Ambroise Firmin-Didot’s Copy in a Mosaic Binding by Lortic
Andrea Alciati. Emblematum libellus, uigilanter recognitus, & iam recèns per Wolphgangum Hungerum Bauarum, rhytmis Germanicis uersus. Paris, Christian Wechel, 1542.
First Latin-German parallel edition of Alciati’s Emblemata — and likely the first German text ever printed in Paris. A celebrated landmark of emblem literature, richly illustrated with 115 large woodcuts in brilliant impressions. An exceptional copy from the library of the great Parisian publisher and bibliophile Ambroise Firmin-Didot, later bound by Pierre Marcellin Lortic in an elegant and highly personal mosaic binding.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
A–Q8 = 253 pp., 1 leaf.
With printer’s device on title and final leaf, and 115 large woodcuts throughout.
Small octavo (160 × 100 mm).
Published only eleven years after the first edition of Alciati’s Emblemata of 1531, this 1542 printing marks the first edition with parallel Latin and German text. The translation was prepared by Wolfgang Hunger (1511–1555), professor at Ingolstadt and former student of Alciati in Bourges. Rather than translating directly from the Latin, Hunger appears to have worked from the French adaptation by Jean Le Fevre.
The emblem book — combining image, motto, and explanatory epigram — became one of the defining literary and artistic forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Alciati is widely regarded as the founder of the genre, whose influence extended across literature, painting, rhetoric, architecture, and decorative arts for centuries.
Physical Description & Binding
Nineteenth-century orange morocco by Pierre Marcellin Lortic (1822–1892), signed on the inner board. Spine gilt in compartments with floral tools; covers framed with double blind fillets and centred with an elaborate inlaid mosaic design depicting a nude boy holding a cornucopia — a playful allegory of emblematic abundance. Gilt turn-ins, marbled endleaves, and gilt edges.
The present copy preserves the 115 woodcuts in exceptionally strong impressions. The illustrations derive from the celebrated Paris editions printed by Christian Wechel, for which Mercure Jollat created refined cuts “in the manner of Holbein.” Compared with earlier editions, the present version includes two additional illustrations.
A Foundational Work of Emblem Literature
Before emblem books became one of the dominant visual-literary forms of early modern Europe, Alciati’s Emblemata established the model itself: concise symbolic images paired with mottos and explanatory verse. These combinations functioned simultaneously as moral instruction, intellectual game, and humanist exercise in interpretation.
The genre became enormously influential from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Emblematic thinking shaped not only literature, but also Baroque painting, court festivals, architecture, theatre, and systems of political symbolism. As later scholars observed, emblem literature became a “vast reservoir” of medieval and humanist learning and remains essential for understanding the symbolic language of the Baroque world.
Christian Wechel’s Paris editions helped standardize the visual language of emblem books across Europe. The present 1542 edition occupies a particularly important position within that development, uniting Latin humanist culture with vernacular German readership at a remarkably early date.
Provenance
University of Lund, with 18th-century institutional stamp and later duplicate stamp.
Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1810–1876), with his library label on the front pastedown; sold in the Firmin-Didot sale, Paris 1879, lot 471.
Literature
Duplessis 16; Élie 193; Fünf Jahrhunderte 86; Goedeke II, 484 III, no. 1; Graesse I, 62; Green no. 20; KNLL I, 258; Landwehr 1976, no. 25; not in Hoe.
Binding: Devauchelle II, 56–61; Fléty 115.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, lot 79:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
