The Four Seasons Tapestries

Michael Bath

The way that the identifiable print sources used as patterns for the total of 170 emblems

in the borders of the Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield House are handled can tell us

something not only about the meaning of the emblems in their new medium and setting

but also about their weaving process. Changes to the Latin mottoes and to pictorial

detail are shown to be purely pragmatic in some cases but clearly motivated in others,

whilst both are influenced not only by the received iconology but also by the art of

rhetoric as taught in the Elizabethan schoolroom. These changes are highly likely to

have been decided on by the patron who commissioned them, Sir John Tracy.

Introduction

The Four Seasons tapestries, now at Hatfi eld House (Hertfordshire), have been recog-

nised as among the more important surviving examples of early English tapestry

(Fig. 1). Their interest for textile history has been strengthened by the belief that we

knew not only their date of manufacture, but also who commissioned them and where

they were woven. Unfortunately, however, recent research has cast doubt on some of

these assumptions. Generally described as ‘Sheldon’ tapestries, woven in the workshop

set up at Barcheston, Warwickshire by William Sheldon in 1570 for the production of

‘tapestry, arras, moccadoes, carolles, plometts, grograynes, sayes and sarges’, the Four

Seasons have been assumed, even in the absence of any documentary evidence, to have

been woven there largely for geographical or stylistic reasons.1 However, the recent

discovery on two of the selvedges of a city mark which was that used in the early

seventeenth century by weavers in Bruges has cast doubt on the ‘Sheldon’ attribution2

(Fig. 2), whilst the 1611 date, which has been confi dently and repeatedly described as

woven into the border of the Winter tapestry, turns out to be a highly speculative inter-

pretation of a puzzling and seemingly illegible detail in one of the Latin emblem mottoes

that fi ll the borders to these tapestries: the case for reading it as a date has never been

properly argued.

The only thing we do know for certain about the origins of the tapestries is that they

were woven for the Tracy family of Toddington, Gloucestershire, since each tapestry

has the arms of Tracy impaling those of Shirley, of Wiston, Sussex: Sir John Tracy mar-

ried Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Shirley, in 1590. It is now more likely that they were

woven at some time after this date, not in Barcheston nor in Bruges, but possibly in

London by weavers working under an immigrant Flemish master who went on using the

weaver’s mark of the city where he had fi rst practised.3

Textile History, 44 (1), 51–71, May 2013

© Pasold Research Fund Ltd 2013 DOI: 10.1179/0040496913Z.00000000019

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The Four Seasons Tapestries

Fig. 2. City mark showing a high warp bobbin as used by weavers licensed by the city of Bruges, here on the selvedge to the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 1. Summer tapestry from the Four Seasons set, Hatfield House.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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The Iconography and its Interpretation

The wider interest of the tapestries centres on their iconography and interpretation. Although the seasonal subjects of their centre panels are familiar and relatively unprob-lematic in the decorative arts of this period, copying or adapting a set of Seasons engrav-ings by Maarten de Vos, their borders are fi lled with Renaissance emblems, comprising an often enigmatic image and a Latin motto whose relation to the accompanying image has to be worked out by the viewer in order to interpret its meaning. These 170 emblems — which had never been fully recorded, illustrated, or interpreted — are the main preoccupation of my own work on the Four Seasons tapestries, shortly to be published by Archetype Publications with the support of the Pasold Research Fund.4 My major task in the book has been to identify sources for the majority of these emblems in the printed emblem books which became so infl uential in the iconographical lexicon of the visual — and especially the decorative — arts, following the publication of Andrea Alciato’s pioneering Emblematum liber in 1531.5 My primary focus is on interpretation since, in many cases, it is only when one has identifi ed the source of these woven emblems in the emblem books that one can make much sense of the Latin mottoes and their accompanying images. The tapestries can now be shown to have used just four emblem books, which inspired the design of their highly unusual and challenging bor-ders, namely Andrea Alciato, whose Emblematum liber initiated the genre in 1531; Joannes Sambucus whose Latin Emblemata appeared in Antwerp in 1565; Geffrey Whitney, whose Choice of Emblemes (London, 1586) was the fi rst English emblem book; and Guillaume de la Perrière, whose French Theatre des bons engins fi rst appeared in Paris in 1540. La Perrière’s emblem book was translated into English by Thomas Combe and listed in the Stationers’ Register in 1593, using the same woodcuts that had illustrated the Lyons editions printed by Jean de Tournes in 1545.6

