To sin or to pish: the origins of “wonder” in prench and plemish love emblems (the turn of the 16th - 17th centuries)

This article is devoted to analysis of French, Flemish, and Dutch love emblems created at the cusp of the 17th century. Our closest attention was drawn to the so-called Marshall’s version of Emblemata amatoria (1608/1609) published by the Renaissance humanist Daniel Heinsius, specifically to folio 62 which shows a woman sitting in a provocative pose and drying a fishing net. The comic effect of this emblem is borne in upon the motto that plays on the homonymy of the French verbs “fish” (pecher) and “sin” (pecher). In this article, we research into the iconographic topics associated with the woman’s pose and the silhouette appearing in the doorway or window, strip the symbolic language of genre-specific brothel scenes, and make assumptions about the strategies of blending the topics of fishing and sex. A substantial amount of effort was spent to investigate into the reasons for depicting fishing nets as a harlot’s attribute. In particular, this metaphor is hypothesized to have been introduced not only by traditional lexical constructions but also by emblem 30 (75) Against the Lovers of Prostitutes from Little Book of Emblems by Andrea Alciato, who portrayed a prostitute as a fisherman wrapped in a goat’s hide to deceive the sargus - fish attracted by goats - into his nets. This topic, in its turn, may trace its roots to the ancient tradition, including Aelian’s animalistic prose. It could be deduced therefore that the blending of heterogeneous topics in emblems was perceived in the 17th century through the aesthetic lens of “wonder”.