Studies in the Jesuit Emblem (review)

The essays in this important collection, selected from G. Richard Dimler’s extensive writings on emblematic theory and practice, examine the rhetorical form and function of the Jesuit emblem between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The order’s pedagogues and preachers, as he shows, considered the emblem a privileged instrument of moral instruction, both public and private, and a key component in programs of meditative self-formation, adapted from Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises; their many emblematic publications and spectacles, among which Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria, read by Catholics and Protestants alike, was the most widely circulated emblem book of the seventeenth century, testify to their importance as propagators of emblems and of the rhetorical image-theory and poetics such emblems exemplify.

Dimler’s fine introduction offers a comprehensive overview of scholarship on the Jesuit emblem, a subfield first mapped by Mario Praz, and lately enriched by two important collections, The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition and Emblematik und Kunst der Jesuiten in Bayern, both of which he closely analyzes. The seventeen chapters that follow divide Jesuit emblem production into two phases: based on the notion of the spiritual itinerary, Jerónimo Nadal’s proto-emblematic Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia of 1595, emulated by Jan David, Antoine Sucquet, and other Jesuits active within the order’s Flemish-Belgian province, codified the use of the annotated pictura as a source for meditative and contemplative reflection on the soul’s relation to Christ; Jesuit emblematists of the mid- and later seventeenth century, among whom the most distinguished practitioner-theorists were Claude-François Menestrier and Jakob Masen, consolidated the move away from the pithy epigrammatic form and enigmatic content codified by Andrea Alciato as an elite pastime in the Emblematum liber of 1531. Instead, as Dimler’s essays reveal, authors favored emblems structured as demonstrative arguments, in which the subscriptio, modeled on the eloquent sermon, occasionally comments at length upon the relation between pictura and lemma. Dimler’s insights into what he terms the “rhetoricized emblem” partially derive from Barbara Bauer’s crucial work on the Jesuit ars rhetorica informing the emblematic plays and placards staged as the chief ornaments of the order’s academic festivals. Conversely, his publications have proved fundamental to Judy Loach’s groundbreaking studies on the teaching of emblematics and other kinds of symbolic imagery within the first cycle of the ratio studiorum, as also to Ralph Dekoninck’s splendid recent book on the functions of the pictorial imago within the Jesuit imaginary that emblems were seen to order and to mobilize.

Most impressive are the four central chapters on Jakob Masen’s theory of the figurative image, as it bears upon his critique of two monuments of emblem literature, Alciato’s Emblematum liber and the Imago primi saeculi, published by the Jesuit College of Antwerp to mark the centenary of the order. Masen’s influential Speculum imaginum defines the emblem as a word-image construct displaying argutia (incisiveness), a quality distilled by the laconic eloquence of Seneca, Statius, and Martial. Such incisiveness inspires the reader-viewer to interpret the emblem as a virtual syllogism, or more precisely enthymeme, in which the res picta, comprised by the picture and epigram together, constitutes the protasis, while the res significata, to be inferred by the inventive reader-viewer, supplies the apodosis that completes the enthymematic argument. As Dimler further demonstrates, the relation between res picta and res significata, that is, allusive protasis and implied apodosis, becomes figurative (and thereby truly emblematic) when the poetic image of one thing is compared to the poetic image of another thing, these two images being differentiated and yet associated according to the rhetorical sources of invention-analogy, opposition, estrangement, and allusion. If Masen’s theory privileges the emblem’s visual component, it does so to underscore the power of symbolic imagery to frame persuasive moral arguments in a heightened argutial style.

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