In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emblems were generally made up
of three components: a title or motto (referred to by the Latin term
inscriptio), an illustration (pictura) and an explanatory text
in prose or, more often, in verse (subscriptio). The attractive
combination of texts and images meant the emblematic genre quickly became
extremely popular in Italy and France.
Although
this emblematic concept was a literary product of sixteenth-century
Europe, popular medieval symbols and allegories, heraldic devices and
hieroglyphs were used and re-used by emblematists. True to the ideals
of the Renaissance, myths and legends from ancient Greek and Roman literature
influenced the emblem genre in a significant way, as did Biblical and
Christian motifs.
##When emblems
were introduced to the Low Countries in the 1550s, most of the subscriptions
were written in Latin, as almost all literature was at the time. In
the 1570s and 1580s, an increasing number of poets called for the writing
of literature in the vernacular. In 1601, Daniël Heinsius published
the first emblem book with subscriptions in Dutch, and other prominent
poets such as Hooft and Vondel soon followed his example. Roemer Visscher,
himself a strong advocate of the use of the Dutch language, explicitly
stated his love for his mother tongue in the >preface
to his emblem book.
The first
decades of the seventeenth century formed the zenith of emblem literature
in the Dutch Republic. Nowhere else was the genre to flourish as richly
as in the (Northern) Netherlands. Love emblematics became a Dutch speciality
- Hooft`s Emblemata Amatoria (1611)
being the outstanding example of its kind. In an even more characteristically
Dutch type of emblem, the pictura and subscriptio referred
directly to daily life, resulting in highly recognizable and therefore
extremely popular emblem books. These emblems were the perfect vehicle
for moralistic lessons, as can be observed in both Roemer Visscher`s
Sinnepoppen and #Jacob Cats` Sinne- en Minnebeelden (1627),
perhaps the most important emblem book of the Dutch Golden Age.