Scholars differ on the key question of whether the actual
emblems in question are the visual images, the accompanying texts, or the combination of the two. This is understandable, given that first emblem book, the
Emblemata of
Andrea Alciato, was first issued in an unauthorized edition in which the
woodcuts were chosen by the printer without any input from the author, who had circulated the texts in unillustrated manuscript form. It contained around a hundred short verses in Latin. One image it depicted was the lute, which symbolized the need for harmony instead of warfare in the city-states of Italy. Some early emblem books were unillustrated, particularly those issued by the French printer Denis de Harsy. With time, however, the reading public came to expect emblem books to contain picture-text combinations. Each combination consisted of a
woodcut or
engraving accompanied by one or more short texts, intended to inspire their readers to reflect on a general
moral lesson derived from the reading of both picture and text together. The picture was subject to numerous interpretations: only by reading the text could a reader be certain which meaning was intended by the author. Thus the books are closely related to the personal symbolic picture-text combinations called
personal devices, known in Italy as '
and in France as '. Many of the symbolic images present in emblem books were used in other contexts, on clothes, furniture, street signs, and the façades of buildings. For instance, a sword and scales symbolized death. == Miscellany == Emblem books, both
secular and
religious, attained enormous popularity throughout continental Europe, though in Britain they did not capture the imagination of readers to quite the same extent. The books were especially numerous in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France. Emblem books first became popular in the sixteenth century with Andrea Alciato's
Emblemata and remained popular until the eighteenth century. Many emblematic works borrowed plates or texts (or both) from earlier exemplars, as was the case with
Geoffrey Whitney's
Choice of Emblemes, a compilation which chiefly used the resources of the
Plantin Press in Leyden. Early European studies of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, like that of
Athanasius Kircher, assumed that the hieroglyphs were emblems, and imaginatively interpreted them accordingly. A similar collection of emblems, but not in book form, is
Lady Drury's Closet. == Timeline ==