- The Emblem in Scandinavia and the Baltic
This book surprises the reader because of its unexpectedly large number and variety of examples of emblems from the European North, whose cities are rarely represented as places of publication in bibliographies of emblem books. Simon McKeown and Mara Wade have assembled a collection of essays that presents the [End Page 233] emblem culture of the Scandinavian-Baltic region along a broad spectrum of subjects. The first three essays provide an overview of the reception of emblems in Norway, Denmark, and the Baltics. Carsten Bach-Nielsen describes the beginning of the use of emblems in Denmark in the sixteenth century, which was influenced first by German, then Netherlandish, then English models. The phenomenon included runes and continued from the Danish Order of the Elephant to the buttons of police uniforms and matchboxes in the twentieth century. Elita Grosmane presents the publication of Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum . . . by Johann Arndt from Lüneburg, which was published with emblems for the first time in Riga in 1678–79, more than fifty years after the death of the author. This edition greatly influenced Northern Europe's applied emblems and is constantly mentioned in the essays that follow as the model of sacred emblems. Grosmane gives an overview of emblem usage in everyday life such as cupboards, vessels, and goblets, and in profane and sacred architecture of Latvia and Lithuania. Hendrik von Achen describes the use of emblems on epitaphs, on stained glass windows and galleries in Norwegian churches, and on castiron box stoves in the late seventeenth century.
Three studies focus on political emblematics in Sweden. The essay by Allan Ellenius on the political iconography of the title page of Johann Scheffer's De militia navali veterum libri quatuor (Uppsala, 1654) first appeared in Swedish in 1954–55. Ellenius pursues the iconographic theme of the union of Minerva and Fortuna, which presumably was adopted from Antwerp (Rubens took it up in the Marie de Medici cycle), for Queen Christina, the "Swedish Minerva." She was seen to have navigated the Swedish ship of state wisely, leading by means of Minerva and Fortuna, an allegory of Sweden in the contemporary political scene. Schering Rosenhane was the author of an emblematic manuscript that cited the Emblemata politica of the Spanish diplomat Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, and focused them on the Swedish political situation as a constitutional monarchy and Protestant European power after the Thirty Years' War. In his informative iconographic research, Julian Vasquez examines how the emblems of this 1645 manuscript were transformed in fresco paintings in the Rosenhane Palace in Stockholm after Queen Christina's conversion to Catholicism and abdication, and how they were changed to reflect the new situation. Painting Christina as the legitimate Swedish ruler with outstanding political capabilities, as the manuscript had maintained, was no longer tenable after 1654. Simon McKeown examines another emblem manuscript, which the Stettiner Johann Joachim Zeuner designed and dedicated to the Governor-General of Pomerania, Carl Gustav Wrangel, in 1674. The fact that the emblems independently unite the Swedish lion with the Pomeranian griffins and Wrangel's insignia provides evidence for the significance of Wrangel for Stettin and Pomerania. There is an interesting side detail: Zeuner's manuscript, which today is in the Royal Library in Stockholm, contains architectural plans for the Stettin Palace from 1674 and was used to rebuild it after its destruction in World War II.
Applied emblematics in the noble culture of Sweden is the theme for two more essays. Also among the possessions of Carl Gustav Wrangel were partisans — [End Page 234] a kind of halberd —that belonged to the uniforms of his bodyguards and are decorated with emblems. Lena Rangström examines this phenomenon unique to the history of the Scandinavian military decoration. Hans-Olof Boström describes love emblems in the Swedish palaces of Ekholmen and Venngarn, which were created through the initiative of the Swedish...