Sticking together...

An emblem from Giles Corrozet's 1540 Hecatomgraphie makes the connection between peace, amity, kinship and the need for unity in early modern Europe quite explicit. The rhyme explaining this emblem asks how much stronger must these qualities be in relations than they are between strangers?: "Si amytié se treuve es estrangers,/ De combien plus entre amys & parens/ Doibt elle avoir ses effectz apparens?/ Non pas fainctifz, desloyaulx ne legiers?" 

What follows is a retelling of the story of the death of Scylurus, the Scythain king, that is originally found in Plutarch's Moralia XXIX. On his deathbed he asked his eighty sons (!) to break bundles of arrows that were tied together; when they were unable to, the king drew the arrows out one by one and broke them easily, demonstrating that the only way of preserving their strength was by being joined together in concord. 

This is the same idea found in the ancient symbol of the fasces lictoriae,  the bundle of elm rods bound up with an axe which was symbol of the Roman Republic, although without the axe which suggested that the state reserved the right to punish wrongdoers to maintain this unity. The image has been used by many subsequently, most obviously in the imagery of Italian fascism which drew its very name from the fasces, but also quite often in American political imagery such as on the obverse of my favourite coin and good luck token the Mercury Dime as well as in the flags or arms of several American states.

It also appears in other contexts. A similar story appears in a legend of Ghengis Khan's ancestor Alan Ho'a, which can be read in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols. Similarly, it is a lesson taught by the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord Mori Motonari to his sons, an episode familiar, apparently, to all Japanese schoolchildren. 

An episode in Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film Ran inverts this story; one son calls the lesson stupid and does, in fact, break the bound arrows over his knee. In the Americas it is recorded as being part of the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederation, in which Hiawatha asked each tribal chief to contribute an arrow to a bundle to symbolise the unity of the general council of tribes. A bundle of bound arrows were to be left beside the sacred fire as a symbol of the unity of the tribes in one confederation. A recent (2010) $1 coin commemorates this, wrapping the five arrows of the five Iroquois tribes in Hiawatha's belt.

Other examples that I don't really have time to follow upon that use sticks not arrows: the story of Svatopluk, king of Moravia who lived between 830 and 894, and the twigs he presented to his sons before his death; the Bulgar account of Khan Kubrat doing the same thing upon his death bed, which has led to the Bulgarian coat of arms containing a bundle of sticks; lastly, possibly a Persian version from the Seljuk period (mid-eleventh century) although I can't find a specific reference to this.


A dreadful pun has just dawned upon me, which I'll use as the title of this post, that the symbol of the fasces is all about sticking together. 

Ganymede...

A medal of pope Paul III from 1549, the year in which he died, which was produced to commemorate the donation of Parma and Piacenza to his son, Pier Luigi Farnese. Interesting that there is some suggestion that the obverse depicts Zeus as an eagle and Ganymede, who pours an amphora of water upon a lily, the symbol of the Farnese family. The legend says, in Greek, "The Peace of Zeus Pours Well."

The subject of Zeus and Ganymede is an interesting choice for a commemorative medal in the renaissance as it is loaded with homosexual overtones. Ganymede was a Trojan prince whose beauty was so great that he was abducted to serve as the gods' cup bearer and, in many sources, as Zeus' male lover. 

Having said that, Robert Baldwin - who has worked on depictions of rape in early modern Europe - has suggested that Ganymede and Europa were actually reasonably common symbols of  Roman military triumphs that was adapted in the renaissance, and in the Christian tradition it was an allegory for the rapture of the human soul by divine love. Indeed, Alciato used it as an illustration of the adage Joy is Found in God in the first edition of his book of emblems. 

Helmets, Bees, Phallus, Don Henley...

These are not the only examples of helmets being used as symbols in Goetz's medals or the most striking. For instance, the most arresting design includes an assault helmet atop an erect penis to which a German maiden, Lorelei is chained, a bastard child and a broken lyre at her feet. But they are the images that reminded me the most of this image taken from Andrea Alciato's book of emblems published in  Augsburg in 1531.

This woodcut illustrated the proverb Ex bello pax or Out of war comes Peace. The explanation of this suggested it be read in this way: "See here a helmet which a fearless soldier previously wore and which was often spattered with enemy blood. After peace was won, it retired to be used as a narrow hive for bees; it holds honey-combs and nice honey. - Let weapons lie far off; let it be right to embark on war only when you cannot in any other way enjoy the art of peace." Of course, a complete reversal of the sentiments of the twentieth century German examples above.

This sentiment seems to have originated with Alciato's emblem but it does recall many earlier precedents. One from the Bible that has turned up everywhere from Virgil (Georgics Book I) to Michael Jackson (Heal the World) is the idea of military weapons being turned to different purposes in Isaiah 2:4 or Micah 4:3 - "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."Similarly, it runs through classical literature with the spider being the most common occupant of old armour or weapons. 'In iron-bound shields are the looms of busy spiders' is a phrase of Bacchylides quoted by Plutarch (Numa 20); Euripides has a spear covered in cobwebs in Erectheus V. It's also found in Sophocles, Theocritus and, as mentioned in Roman literature in Virgil as well as Ovid (Fasti I.) Here, it is interesting to note a difference betwen Greek and Roman imagery, as suggested by James Hutton, that the Greek tradition uses the spider, whereas the Roman tradition uses the idea of ploughshares, and that these are combined only in the renaissance (Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry, 283.)

