The album amicorum originated in the desire to commemorate one’s fellow students, one’s university friends — and professors — in mid-16C Wittenberg. As soon as it became customary to include drawn and painted devices and miniatures, almost every album contained such schematic visual emblems of friendship, Lat. amicitia.
Friends, in this context — certainly throughout the rest of the 16C — means male friends — but the emblems of friendship are closely related to, and often identical (except for the sex of those depicted) with the emblems of love which we have already considered at some length here:
But we begin with an allegedly ancient Roman image, which the English medieval Dominican preacher, Robert Holcot (d.1349), reported in the 26th of his Moralites, as the picture of love or friendship [amor vel amicitia], and described as a barefoot young man dressed in green with his heart exposed, and labelled with three pairs of opposite words. Around his head are written, hiems et aestas [winter & summer], meaning that true love/friendship knows no season, takes no account of adversity or prosperity; around his heart, longe et prope [far & near], nor whether the friend is far off or near at hand; and around the hem of his robe, mors et vita [death & life], because a true friendship/love endures even after death.
As Holcot’s 14C text seems rather difficult to get sight of, I attach the relevant ‘morality’ from one of the early printed editions here:
Only today [18/5/26], thanks to Julia Drobinsky’s blog [ https://revue-textimage.com/conferencier/01_image_repetee/drobinsky3.html ] I discover this illustration in a manuscript of poems by Guillaume de Machaut, specifically, his Livre du Voir-Dit, composed c.1363. Over more than 100 lines (7232-7347 — available together with modernisation in the Livres de Poche edition on archive.org) we are treated to a detailed description and moralisation of the figure exactly as in Fulgentius
Comment li ancien entailloient L’ymage d’Amour ou paingnoient (7240f.) [How the Ancients sculpted or painted the image of Love]
The above image is now the earliest known medieval representation of the allegorical figure described by Fulgentius in his 5C Mythologies, as reported by Holcot, Ridewall, and the author of one of the macaronic sermons in Bodley 649 in the fourteenth century, Reisch (see below) c.1500, and others. In Machaut’s poem the gender of the figure vacillates, and the above image is somewhat indeterminate, but in the later version below, c.1425×30 — contemporary with the images in the ‘spiritual encyclopedias’ — the painter has clearly rendered the figure as a young woman, and dressed her in green, in accordance with the Late Antique description.
Hitherto, the images below from late medieval ‘spiritual encyclopedias’ — to use Saxl’s term — have been cited as the earliest representations of this allegorical figure, constructed after the Roman mythographer’s description:
The contemporary little box (below) is particularly interesting, and I don’t believe has been mentioned in this connexion before. On the inside of the coffer-lid our young man is painted in green (as specified), with the words winter sumer on a banderole in his hair, aer and nach [far & near] around his open heart, and Tod and Lebe [death & life] on the hem of his robe. The banderole beside him makes it clear that he represents recht lieby [true love].
Perhaps a generation later, and at any rate before 1466, a manuscript compiled in Tongeren, Belgium, of texts intended for the instruction of novices, which includes our motif, appeared recently on the art market. The adjacent page styles the image pictura amoris [the picture of love], and cites the explanatory passage from Fulgentius, which was also the basis of Holcot’s text.
The image below, from the earlier 1460s, belongs with the ‘spiritiual encyclopedias’ (above), being from another collection of manuscript texts, but I reproduce it here in order to preserve the chronological arrangement!
Writing in 1952, Waldemar Deonna drew attention to our figure amongst those painted in the town-hall in Geneva — labelled ver[us] amic[us] est alter ego [a true friend is another self] —
It seems he was unaware of the above antecedents, though realised such must have existed. He was, however, able to point to the device of Strasbourg printer Wolfgang Köpfel, a generation later:
But an important omission in the early history of this motif is its first appearance in print, as a woodcut illustrating the Margarita Philosophica of Gregor Reisch, published in Freiburg in 1503:
The cut itself is headed Amicicia, but the details explaining the other labels are covered on the previous page, beside the marginal note, Typus amicitiae. Only a decade or so later, c.1515, a drawn example is to be found in the proto-emblematic Woodner manuscript now in Washington:
The frescoed representation of Friendship at Calavese in Trento, painted in 1539/40 by Marcello Fogolino, is iconographically quite different – the seated girl holds a fruit ?pomegranate) in one hand and holds her other hand in a burning brazier, while her bare feet rest on thorns, though the usual label, LONGE ET PROPE, appears on the border of the girl’s bodice at heart height (though the heart itself is not shown bared), HIEMS ET AESTAS is inscribed on the plaque above her head, and MORS ET VITA inscribed in relief on the brazier.
