Erasmian Wit and Proverbial Wisdom: An Illustrated Moral Compendium for Francois I. Facsimile of a Dismembered Manuscript with Introduction and Description.

Jean Michel Massing. Ed. Elizabeth McGrath and J.B. Trapp. (Studies of the Warburg Institute, 43.) London: University of London, 1995.47 pp. b/w facs. + 47 b/w pls. + color frontspiece + xi + 117 pp. [pounds] 25. ISBN: 0-8548-1096-X.

The title does not do justice to this facsimile edition of a Speculum principis (Mirror for Princes) written for the young Francis d'Angouleme by his tutor, Francis Demoulins, sometime between 1512 and 1515. Jean Michel Massing, by providing us with access to a now dismembered, illustrated manuscript and giving us a convincing argument for Erasmus's Adagia as its direct source, exposes this early conjunction of text and image as a proto-emblematic form, anticipating by at least fifteen years the formal appearance of the emblem book, the first printing of Alciati's Liber Emblematum in 1531. In emblem studies, as Peter Daly recently noted, "one can only study what is known to have existed" (Emblematica 8. 1, 151), and by exposing this early manuscript, Massing expands our resources for understanding why the emblem became so influential throughout Europe. He gives us a photographic facsimile of the manuscript (taken before its dismemberment), comparative illustrations, a catalogue describing each plate in detail (with sources), and a critical introduction that convincingly establishes authorship and dating, placing the manuscript in its cultural, aesthetic, and courtly context.

We would not have this manuscript if not for the foresight of Fritz Saxl, a former Director of the Warburg Institute, whose photographs of the manuscript, taken around the early 1940s, serve as the basis for this edition. Although the volume was intact when sold to an American dealer in 1941, it was already dismembered when purchased by the late Ian Woodner as a group of thirty-five Renaissance humanist illustrations. Fortuitously, when first published in 1973, these drawings revealed, under ultraviolet light, the traces of expunged epigrams. Although some individual leaves have been discussed by scholars, the manuscript as a whole remains relatively unknown, making this facsimile an invaluable resource for scholars in Renaissance art or literature, emblem or Erasmian studies.

As Massing carefully documents, much of the text was drawn from the 1508 edition of Erasmus's Adagiorum chiliades. Not only are there parallels in the commentaries, but other precepts, specifically those taken from Pythagoras, can be located within Erasmus's commentary to the Adagia. Additionally, Massing locates parallels between the illustrations in the Demoulins manuscript and those drawings attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger in the 1515 edition of The Praise of Folly, the only illustrations of an Erasmian text extant (before this discovery). The comparable illustrations supplied by Massing reveal similarities that, because of the earlier date and private distribution of the Demoulins text, can only be explained as evoked by a common source.

The Erasmian influence argued by Massing is important for emblem scholars. As Michael Bath has noted, the connection between emblem books and commonplace books has received scant attention. Although the prosaic descriptions attending the illustrations in the Demoulins text seem to be a far cry from the formal epigrams accompanying a motto and picture in the three-part emblem standardized later by Alciati, Massing carefully reminds us that Demoulins's form is not inconsistent with the less formal French sixteenth-century emblem books. Massing does not draw any conclusions hastily, though, and he is careful to present Demoulins's Speculum principis for what it is: an early example of the direct and indirect influence of Erasmus on the unification of text and image for the moral education of a prince.

L. BENSEL-MEYERS University of Tennessee, Knoxville