It became apparent in writing my book, however, that source identifi cation can tell us something not only about meaning but also about the way the source materials were handled in the weaving process, and it is this aspect that I concentrate on in the present article. Two aspects of that process are at issue in this context. Firstly, how were the source engravings copied or (in many cases, as we shall see) amended for their incorpo-ration into the cartoons which would have been used by the team of professional weav-ers in their workshop? Did the owner, Sir John Tracy, who commissioned them have any say in their design? Did he own the actual emblem books? And, secondly, how did the weavers interpret (or occasionally, as we shall see, misinterpret) what must have been represented in the cartoons? Although these questions inevitably involve some speculation, identifi cation of the actual woodcuts or engravings which must have been used gives us a certain security in making those assumptions. It is the differences, and not just the similarities, between source and copy that are often most interesting, since when we fi nd the designer making signifi cant changes to his pattern-print we probably have the clearest evidence of his artistic intentions — such changes are unlikely to be unmotivated.

We may usefully distinguish, in this investigation, between changes to the pictorial detail which appear in the tapestries and changes to the Latin mottoes; in both of these areas it soon becomes apparent that not all the changes were simply pragmatic. The emblem picturae are all contained within encircling scrollwork, about nine inches in

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The Four Seasons Tapestries

diameter, and although the mottoes are contained in scrolls which extend beyond the scrollwork, space is necessarily limited. But although some of the mottoes which the designer found in his sources evidently had to be shortened, far more have been length-ened. In many cases an entirely new motto is substituted for the one used in the emblem book that supplied the emblematic image, whilst for all of the emblems copied from La Perrière’s Theatre de bons engins an appropriate motto had to be discovered in classical texts, or otherwise invented, since La Perrière does not use Latin mottoes but French verse-couplet headers. Clearly, therefore, the print sources or engravings did not supply simple labour-saving, off-the-shelf patterns, but had to be adapted and rethought by a competent reader of Latin, able to adapt the moral apophthegms which he found in his sources and to fi nd or invent good substitutes where necessary. As we shall see, he also had a good understanding of the associated iconography of his chosen emblems since the changes made to their picturae show at least some understanding of the received meaning and moral point of the emblem.

Abbreviation of the motto to fi t the available space can be found in those emblems showing what have to be understood as various powerful animals which were tradition-ally thought to show an exceptional weakness: bulls fear red; elephants fear white; stags fl ee burning cloths; lions are frightened by a cock crowing, all indicating that no one should believe there is nothing to frighten them, or so one learns on consulting Sambu-cus who invented this emblem (Figs 3 and 4). His motto spells out the moral, Fortissima minimis interdum cedunt (‘Sometimes the strongest give way to the weakest’). This is shortened to read CEDUNT FORTIA PARVIS (‘The strong give way to the weak’), which preserves the moral whilst economising on space. The tapestry has the advantage over Sambucus’s woodcut, however, insofar as it is able to show the appropriate colours: the bull charges a red drape; the elephant faces a white one. This change was surely prompted by what the accompanying epigram tells us about these colours in

Fig. 3. CEDUNT FORTIA PARVIS (‘The strong give way to the weak’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 4. Fortissima minimis interdum cedun t, Geffrey Whitney, Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 52.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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Michael Bath

Sambucus (or in Whitney, who translates this emblem), and is evidence of a determina-tion to preserve the emblematic point, which suggests that it must have been made at the insistence of the client, Sir John Tracy, who commissioned the tapestries, or who-ever was responsible for communicating his requirements to the designer of the cartoons to be used by the weavers.