Some 20 years later, the allegorical figure of Friendship appeared in person in the entourage of Venus, as part of the pageant celebrating the wedding of Francesco I de Medicii and Joanna of Austria in Florence in 1565. There is a contemporary printed account, but it is also described in great detail by Vasari (Lives vol. X):
Extravagantly figured, next, was Friendship, … although in the form of a young woman, she was seen to have the bare head crowned with leaves of pomegranate and myrtle, wearing a rough dress, upon which could be read, MORS ET VITA; with the breast open, so that the heart could be perceived, and there, likewise, were to be read these words written, LONGE ET PROPE; and she carried in the hand a withered elm-trunk entwined with a fresh and fertile vine.
The last-named attribute adumbrates the figure later described by Ripa (see below).
In the albums
The earliest I have noticed the motif in our corpus is in 1587, in the Prasch album (below), by which date, as we have seen, it has been around for more than 200 years. There are two further examples in the 1590s, but then I have not spotted it again until the 1620s.
The Prasch album painter includes a faithful hound at the figure’s feet, labelled Fidus ubiq[ue] comes [a faithful companion everywhere], and the figure is labelled Love (in Greek), but also identified in Latin as the Typus Amicitiae. The small emblematic device in the top righthand corner shows two friends’ hands holding a heart pierced by two arrows surmounted by a golden cup.
Before the date of the Prasch painting, however, at least two single-sheet prints of the motif had been appeared, the earlier, issued in Bern 50 years before, being clearly the painter’s model
The later, issued in 1556, probably in Wittenberg, also under the title Typus Amiciciae, is illustrated with a woodcut of our motif, and was followed by another edition issued five years later dedicated to Melanchthon:
A painting recently on the London art market, attributed to Mirabello Cavalori 1565×70, is the earliest Italian version of our motif I have come across and — importantly — pre-dates Ripa’s Iconologia [see below]. Note the presence of the faithful hound. Two of the three labels, however, are a little anomalous — here the heart is labelled, PROCVL PROPE, and the hair, HYEMES ET VER [Winter and Spring].
In 1579 a print very similar to the Typus Amiciciae sheets (above) was published in Copenhagen, in the same year that the motif entered the emblem-book repertoire, in Laurens van Haecht’s Mikrokosmos (Antwerp 1579):
An important publication in which our motif appeared, shortly before it is found in the Welser album, and on another orphaned leaf dated 1593, is the Hoffman/ Wirich Stamm- und Wappenbuchlin (Frankfurt 1592); here the figure is labelled, Die Recht Alte ware freundtschafft [The proper old True Friendship] — note the presence of the (unlabelled) dog:
The Welser album was compiled between 1591 and 1596, and our motif appears in it adjacent to a page dated 1595 — the labelled opposites, though here in the vernacular, are not in their usual places:
The orphaned leaf in the BNM continues their traditional placing:
The example of our motif in the Grittschreiber album painted in 1599 is unique; here the figure of Friendship is a standard-bearer (popular in the albums in his own right) — his bared heart is visible beneath the label PROCVL PROPE , HIEMS AESTAS appears on the band at the base of his hat, but there is no sign of MORS VITA.
Though I have been unable to see a reproduction of the image itself, Lieselotte Möller illustrated a miniature from the album of Andreas Chemnitius painted in 1602 which features a female Friendship, a naked girl standing on a plinth pointing to herself, entitled, Loquens Amicitiae pictura [this picture speaks of friendship]. It presumably bears some relation to the device used by the Parisian printer, Guillaime Julien, from 1555, up until his death in 1589.
Six years before the Chemnitius album miniature, Theodor de Bry engraved another female Amicitia for the Emblemata of Denis Lebey de Batilly (Frankfurt 1596); the same figure (copied in reverse) illustrates a single-sheet print published two years later under the title Typus Amicitiae.
It comes as something of a surprise, though, to find our motif illustrating an English emblem-book, Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna, published in London in 1612. The verse accompanying the woodcut illustration shows that Peacham was fully aware of the ‘Roman’ origins of the ‘statue’, and moralises the image in the usual way. Peacham’s emblem was then reproduced in the plasterwork of the still extant Jacobean ceiling at Blickling Hall in Norfolk.
And yet in his Diary, the German traveller, Thomas Platter, records that when his party visited Hampton Court palace in 1599, in the Queen’s bedroom,
we saw a picture of love, in the guise of a woman. Across her brow was written: ‘Procul et prope’, that is ‘far and near’, and over her heart I read: ‘Mors et vita’, that is ‘Death and life’; by her feet, ‘Hyems et aestas’, that is ‘Winter and Summer’, and underneath, ‘Veri amoris repraesentatio’, that is ‘The image of true love’.
