OTTO VAENIUS AND HIS EMBLEM BOOKS

Otto Vaenius (1556-1629) was one of the outstanding cultural figures of the Low Countries at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Admired as an erudite painter and writer who moved in intellectually elite circles, Vaenius is known to posterity as Peter Paul Rubens’s most influential teacher. He is also esteemed by scholars of the emblem as perhaps the most inventive and influential practitioner of the form in the seventeenth century, and his triumvirate of books, the Emblemata Horatiana (1607),Amorum Emblemata (1608) and Amoris Divini Emblemata (1615) inspired a host of imitations and adaptations in both print and wider material culture. This collection of essays seeks to approach Vaenius’s work in the bimedial sphere from a more pan-optic perspective than has been traditional hitherto, giving full consideration to his canonical emblem books, but exploring, too, his experiments with word and image in a range of less familiar works. These publications, which may be justly described as ‘para-emblematic’, include Vaenius’s hagiographical life of Thomas Aquinas, his graphic series on a medieval Spanish legend, a compendium of medallic reverses, and a mysterious treatise on predestination and free will. Consequently, this volume, the first in English or any other language to be devoted to Vaenius’s wider publishing career, considerably broadens the contextual framework within which this centrally important writer and artist should be read and understood.