Why Does a Picture Come With a Motto? A Form That Wanted to Be Read

An emblem has three parts that work together and are meant to be read in relation to each other. A motto, usually a short phrase in Latin, states a maxim compactly and frequently obscurely. A picture depicts a scene, an object or a creature, sometimes obviously connected to the motto and sometimes not. A verse beneath explains the relationship, drawing out the moral and connecting the image to the words. The form's appeal lay in the gap between the parts, since the reader is expected to work out why this picture illustrates this motto, and a connection that is too obvious was regarded as a failure. Emblem books collected hundreds of these, arranged by theme.

The pictorial vocabulary was drawn from a defined set of sources:

• •Classical mythology and history, supplying figures whose stories were known
• •Natural history from ancient authors, including creatures with attributed behaviours that are not real
• •Egyptian hieroglyphs as misunderstood by Renaissance scholars, believed to encode wisdom symbolically
• •Biblical episodes and proverbs
• •Everyday objects given moral readings
• •Heraldry and personal devices, which are closely related and differ in being specific to an individual

The genre was enormously popular and its influence ran well beyond the books. The first collection, published in 1531, went through many editions and translations and was followed by hundreds of imitations across Europe over two centuries. The images supplied a shared visual vocabulary that painters, architects, silversmiths and garden designers drew on, which is why so much decoration of the period carries meanings that are opaque now and were legible then, and why an apparently decorative figure on a ceiling frequently states a specific moral. Jesuit education used the form heavily as a teaching device. Literary scholars use the books as keys to imagery in poetry and drama of the period, since writers and audiences shared the same vocabulary.

A substantial part of the pictorial vocabulary depicts animals behaving in ways they do not, and the source is a specific tradition. Ancient and medieval natural history compilations attributed moral behaviours to animals, and those accounts were copied and elaborated for centuries with no fresh observation, producing a stock of creatures whose supposed habits carried fixed meanings. The pelican was said to wound its own breast to feed its young with blood, which made it a standard image of sacrifice and appears in church decoration everywhere. The phoenix, the salamander living in fire and the beaver escaping hunters by self-mutilation all carried settled readings. Emblem writers used them as established currency, and the images remained legible long after anybody believed the natural history behind them.

The genre declined in the eighteenth century as taste moved against obscurity and as the classical learning it assumed became less universal, which removed both the pleasure and the possibility of reading it. Its descendants are more numerous than its disappearance suggests. Political cartoons use exactly the same structure of image, caption and implied moral, and the earliest examples borrowed the vocabulary directly. Advertising pairs an image with a slogan in the same way and relies on the reader closing the gap. Corporate and institutional logos with mottoes are emblems in the technical sense. And the practice of reading moral meaning out of an image, which the genre trained its audience in, remains the default assumption when anybody encounters an unfamiliar symbol.

A motto, a picture and an explanatory verse work together, with the pleasure lying in the gap the reader must close, and an obvious connection counted as a failure. Images came from mythology, ancient natural history and misread hieroglyphs. The shared vocabulary explains why decoration of the period carries meanings that were legible then and are opaque now.