Slightly off-track: here's the image of Lorelei chained to the phallus:

I'm not just including this because I may have no opportunity to do so in the future, but also to illustrate certain a point. The image at first seemed to me to be quite ridiculous but the underlying sentiment is really quite disturbing. Goetz was commenting upon the use of black colonial French troops in the Rhineland and their alleged rape of German women. Why I'm including it here is that it occurred to me that some elements of the symbolism in this piece are also drawn straight from the renaissance emblem book. Here's Alciato once more, this time on discord.

This was used as an allegory for the peace of Italy in the 1531 edition. In subsequent ones it was titled Foedera, meaning a contract, agreement or treaty. The one broken string suggested, said Alciato's commentary, that "It is difficult, except for a man of skill, to tune so many strings, and if one string is out of tune or broken, which so easily happens, all the music of the instrument is lost and its lovely song disjointed. In like manner the leaders of Italy are now forming alliances.There is nothing for you to fear if affection lasts for you and stays in concord. But if any one should slide away, which we often see, that harmony is all dissolved into nothing." While we're on the subject, this sentiment has also recently topped the UK charts in a song by James Morrison featuring Nelly Furtado titled Broken Strings. When I first heard it I thought it was interesting that this imagery that I'd been reading about was still cropping up in pop music four centuries later, especially music with lines that have an audible clunk to them such as  When I love you,/ It's so untrue...

I'm not going to include a link to that because it drives me nuts enough as it is, as it seems to get played almost every time I step into a public space. It's easy enough to track down if you feel like subjecting yourself to it. Why Don Henley in the title of this post? Well, if anyone's interested in a slice of musical masochism, here is a link to the song about Ronald Reagan by Bruce Hornsby,  The End of Innocence, which Henley recorded in 1989.  There's a fair few of the standard images/ tropes of the eighties music video used here: a couple rolling around in grassy fields; saxophone solo; nostalgia for the fifties; Henley doing what musicians seemed to do in clips all the time thirty years ago, namely standing in a field wearing a trench coat. But when he sings  "they're beating ploughshares into swords, for the tired old man who we elected king"  it reminds me - as it did when I saw Goetz's medals -  that certain symbols seem to persist in many different contexts, that they can be deployed to say radically different things and that once you're aware of them  you find them in very odd places.

Once again, you can find a catalogue of Goetz's work here and can explore Glasgow University's excellent digital version of Alciato's Emblematum liber with a click here or the other excellent site here at MUN in which many editions are cross-referenced here.

NAHC 

For Foes asleepe, (they say) the Devil Rocks...

A few pages from Henry Peacham's book of emblems Minerva Britannia published in 1612. Although this doesn't contain as man explicit references to treaties as earlier emblem books such as Alciato's Emblematta, it does have several references to peace that are quite interesting. The first one I've included, Sic bellica virtus,  expounds on martial virtue, the essence of which is being prepared even at times of peace. Seeing as the book was dedicated to Henry, Prince of Wales, who disagreed with his father on military matters, it seems appropriate that it speaks of those 'Who not of Fathers Actes ambitious are, But of the brave Atchivements of their owne...'

Henry was depicted as a martial prince elsewhere in the volume, in full armour mounted upon a horse. The legend beneath threatened, as did his father's work the Basilikon Doron had earlier, 'That whether Turke, Spaine, France, Or Italie,/ The Red-Shanke, or the Irish Rebell bold,/ Shall rouze thee up, thy Trophees may be more,/ Than all the Henries Ever Liv'd before.' Of course, he was to die before taking the throne, leaving his brother Charles to inherit his titles.

Prince Charles was depicted by Peacham as in the mould of his father, a peacemaker. This is how Peacham depicted the king, with the motto Sic pacem habemus, referring to his unification of previous warring states of England and Scotland. Although he recommended that the united lions should try their might upon a shared enemy, it's notable that James I had actually brought the Anglo-Spanish War to an end in 1604.

What strikes me about this emblem, which is about how peace stems from unity, is how closely it corresponds so closely to several other emblems in the same volume. First, another dedicated explicitly to James: Ex utroque Immortalis.

The second is about the value of friendship - Vicinorum amicitia. 

These values are often entwined not only in emblem literature, but also in earlier forerunners to the genre like Erasmus in his Adages.  I'll certainly write more on both subjects in the future as they come up in my reading and research. 

See the site Middlebury Minerva for scans and some basic commentaries on Peacham's Minerva Britannica. It's the kind of site that there should be more of, as it was put together in 2001 by a first-year university course on emblem literature run by Professor Timothy Billings at Middlebury College, Vermont. It shows that it's possible for scholars even on the bottom rung of the academic ladder are already able to contribute to a wider corpus of scholarship, not only by making resources available, but by offering some reasonably astute commentary.

NAHC