Amplifi cation of the motto occurs, for example, in two emblems on the Spring tapestry where the original motto is simply repeated, probably for purely practical reasons. Alciato’s emblem of peace shows an elephant, which his epigram explains is trained to be aggressive in wartime but is yoked to emperors’ chariots once peace is declared. The simple motto Pax evidently required some padding to fi ll the scroll above the picture, so in addition to the two decorative plant-slips — which are evidently space-fi llers — the designer has simply repeated the word to produce a motto: PAX PAX (Figs 5 and 6). Similar repetition is found close by on the same tapestry in the emblem of the ass, which carries rich provender on its back but stoops to feed on a thistle, representing misers who hoard their wealth whilst living on bread and water, hence its motto in Alciato, In avaros (‘On misers’) (Figs 7 and 8). This is longer than the three letters of Pax, but once again the tapestry repeats it, to produce the evidently tauto-logical IN AVAROS IN AVAROS. These changes were all, presumably, pragmatic.

Greater resourcefulness was required when an entirely new motto had to be found. Emblem mottoes often draw on the body of classical sayings, proverbs, adages and apophthegms which were the building blocks of Latin composition and of ‘common-place’ rhetoric as taught in the Elizabethan grammar schools, so we should not perhaps be surprised at the readiness of their designer (or of Sir John Tracy) to supply appropri-ate mottoes where those were lacking in his source, or substitutions where he recognised a more appropriate — or perhaps a more familiar — analogue. Schoolboys, after all, learned how to compile classifi ed lists of such analogues under topical headings in the

Fig. 5. PAX PAX (‘Peace peace’), emblem from the Spring tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 6. Pax, Alciato, Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), p. 20.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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classroom.7 An emblem on the Winter tapestry shows a dyer lifting textiles from a boil-ing dye-kettle, copying one that goes back via Whitney to Alciato, who both explain that the dying of cloth in various colours is an art which is required to meet the aspiration of different trades, classes, and ranks in life for distinctive costumes (Figs 9 and 10). Both sources supply the simple motto In colores (‘On colours’), for which the tapestry substi-tutes a motto that at least suggests the moral point, HONOS ALIT ARTES (‘Honours nurture the arts’). This quotes Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, 1.2.4) and is not cited by Alciato or Whitney.

Fig. 7. IN AVAROS IN AVAROS (‘On misers on misers’), emblem from the Spring tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 10. In colores, Alciato, Emble-mata (Leiden, 1591), p. 142.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 8. In avaros, Alciato, Emblemat a (Leiden, 1591), p. 104.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 9. HONOS ALIT ARTES (‘Honours nurture the arts’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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Michael Bath

The Winter tapestry has another emblem based on the useful arts, showing what has to be understood as an ass eating newly spun rope which its maker and his assistant are spinning on a rope-walk (Figs 11 and 12). This copies Alciato, whose verse epigram explains that it shows a she-ass which, classical authors tell us, ate the rope spun by a man called Ocnus. The emblem represents, as Alciato’s extraordinarily verbose motto puts it, Ocni effi gies, de iis qui meretricibus donant, quod in bonos usus verti debeat (‘A representation of Ocnus, on those who give to whores what should be turned to good use’). The tapestry motto Non m[ultum] si frugis et uxor sit (‘It is not often that a woman is both a wife and frugal’) preserves the misogynist moral, though it owes nothing to Alciato’s Latin, and the struggle to invent something short enough to fi t the available space can be witnessed in the abbreviation of the word m[ultum], fi ve of whose missing letters have to be understood by the reader as concealed behind the encircling rope work: only readers accustomed to making sense of familiar Latin abbreviations would know how to construe the grammar of this sentence. The emblem was used else-where in the decorative arts of this period in England; the house in which Elizabethan writer Gabriel Harvey was brought up in Saffron Walden has a carved fi replace which displays the Ocnus emblem — for very good reasons, as it happens, since Harvey’s father was a rope maker, although whether his wife was a spendthrift or whether he himself spent his hard-earned money in brothels are not, presumably, the questions we are being encouraged to ask as we sit in front of his fi re.8

A similar abbreviation can be found on the Winter tapestry’s emblem showing what turns out to be Narcissus falling in love with his own refl ection in the water, copying an emblem of ‘Self-love’ to which Whitney gave the Latin motto Amor sui after Alciato’s original, which that distinguished lawyer and humanist entitled Φιλαυτία using the

