changing circumstance; the careful weighing and balancing of cube (wisdom) and sphere (chance, or to use the preferred rhetorical term, occasion); the chain with a heart for a pendant, signifying spiritual love and the interconnection of all things, and from an understanding of this, the ability to give wise counsel; and finally, the double-faced Prudence herself, riding gracefully into the future on an unbridled dolphin, while directing her watchful gaze at the past.

It is an image that continues to unfold its lessons long after the initial decoding.

The same is true, I think, for Comenius’ Prudentia, taken from his picture-book for children, which in general stressed many of the same visual themes as did the emblem books for adults.

No. CX, Prudentia. Pp. 224–5 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1659.

The English-language gloss reads:

Prudence, 1. looketh upon all things as a Serpent, 2. and doeth, speaketh, or thinketh nothing in vain.

She looks backward, 3 as into a looking glass, 4. to things past; and seeth before her, 5. as with a Perspective-glass, 7. things to come, or the end; 6. and so she perceiveth what she hath done, and what remaineth to be done.

She proposeth an Honest, Profitable, and withal, if it may be done, a pleasant End to her actions.

Having foreseen the End, she looketh out Means, as a Way, 8. as leadeth to the end; but such as are certain and easie, and fewer rather than more, lest anything should hinder.

She watcheth Opporrtunity, 9. (which having a bushy forehead, 10. & being bald-pated, 11. and moreover having wings, 12. doth quickly slip away) and catcheth it.

She goeth on her way warily, for fear she should stumble or go amiss.

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Comenius, who noted the rhetorical nature of all symbolic language by making “Hieroglyphicks” one of the attributes of the allegorical figure, Rhetorica, pictured a more conventional Prudentia than did Bocchi. The two-faced female figure given in Comenius is standard in Ripa’s iconology (while Alciato favored the two-faced male Janus), and is a more appropriate image for a children’s primer. Plus, Comenius introduced numbered callouts in his emblem, in order to clarify references and relationships between res and verba.

In his Sculptura, Evelyn, who was a zealous supporter of Comenian pedagogy with its “use of Pictures in Order to the Education of Children,” expressed dismay over the especially poor quality of the engraving in Hoole’s translation:

What a specimen of this [i.e., a “Hieroglyphical Grammar”] Jo. Amos Commenius in his Orbis sensualium pictus gives us in a Nomenclator of all the Fundamental things and Actions of Men in the whole World, is publick, and I do boldly affirm it to be a piece of such excellent use, as that the like was never extant; however it comes not yet to be perceived: A thousand pitties it is, that in the Edition published by Mr. Hoole, the cuts were so wretchedly engraven: I do therefore heartily wish that this might excite some gallant and publick minded person, to augment and proceed farther upon that most usefull design, which yet comes greatly short of the perfection it is capable of, were some additions made, and the prints reformed and improved to the utmost, by the skillfull hand of some rare Artist.

(Evelyn, Sculptura 139–40)

As far as I know, no one stepped up to the task, and the existing copper-plates continued to be used until they became indistinct and were replaced by wood-engravings, of coarse execution, and often of changed treatment. Thus, Comenius’ 19th-century editor, C. W. Bardeen, criticized 18th-century substitute graphics for, e.g., the original cut of the human soul (a stippled figure, lacking discernible bulk, shown standing in front of a drawn curtain).

Engraved portrait of Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), shown at age 50 in 1642

Engraved by T. Cross when Comenius was brought to England by Samuel Hartlib, in hopes of actually establishing Francis Bacon’s “Salomon’s House” (as envisioned in Bacon’s posthmously published New Atlantis), and printed as the frontispiece to Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (London, 1659).

The same copper plate was reused for the many English reprintings of Comenius’ popular book throughout the 17th century, and by the time Hoole’s translation was reprinted in 1689 by J. R. for the publisher Abell Swall (doing business under the sign of the Unicorn, in the west end of St Paul’s Churchyard), all the retouching of the plate had caused noticeable changes in Comenius’ facial structure. By this point, his beard and clothing had become Comenius’ (aka John Amos Komensky) most consistently identifiable features.

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No. XLIII, Anima Hominis. Pp. 88–9 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1659.

The English-language gloss reads:

The Soul is the life of the body, one in the whole: Only Vegetative in Plants. Withal sensitive in Animals; And also Rational in man.

