As we noticed in our Emblems in the Albums I post: https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/emblems-i-copied-alciato-et-al/ , the rise of the album-keeping habit co-incided more or less with the rise of the emblem-book, and it is a rare album in our period (c.1550-c.1650) that does not have at least one miniature copied from an emblem-book — not always labelled…

Alciato Alciato’s Emblematum Liber, published in Augsburg in 1531 and conventionally considered the first emblem-book, in the usual sense of the term, appeared a mere generation before the birth of the album amicorum. From the second half of the 16C both genres evolve symbiotically — many printed emblem-books being ‘re-purposed’ as albums. Given his book’s…

One expects to see a baby in a baby-walker — as in this image in the album of Stephan Lansius drawn in 1624 One does not expect to see an Old Man: The hour-glass held by this ancient toddler is labelled in Italian ANCORA INPARO [still learning]. Friedrich Sustris, Emperor Maximilian’s court-painter in Munchen, from…

This is a complex allegorical composition based around a central Crucifixion, but in which hands issue from the terminals of the Cross. It is mainly confined to central Europe and seems to have originated c.1400 and to have gone out of fashion shortly after 1600. The only example I have noticed is in the iconographically…

Anti-Jewish motifs are to be found in the albums as they are elsewhere in contemporary art. The Hebrew word Schemhamphoras, meaning “the explicit name”, was originally a Tannaitic term for the Tetragrammaton, and is used to title at least two album miniatures of the notorious Judensau [Jews’ sow] — those of Wigandt (dated 1600) and Petzke (c.1620). (Note…

This came as a surprise! I’m used to seeing phallus-birds in other media — especially in the late medieval lead badges recovered from various European rivers, the Seine, the Thames and the drowned villages of the Scheldt estuary in the Netherlands — which, as I have suggested elsewhere, probably derive from the discovery of Roman…

A riotous musical concert is the subject of a full-page miniature in the album of Andreas Matt, dared entries 1597-1606. The principal instrument, however, is a piano from which five animal heads — belonging to four cats and a dog — project, which screech when the particular key to which they are attached is struck!…

A surreal motif, which — famous for my gravitas — I only give house-room here, as today I found a second example. The Huber album example painted in the 1620s is ironically captioned — the bagpipe is not usually considered to sound sweetly [dulce] — with a well-known line from one of the popular medieval…

On the cover of the only English-language work to discuss early modern alba amicorum to date, June Schlueter’s much-needed The Album Amicorum and the London of Shakespeare’s Time (London 2011), we see a group of figures on horseback and on foot, which the author plausibly identifies as a company of travelling players: It is clear…

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…