Beyond the Page: Quarles’s Emblemes, Wall-Paintings, and Godly Interiors in Seventeenth-Century York

In 1998, the remains of a sequence of seventeenth-century emblematic wall-paintings were discovered in a house in York. The paintings’ reproduction of images from Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1635), rarely used in domestic decoration in the period, prompts a series of questions about the identity of the paintings’ commissioner, their private and public use, and how viewers were to understand the relationship between word and image in the paintings’ depiction of the soul’s anguished relationship with God. In providing preliminary discussion around each of these questions, this essay places the York paintings in the wider context of domestic decoration in early modern England and focuses on the complex set of relationships between householder, painting, and viewer, and between the wall-paintings and their literary and biblical sources.