FORTUNE, (From Alciati's "Emblems," 1522.)
The device of the crab, too, with a butterfly between its claws, and the motto Festina lente—hasten slowly—is a favourite. The phœnix, also, borrowed from ancient Egypt, but nowadays generally associated with life insurance. Fortune, with the sail of a ship standing on a globe, and sometimes a wheel, floating in a tempestuous sea, to express her fickleness and uncertainty, often appears. The fate of Ambition, in the fable of Phaeton falling from Apollo's car; the snake in the grass—Latet anguis in herba; labour in vain, a man pouring water into a sieve, the sieve held by blindfold Love, also figures; the ass loaded with dainties and rich food, but stooping to eat the thistle by the wayside, appears as a symbol of Avarice. Æsop's fables were utilized, and classical mythology, in fact all was fish to the moral net of the emblem designer, and the multiplication of such collections in printed books is evidence of the moralizing, philosophizing tendency of the times, and the love of personifying and imaging ideas.
AMBITION, (From Alciati's "Emblems," 1522.)
AVARICE, (From Alciati's "Emblems," 1522.)
Elaborate designs, such as one of Romeyn de Hooghe (1670)—following the tablet of Cebes, b.c. 390, or the Latin version of 1507—allegorizing human life as a whole, from birth to death, under the device of a labyrinth or maze, with figures wandering about in its walks, under different influences, down to simple devices like the moth and the candle, are comprehended in these emblem books; but it is only reducing to small compass and to compact, portable, and popular form the same spirit of quaint invention which covered the walls and ceilings of great houses and public halls and tapestries with personifications, like the splendid series of the "Triumphs" of Petrarch, Love, Time, Death, and Chastity in our National Museum at South Kensington, as well as endless embodiments of the seasons, the senses, the virtues, and the vices. Emblematic art, however, like heraldry, became overlaid with pedantry, and its artistic interest died when its form became prescribed, and precedent and rule took the place of original invention.
The chief scope for symbol and emblem in our time lies in the province of decorative design, which in its highest forms may be regarded as the metre or poetry of art. The designer, like the poet, rejoices in certain limitations, which, while they fix and control his form and treatment, leave him extraordinary freedom in dealing suggestively with themes difficult or impossible to be approached in purely naturalistic form.
It is true we find emblematic art in very stiff and degraded forms, and applied to quite humdrum purposes. It is largely used in commerce, for instance, and one may find classical fable and symbolism reduced to a trade mark or a poster. Still trade marks, after all, fill the place, in our modern commercial war, of the old knightly heraldry—shorn of its splendour and romance, certainly—and given trade marks and posters they might as well be designed, and would serve their purpose more effectively if they were treated more according to the principles of mediæval heraldry, since they would gain at once character, distinctness, and decorative effect.