The Ways of the Emblem in European Jesuit Festivals

The extensive use that the Society of Jesus made of emblems as a rhetorical tool is a wide known phenomenon. The pedagogical, decorative and performing qualities of the emblems used in Jesuit festivals—such as royal entries, canonizations, exequies or scholar festivities—had a significant impact on the sensorial and semantic perception of these spectacles, which configured a fundamental medium of political and spiritual expression in the Early-Modern Europe. In these celebrations, emblems were ‘applied’ on several forms and supports (in paintings, sculptures, performing figures, and so on). In common, they all shared an ephemeral nature – after the festival they were dismounted together with the rest of the decorations, destroyed or simply lost. Apart from the cases in which they appeared printed in fête-books, today we can study these ephemeral emblems only by their textual description, and that creates a kind of distancing that hinders a wider comprehension of the transmissions of these emblems in the visual landscape of European culture.

Mundus Emblematicus project will allow me to compare ephemeral emblems from festivals with emblematic series still extant in the architecture, which will be catalogued and mapped in the project. By means of this comparative approach, I aim at understanding not only the intellectual content of these emblems, but also the aesthetic context in which they were created, so as to grasp at their inventio and impact on the public.