Research Projects

Emblematics: from word to image to word and Building

Judi Loach

Working within departments of architecture but having taken a research degree in (French) literature as well as a doctorate in architectural history I have been interested in the relations between words and buildings. For a decade I benefited from being a member of an international, multi-disciplinary team organising and teaching on ERASMUS-sponsored intensive courses in early modern emblematics (word-image amalgams), a field of intense development throughout the last couple of decades. Bringing together staff and students from departments of modern languages, comparative literature or neo-latin, art, architectural or music history, and including academic librarians as well as lecturers, we came from, and went to, universities across the UK, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. In coming together from different backgrounds but to study this subject matter on its own terms - studying contemporaneous theoretical literature in order to interpret historic literary and artistic productions - these annual periods of intense collaboration enabled us to develop this currently popular field. In the process I was able to air papers, and gradually refine them, and have eventually published around twenty articles in this field.

At first my own research fitted within traditional scholarship in the field, which was led - and thus largely defined - by literary scholars, and predominately concerned printed sources. As their interest in other material sources increased, I found myself progressively questioning their assumption that emblems (and other symbolic imagery or word-image amalgams) were always devised within a literary sphere and then "applied" to material objects as decoration; increasingly my own, archivally-based research suggested that the converse was true, that printed sources recorded symbolic imagery devised and initially realised within the spheres of performance or art production (including architecture). Consequently buildings should no longer be considered as canvases on which such imagery had been projected but rather as embodiments of symbolic imagery. I therefore began questioning the appropriateness of methodologies developed for analysing the abstract, two-dimensional imagery contained in publications to the analysis of three-dimensional, site-specific buildings and their decorations. This not only led me to produce papers and articles clarifying these ideas, but also, through their publication, has gradually influenced the current state of play in emblematic scholarship.

Due to my own research focus on the Jesuit Menestrier, probably the most influential single theorist on emblematics in seventeenth-century France, I began to wonder whether his use of theological vocabulary for emblematic terminology was merely accidental or actually significant. My subsequent research uncovered both the predominant role played by clergy in formulating early emblematic theory and demonstrated how contemporary theological concepts would have coloured their readers' understanding of their aesthetic treatises in ways previously unsuspected by modern scholars. Symbolic images - including buildings - embodied ideas for which words could only serve as signposts.

In turn this led me to suggest new methodological approaches for analysing seventeenth-century French architecture, particularly that designed for the Counter-Reformation, usually considered baroque in style. I turned to a study of the function of inscriptions in buildings, inspired by contemporaneous theory to consider their original intention as providing words that would signal how to read the meaning inherent in a building conceived as an embodied symbol. This has resulted in fruitful analyses of specific buildings but more significantly has provided a tool that enables rigorous comparison of intentionality underlying different buildings. This tool has then proved capable of application to buildings designed in other places and periods, as I have demonstrated in a recent article, through its application to an analysis of a nineteenth-century American building, the Boston Public Library.

Whilst emblematics, as a discipline, has developed from studying early modern material, the methodologies developed are now being applied fruitfully to the analysis of more recent forms of word-image amalgam, such as the bande dessinée (French cartoon strip). Within this context I have begun to apply perspectives drawn from emblematics to my main area of modern study, Le Corbusier, with a chapter published on the influence on him of early twentieth-century French mass culture formats, such as bande dessinée.