Emblem Project Utrecht - Home Page. Emblemata Nova. First developed in the 16th century, emblems consist of three parts: a symbolic picture (pictura) with a motto or title (inscriptio) and an explanatory poem or epigram (subscriptio).
Emblem books proved popular for more than two hundred years and thousands were published across Europe. The purpose of the emblem is to indirectly convey moral, political or religious values in forms that need to be decoded by the viewer. The pictura often juxtapose ordinary objects in an enigmatic way so as to offer a reader the intellectual challenge of attempting to divine all the allegorical meanings. Emblemata Online. French Emblems at Glasgow: Home. Welcome to French Emblems at Glasgow.
This website gives you access to all the French Emblem Books of the 16th century, along with their Latin versions when appropriate. While the seed of the emblem as a genre was sown in Germany in 1531, it flowered and developed in France during the 16th century, and it was from there that it spread throughout Europe. The site has been developed, with generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Resource Enhancement Scheme, by a team led by Post-Doctoral Research Assistant Jonathan Spangler, and Project Director Alison Adams. All but two of the emblem books digitised are from the Stirling Maxwell Collection in Glasgow University Library. The Bodleian Library and the Bibliothèque Mazarine have generously made material available to enable us to present the complete corpus.