Emblem Books: Image and Word

This volume—essentially illustrated—brings together a careful selection of works emblematic of the Baroque period, in which this genre had its heyday. These are works that influenced New Granada culture in several fields. In the artistic, as a model of images for artists; in the theological, as inspiration for sermons and speeches; and in pedagogy, as a stimulus to the inventiveness and creativity of the students.

The books that appear here are organized chronologically by the year of their first publication. The University has copies of different editions and it is important to place them in the year of origin to contextualize their significance.

The emblem is a set that combines image and word: it generally brings together the “pictura” or figure, the “lemma” or nickname—a brief sentence of one's own or that of a classical author or the Bible, almost always in Latin—and an explanation of the figure in verse or prose.