This consisteth in three things;

In the understanding whereby it judgeth, and understandeth a thing good and evill, or true or apparent;

In the will, whereby it chooseth, and desireth, or rejecteth or misliketh a thing known.

In the Mind, whereby it pursueth the good chosen, or avoideth the evill rejected.

Hence is hope, and Fear, in the desire and dislike;

Hence is love and joy, in the fruition;

But Anger, and Grief, in suffering.

The true judgment of a thing is Knowledge; the false is Error, Opinion, and Suspicion.

To view an enlarged facsimile of the original 2-page spread,
click here for the verso page 88 (133KB) and click here for the recto page 89 (120KB).

Another engraved portrait of Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), with his autograph added below

In an edition of 1755, Comenius’ figuring of Anima hominis was replaced with a picture of an eye, about which Bardeen comments:

... it is difficult to recognize in this an expressive psychological symbol, and to explain it.

(C. W. Bardeen, The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius iii)

And in a 1779 edition of Comenius’ picture-book published in Vienna, the original illustration of heaven is augmented by a new cut directly under it

in which the earth is revolving about the sun; and after the statement of Comenius, “Coelum rotatur, et ambit terram, in medio stantem” interpolates: “prout veteres crediderunt; recentiores enim defendunt motum terrae circa solem” [as the ancients used to think; for later authorities hold that the motion of the earth is about the sun.]

(Bardeen, The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius iv)

Portrait printed as the frontispiece to the German edition of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Nuremberg, 1658).

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No. IV, Coelum. Pp. 10–11 from Charles Hoole’s English translation of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1659.

The English-language gloss reads:

The Heaven 1. is wheeled about, and encompasseth the Earth 2. standing in the middle.

The Sun 3. wheresoever it is shineth perpetually, howsoever dark Clouds 4. may take it from us; and by its rayes 5. it causeth light, and the light, Day.

On the other side over against it is Darkness 6. and thence Night.

In the Night, shineth the Moon, 7. and the Stars 8. glister, and twinckle.

In the Evening 9. is Twilight, In the Morning, 10. the breaking, and dawning of the Day[.]

To view an enlarged facsimile of the original 2-page spread,
click here for the verso page 10 (79KB) and click here for the recto page 11 (115KB).

Bardeen disapproved of such inharmonious updates to the original, as I suspect Evelyn would have also.

In a way, the emblematic tradition of Prudentia is a backdrop for the Athenian Society emblem of 1692. After all, the underlying concern of the Athenians and their correspondents was still the universal human quest for wisdom, good counsel, and what Comenius called in his gloss “pleasant ends.” Throughout the 6-year, 20-volume run of the Athenian Mercury, “the rule of prudence is almost always present.” (McEwen 157)

The Athenians, in the Preface to Volume Eighteen, expressed their irritation with “trifling and impertinent love questions,” and hoped that sometimes they had talked “as gravely and usefully” as they could on subjects of a higher nature. In spite of this pious wish, the great bulk of questions in the Mercury are social rather than philosophical. If the last decade of the [17th] century was indeed the inception of the age of “prudent mediocrity,” as A. 0. Lovejoy has called it, the Athenians helped at its birth, for except in facetious passages, they counselled prudence above all.

(McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House 144)

That later ages allowed Prudentia to inspire only mediocrity can not be blamed on popular literature, although Alexander Pope intimated as much in his The Dunciad, in Four Books (London, 1743), a poem about “the Restoration of the Empire of Dulness in Britain,” according to Pope’s literary executor and editor, William Warburton. In Pope’s Dunciad, the goddess Dulness presides in “clouded majesty,” her throne supported by the “Four guardian Virtues” (the Christian church’s cardinal virtues) Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence — “whose [perspective] glass presents th’ approaching jayl” (Bk. I, l. 51) — and (Poetic) Justice.

The Athenian Society and Mercury take several hits in The Dunciad, as does emblem literature, especially the productions of Francis Quarles (1592–1644). We know from a remark in Chambers’ early 18th-century Cyclopaedia that there was a cultural divide within the emblem tradition as it developed in Britain:

The Emblems of Alciatus have been in as much Reputation among the more learned, as those of Quarles among the Vulgar.

