Visual Allegory and Materiality in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

nAllegorical imagery was richly woven throughout the visual culture of early modern Europe. In examining a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish prints, emblem books, and paintings, this chapter argues that the materiality of visual allegory’s figural signs, apprehended through the senses and experienced in tangible form, is intrinsic to their operation in this period of expanding audiences and marketplaces for visual media. In works deploying representations of the human body, crafted objects, and specimens of the natural world, seeing allegorically entails dynamic movement between the registers of figure and conceit, while mobilizing the often-contending stakes of moral, spiritual, and material modes of knowledge.