BERNARD SALOMON'S
EMBLEMS FOR THE TRIUMPHS OF PETRARCH.
a summary of research in progress.

Modern studies of emblem books either examine the theory of the emblem or are concerned with emblems as collections of pictorial idioms of popular culture. Few investigators have assessed the process that created emblems out of the visual and literary culture of the Middle Ages, and few have studied how the forms and meanings of emblems transform from one era to the next.

One unexplored facet of the development of the Renaissance emblem in France may be discerned in a series of six emblems made for Petrarch's allegorical cycle, I trionfi, which appeared in the 1547 Lyon edition of Petrarch's vernacular poems published by Jean de Tournes. In this edition, woodcuts by Bernard Salomon manifest the conclusion of a process by which medieval images are transformed into modern emblems.

In contrast to Italian "Triumphs of Petrarch," which depend less on Petrarch's text than upon antique triumphal processions as interpreted by art and pageantry, the de Tournes/Salomon series derives from correspondences drawn between image and text -- but not from Petrarch's text. Rather, Salomon's Petrarchian devices depend upon illustrations that had been paired with verse paraphrases of the Triumphs found in French manusripts of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. These verses reduce the scope of Petrarch's classicism while underscoring the moral themes. Illustrations appearing with Jean Robertet's condensations of the trionfi address themselves to the verses by adapting the medieval formula of Virtues standing upon the crumpled bodies of the Vices, thus establishing a program which shows that each new Petrarchan victory is but a prelude to a coming defeat.

The most important step taken in the transformation of Robertet's images into emblems occurs in the Triumphs published in Paris by Denys Janot. In two 1539 editions of the Trionfi in French, Janot transforms the Robertet images into hieroglyphic chapter-heads. The inclusion of the concluding Latin and French verses of Robertet's compositions alongside the emblems in the edition with the older of the two translations suggests that these emblems were intended to replace the verse argumenta prefacing the early translations. The other edition, with a newer translation, uses the same emblems, but omits the mottoes, forcing these hieroglyphs to proclaim the sens moral in silence.

Salomon's emblems continue the Janot tradition of pictorial commentary, but reflect, instead, contemporary Lyonnaise humanistic and neo-Platonist interests in Petrarch. This kind of relationship between image and poetry is also found in the works of the Lyon poet Maurice Scève. Intimately connected with de Tournes' shop, Scève's ideas may even have been the source of Salomon's Petrarchan iconography.

If Salomon's reformulations of the Janot emblems were intended to serve in place of the customary moralized argumenta, they also fulfill the neo-Platonist requirement for an anagogical program connecting the mundane to the celestial. Man's secular history is turned into a sequence of interlocking victories and defeats, transforming the medieval idea of Fortune's wheel into a Platonist cognate of the ladder of Bettini's Holy Mountain. The neo-Platonist intent of the series is confirmed by the appearance of the rare image of the tricephalic Trinity. This image, unique in Petrarchan iconography, restores Petrarch's original idea of a "Triumph of 'Eternity.'" Inexorably linked to the Trinity, this Augustinian "Eternity" is the same as that which precedes the creation of Time, and is that which unifies past, present, and future. By casting off the customary image of the three persons, Salomon's image not only depicts the Trinity, but also alludes to tricephalic images of Time, and to the tricephalic God Creator of contemporary manuscripts. Here the influence of Scève is most strongly felt; his Microcosme, an epic about Man's creation, begins and ends with this kind of imagery: The Trinity, existing before, during, and after time, is the source and means of Man's claim to Eternity.

Triumph of Fame over Death
Petrarca, Les triumphes
(tr. La Forge),
Paris, D. Janot, 1539

Bernard Salomon
Triumph of Eternity over Time.
Petrarca, il Trionfi, Lyon,
Jean de Tournes, 1547

detail of above