(1728 ed. of the Cyclopaedia, vol. 1,
p. 297, sv Emblem)

Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1st ed., London 1635; with known 17th-century reissues in 1639, 1643, 1658, 1660, 1663, 1669, 1676, 1683, 1684, and 1696) was illustrated by William Marshall, who did the allegorical title page and many of the plates for the first books (the almost 350-page Emblemes is divided into 5 books), and others. Quarles favored a traditional emblem format, combining a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, such as

Psal. CXLII. VII. Bring my soule out of prison, that I may praise thy Name.

with his own verses on the theme, supplemented by relevant passages from the Christian Fathers, a concluding epigram of 4 lines, and a picture (the engraving for the above-cited emblem 10 of Book 5 shows a youth in a birdcage on the ground, arm stretched out towards the heavens, while an angel picks the lock on the cage door; this particular image, along with the other 44 plates in the last three books, was borrowed from the Pia Desideria [Antwerp, 1624] of Herman Hugo). Quarles’ verses for emblem 10 of Book 5 begin:

My Soule is like a Bird; my Flesh, the Cage;
Wherein, she weares her weary Pilgrimage
Of houres as few as evill, daily fed
With sacred Wine, and Sacramentall Bread;
The keyes that locks her in, and lets her out,
Are Birth, and Death; ’twixt both, she hopps about
From perch to perch; from Sense to Reason; then,
From higher Reason, downe to Sense agen:
From Sense she climbes to Faith; where, for a season,
She sits and sings; then, down againe to Reason,
From Reason, back to Faith; and straight, from thence
She rudely flutters to the perch of Sense;
From Sense, to Hope; then hopps from Hope to Doubt;
From Doubt, to dull Despaire; there, seeks about
For desp’rate Freedome; and at ev’ry Grate,
She wildly thrusts, and begs th’untimely date
Of unexpired thraldome, to release
Th’afflicted Captive, that can find no peace:
Thus am I coop’d within this fleshly Cage,
I weare my youth, and wast my weary Age,
Spending that breath which was ordain’d to chaunt
Heav’ns praises forth, in sighs and sad complaint:
Whilst happier birds can spread their nimble wing
From Shrubs to Cedars, and there chirp and sing,
In choice of raptures, the harmonious story
Of mans Redemption and his Makers Glory: ....

(Francis Quarles, Emblemes 281–2)

Quarles’ strained poetic conceit is no match for Comenius’ simple explication of the human soul in No. XLIII of Orbis Sensualium Pictus or for Evelyn’s more profound intermingling of the divine spirit with everyday life and human activities throughout his Sculptura. The one saving grace of Quarles’ Emblemes was its pictures:

... where the pictures for the page attone,
And Quarles is sav’d by Beauties not his own.

(Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book I, ll. 139–40)

Since Quarles’ Emblemes was devoted to biblical themes,

An Embleme is but a silent Parable. Let not the tender Eye checke, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured, in these Types. In holy Scripture, He is sometimes called a Sower; sometimes, a Fisher; sometimes, a Physitian: And why not presented so, as well to the eye, as to the eare? Before the knowledge of letters, GOD was knowne by Hierogliphicks; And, indeed, what are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every Creature, but Hierogliphicks and Emblemes of His Glory? I have no more to say. I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing. Farewell Reader.

(Quarles, “To the Reader” in Emblemes, sig. A3r)

it includes no emblematic treatment of Prudentia or other classical and Christian virtues. On the other hand, Comenius’ treatment of the cardinal virtues expanded their number to 8 — Prudence, Diligence, Temperance, Fortitude, Patience, Humanity, Justice, Liberality — all of which were emblematically pictured and located in the section of Orbis Sensualium Pictus on Moral Philosophy. Before this came the section on Natural Philosophy, and after it, the section on civil society, with its discussion of family and social structures (e.g., “Society betwixt Man and Wife,” “The Society betwixt Parents and Children,” “The Society betwixt Masters and Servants,” “A City,” “The Tormenting of Malefactors,” “Merchandizing”). So in Comenius’ picture-book for children, Prudentia is firmly situated in the everyday, but still retains enough of her mystery that the concept is neither reduced nor lessened.

The Athenian Society emblem similarly drew on traditional emblematic iconography, and like Comenius, transformed it for use in an updated educational context.

In the History of the Athenian Society (p. 6), [Charles] Gildon associates Dunton’s choice of the word Athenian with Acts 17.21: “For all the Athenians and Strangers which were there spent their time