At least three other foreign tourists have left reports of seeing the painting during James’s reign, from which we gather that the words Imago Amoris were also written above the head of the figure (which they identify as Venus), and that the label at the bottom of the picture, in fact, read In hac poesi figurantuur proprietates Amoris [In this verse (i.e. the labels) the properties of love are figured].
A single-sheet print engraved and published by Peter Isselburg in Nurnberg in 1617, again — in its title — proclaims the Roman origin of the motif: Der alten weisen Römer Artliche Abbildung wahrer vnd bestendiger Freundschafft vnd derselbigen liebreichen eygenschafften [The wise old Romans’ artistic representation of true and enduring friendship and the loving properties of the same]
The Wroclaw painter, Andreas Hempel (1581-1627), depicted the male figure of Friendship standing between two trees, one in leaf and one bare, presumably representing the Sumer and Winter of the label, in the album of Jacob Petzke, c.1620. The identical miniature also appears in the album of Hans Heintze (dated entries 1619-22), and — but without the trees — in that of Caspar Sagittarius (dated entries 1618-28)
Contemporary with Hempel’s miniatures is a drawing of our motif in the album of Daniel Schelling, with a title from Cicero’s De Amicitia :
The miniature in the octagonal album of Homme van Harinxma must belong to the late 1620s
The version in the album of Wilhelm Bökel is plastered in inscriptions, several seeming to have no immediate relevance to the theme of friendship — omitting the three usual ones — the figure is entitled A Musis Dicor Amicus [I am called a Friend by the muses], and his sleeves are inscribed Fide et vide [Trust but beware] and Amor omnia vincit [love conquers all] — both popular album inscriptions in their own right, of course. Ad astra per aspera [through hardships to the stars], is another common album motto, while Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque [where Fate draws us and draws us back] is adapted from the Aeneid ; cum Deo et die [with God and the day] and sine melle sine felle [without (over-)sweetness, without poison] are two more typical Sprüche. Iconographically unique, however, is the fact that the figure holds a ring which is labelled in Greek — πίστις καί ἀλήθεια [fidelity and truth]. (My thanks to Elisabeta Negrău for reading and translating the Greek).
By the time Georg Keller came to engrave the title-page to Meisner’s Thesaurus Philo-Politicus (Frankfurt 1624) his AMICITIA betrays its debt to Ripa (below) in the vine-entwined frame in which she stands.
title-page to Daniel Meisner, Thesaurus Philo-Politicus (Frankfurt 1624) engraved by Georg Keller
From the close of our period comes another female personification, a delicate painting by Friedrich Brentel, intended for — or perhaps extracted from — an album which, although it is labelled with the traditional word-pairs, is also a portrait of the poet and painter, Anna Maria von Baden-Durlach (1617-72), aged 28:
15 years ago Martin Madl convincingly redated the paintings in the Moravian castle at Niemest [Náměšť nad Oslavou] by Carpoforo Tencalla to the 1650s — and clearly, given the presence of the olive-tree, this particular Amicitia (below) derives unmistakably from Ripa — first illustrated edition, 1603.
[(short diatribe!) For what it’s worth, I have always been highly suspicious of Ripa! That’s to say, it is my belief that he introduced many new details in his description of the motifs he discussed that were not present in earlier art, i.e. that, under the guise of seeming merely to report the details of earlier iconography, he himself adds new features — invents new features — but clearly, and especially post-1603, his Iconologia then acts as a new source for 17C iconography. The present painting is a case in point — no earlier representation of Amicitia includes an olive tree!]
Outside our period, a late example is to be found in the album of Georg Philipp Hagel dated 1672, where Amicitia stands on a tortoise — whose hard shell, according to the accompanying verse, symbolises the durability of true friendship:
Other media
The remarkable procession of decorative sleighs that took place in Nurnberg c. 1640 was fortunately recorded for posterity in minute detail in the form of an album of paintings now preserved in the the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Dressed in the specified green, our Amicitia motif appeared in three-dimensional form as a painted wooden finial of a sleigh (together with the Pelican in her Piety, that other symbol of love, of Christ’s love for humankind):
The 3 of Hearts playing-cards painted on the side of the sleigh, incidentally, are a fitting accompaniment to the Love/Friendship ornament — the numeral 3 [drei] being often used in this rebus-like fashion to signify treu [fidelity, loyalty] — as in these details of an album miniature painted in 1624:
Similarly, a rebus sentence involving mainly numerals — and the words they could punningly represent — inscribed in 1577 in the album of Johann Georg Sattler (present whereabouts unknown) was described in the late 19C as
Man 8 mein 3 ♥ 4 nicht das [drawing of sum/bill] gott
that is, Man achtet mein treu(es) herz für nicht das räche gott
[My faithful heart counts for nothing, God will avenge]
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