Le globe et son image.

In the spring of 1995, the Bibliotheque National de France exhibited "Le globe et son image," for which this professionally designed and printed volume is the permanent documentation. The book's tripartite structure creates an elegant sense of order, with each section logically leading to the next, and with the theme of empire linked through time by images of the globe.

In the first essay, "Image du pouvoir: globe celeste ou globe terrestre de l'Antiquite au Moyen Age," Danielle Lecoq explains how the earthly globe and its various empires reflected the imperium of the heavenly sphere. While not pertaining directly to the Renaissance, Lecoq's contribution sets the stage for the other two essays, which are of significance for readers of this journal.

Monique Pelletier's "Le symbolique royale francaise, des globes et des rois" offers visual evidence of her theme from the numismatic collection of the BNF, illustrating items rarely published outside of collection catalogues, and from the title pages of books on geography and cosmography. She describes the secular power emanating from maps of the world, "la representation hyperbolique et instantanee d'un empire sans bornes" (34), through which cosmographers and other royal advisors achieved individual positions of power and influence. Pelletier also focuses on specific symbols such as the Gallic Hercules and the lily, explaining how the "globe fleurdelise" came to dominate the device of Louis XIV.

During the seventeenth century, globes as political status symbols appeared in the major courts of Europe, growing to mammoth proportions and overwhelming the viewer rather than being taken in at a glance. In some cases, specially commissioned globes assumed something of the character of their owner, such as the Coronelli celestial globe in which the position of the stars represented the moment of birth of Louis XIV. As Pelletier points out, the scientific impetus of the eighteenth century ended these pseudoscientific creations as both Louis XV and Louis XVI became avid students of astronomy and geography.

The final section, "Connaissance du monde, vanite du monde: le globe, image du savoir, image de la Creation," by Catherine Hofmann and Eve Netchine, develops the iconographic tension between the perfect yet ephemeral sphere and the unity of human knowledge symbolized by terrestrial and celestial globes. (This section opens, however, with a different sort of tension: the color reproduction of Vermeer's The Astronomer has been reversed. I mention this unfortunate fact because the image is used to open the section, facing the text on the recto of page 49; the designer may have flipped the image to "improve" the book's design by forcing the astronomer's arm to point toward the text.) Unlike Vermeer's The Geographer, which highlights the cartographer himself, his painting of The Astronomer is dominated by a luminous celestial globe which the scientist seems to be studying, reflecting on his place in the universe.

Hofmann and Netchine discuss the place of the sphere and globe in our universe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, particularly as seen in portraits and emblem books. In portraits, globes most often are meant to represent knowledge, while vanitas usually is symbolized by globes in emblems, contextualized by mottoes or epigrams accompanying the image. The authors draw upon several rather different emblem sources to prove this point, all nicely illustrated: Camerarius, Corrozet, Horozco y Covarrubias, Montenay, and Rollenhagen.

With forty images in black and white, and eleven in full color, Le globe et son image clearly expresses the changing role of global iconography as the world itself was enlarged and transformed. This volume should be an interesting and worthwhile addition to reading lists for undergraduate courses in both art history and the Renaissance.

SANDRA SIDER The Pierpont Morgan Library