Emblematic Paintings from Sweden's Age of Greatness: Nils Bielke and the Neo-Stoic Gallery at Skokloster (review)

The emblem genre, a hybrid form of allegoric images combined with elucidating texts, proves to be an ideal medium for the expression of moral maxims not only in illustrated books, but also in the material culture: for example, in architectural decorations, pageantry, on medals, glassware, furnishings, even weaponry. Researchers have become increasingly concerned with visual culture in general, expanding the scope of emblem studies to include emblems in architecture and other forms of applied emblems (notably The Emblem and Architecture [1999] and Emblem Scholarship: Directions and Developments [2005]).

A new title in the series Imago Figurata Studies provides a valuable case study of applied emblematics in seventeenth-century Swedish art and architecture. Simon McKeown's account of Nils Bielke's Neo-Stoic gallery at Skokloster Castle examines a unique series of paintings that are based on emblems from the popular emblem book Emblemata Horatiana by Otho Vaenius. McKeown, coeditor of a volume on The Emblem in Scandinavia and the Baltic (2006) and distinguished scholar of Scandinavian history and art history, describes the paintings and their significance within the context of Sweden's Age of Greatness, the mid-seventeenth-century period when the country became one of the foremost powers in Europe.

Based on extensive field and archival research, McKeown establishes the provenance of the paintings, even identifying one of the copies of the emblem book from the Bielke library that was used by the artist who left marks and grids on the pages from which he copied. While the paintings have been part of the collection of Skokloster Castle since the eighteenth century, McKeown makes a convincing argument that they were originally commissioned by Count Niels Bielke for his manor at Salsta.

In a reconstruction of Bielke's library as it is preserved today in the Skokloster holdings, including many emblem books, as well as the material library building at Salsta that would have been the original home of the series of emblem paintings, McKeown argues that Vaenius's emblems, and the emblematic mode in general, provided the ideal medium for Bielke's self-representation, pointing to autobiographical elements in the emblem paintings.

While it is quite common that emblem motifs from books were employed within the composition of a painting, notably in vanitas still lives or other allegorical renderings, it is rare, as McKeown points out, that an entire series of finely finished paintings would be based on plates from a printed emblem book. The Skokloster series indeed is fashioned quite faithfully after the splendid illustrations of the printed emblem book executed by C. Boel, C. Galle, and P. de Jode after Vaenius's original designs. The unknown Swedish artist did not merely take certain images and ideas but copied the entire design of the emblem pictura including the inscription, while only changing the format and size, adding or omitting minor details accordingly.

The second half of the book comprises a meticulously detailed documentation of the collection of paintings, including black-and-white reproductions of the paintings and their models from the original 1607 edition of the emblem book, following the order of the plates in the printed book. As is often the case in applied emblematics in architecture, each painting bears only the motto as an inscription on the panel, while the other texts from the printed emblem book are omitted. McKeown provides Vaenius's original subscriptio, classical quotations, and commentaries, for the sake of the reader, in the eighteenth-century English translation by Thomas Mannington Gibbs. Among the useful appendices are a checklist of emblem books from Bielke's library at Skokloster and a list of the inscriptions at Salsta as well as an index of names.

The merit of this well-produced book lies in its important groundwork regarding the archival sources and the contextual and iconographical analysis. Thus...