An emblem is a combination of images and texts that flourished in the early modern period. The book presents the culture of the emblem and its influences and adaptations in various art forms from the late sixteenth century to the 1930s. It also looks at the production of emblem books, the symbolism of certain recurring motifs in emblem collections, and printed emblems as objects of religious devotion. The emblem requires the deciphering of images whose meaning often remains obscure, and the book aims to remind twenty-first-century readers, living in a world where iconographic motifs are ubiquitous, that understanding images is as demanding today as it was in the early modern period. The book will be of interest to specialists in the history of art and early modern culture, as well as to readers wishing to familiarize themselves with the art of reading images.
