McKeown, Simon
Emblematic Paintings from Sweden’s Age of Greatness

Nils Bielke and the Neo-Stoic Gallery at Skokloster.

This volume presents the paintings as an emblem text, reassembling the paintings in the order in which they occur in Vænius, and providing each with a commentary on iconography, sources, and analogues. Each plate is accompanied by a moralizing gloss by the seventeenth-century French author and editor of Vænius, Marin Le Roy, Sieur de Gomberville in the translation of Thomas Mannington Gibbs. The principal importance of the Skokloster paintings lies in the fact that they appear to be a unique instance of paintings wholly adapted from images in a printed emblem book. As such, they prompt questions about the place of the emblem within the fine and applied arts, generic issues explored in some detail in the introductory essay. The study presents a detailed reconstruction of the paintings' place within a lost decorative milieu at the Uppland castle of Salsta, and offers interpretations of the role emblems played within its wider conceptive framework. The appeal of Vænius to the commissioning patron is also examined, and through this, a broader consideration of the reception of literary emblematics in seventeenth-century Sweden. VII,279 Seiten mit 74 Abb. auf 58 Tafeln, Leinen (Imago Figurata. Studies; Vol. 6/Brepols 2006)