The Anchor and the Dolphin: A History of Emblems

This chapter explores the history of emblems, which appear on a broad spectrum between printed literature, visual art, and material culture. Starting from Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber of 1531, the chapter explores multiple approaches on how emblems can be understood in the context of other multimodal media types such as insignia, badges, epigrams, hieroglyphs, and visual artifacts. Differentiating between historical and modern semiotic models, it explains the emergence of the notion of “emblem” in relation to tropes such as symbol, ekphrasis, or allegory. It also deconstructs the common narrative of emblems being characterized by a standardized tripartite pattern consisting of a picture, title, and motto, and their historical confinement to the epochs of the Renaissance and Baroque, specifically between the years 1531 and 1750. By analyzing early modern and modern examples, the chapter demonstrates the historical, technological, and sociocultural influences directing the fluid expectations of this genre. Against the various normative attempts to define the emblem, the chapter strives to contribute to a more open-ended approach to emblems, enabling the identification of them even in modern cultural products.