Fig. 11. NON M[ULTUM] SI FRUGIS ET UXOR SIT (‘It is not often that a woman is both a wife and frugal’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 12. Ocni effigies, de iis qui mer-etricibus donant, quod in bonos usus verti debeat, Alciato, Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), p. 110.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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The Four Seasons Tapestries

Greek alphabet (Figs 13 and 14). The tapestry’s use of Alciato rather than Whitney is suggested by its use of the Latin transliteration of this, though expanded into a motto that is designed, as any good motto should be, to spell out the moral: STULTA EST O[MN]IS PHILAUTIA (‘All self-love is foolish’): Narcissus, we should remember, paid the price for his self love when he fell into the river and drowned. The price the tapestry pays for this expansion, however, is its abbreviation of the word omnis, an abbreviation which in this case would have been perfectly familiar to Latin writers, who habitually omitted Latin nasals (letters ‘m’ and ‘n’) and normally signalled the omission by a dia-critical mark, something only likely to have been used by an educated adaptor of these sources. Greek lettering is extremely uncommon in tapestries of this period, so we should not be surprised that Alciato’s motto is transcribed as Roman capitals, making it both consistent with the other lettering and also more easily legible.9 The weavers, or possibly the designer of their cartoons, are unlikely to have known how to expand any diacritical mark they found in their instructions for these amended mottoes, and would not have copied the mark itself. However, that the tapestry’s designer intended this motto to be legible and understood is surely suggested by the trouble he took in inventing a new explanatory motto, longer than either of his available sources. Modern conservation has visibly had to restore the fi rst three letters of the word PHILAUTIA, but the abbreviated O[MN]IS is the original weaving.

Dating

This brings us to the problematic dating. The Winter tapestry has an unsourced emblem showing a man whose hand is being bitten by a dog (Fig. 15). The motto goes back to

Fig. 14. Φιλαυτία, Alciato, Emblemat a (Leiden, 1591), p. 88.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 13. STULTA EST O[MN]IS PHILAUTIA (‘All self-love is foolish’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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Cicero (De Offi ciis, iii.1), as ex malis eligere minima oportere (‘Choose the least of two evils’), which the tapestry truncates to E MALIS MINIMUM I[?]II (‘The least of evils I[?]II’). It is these last four characters that have rashly been assumed to supply a date for the tapestries, although why a date should appear at random in just one of the 170 emblem mottoes, or why it should be in this particular one at the top of what we have good reason to believe would have been the last of the four tapestries to be woven, are questions which have seldom been addressed, let alone answered. We also need to ask what, exactly, the date would be recording — is it the completion of the weaving? As Joan Kendall asks, ‘If this is a date why weave it possibly two years before the tapestry could be fi nished when there is space at the end of the last upper label, which has been fi lled in with a quatrefoil and another motif?’.10 The idea that this is a date rests heavily on the notion that the curious second character in this conundrum is indeed the reversed number 6, producing the date ‘1611’. Reversal of details is admittedly an easy mistake to make, although there are no others on the mottoes to these emblems, and it surely makes more sense to assume that this is part of the emblem’s motto and possibly another abbreviation. The loop of this character is also, it has to be said, more spiralled than one expects in the Arabic numeral. Something resembling the number ‘9’ is, how-ever, a common diacritical mark, normally signalling the omission of the letters ‘-us’ in Latin, and, although this is not what we need in order to fi nd any intelligible word that might conclude this motto, it makes at least some sense if we take the adjoining letters as Roman numerals: I (‘one’) and II (‘two’), whilst the mystery character might possibly be the rendition of a sign intended for the word aut (‘or’) or nec (‘not’), hence ‘One not two’. I can fi nd no authority, admittedly, in diacritical usage for reading the ‘reversed 6’ character this way, but in his Adagia — that great compendium of classical common-places — Erasmus cites a version of this proverb using both these numerals: Praestat uni malo obnoxium esse quam duobus (‘It is better to be exposed to one evil rather than two’). The proposed abbreviation would, in fact, be an exact translation of the phrase uni . . . quam duobus, and even if the tapestry’s E malis minimum formula is closer to Cicero’s than to Erasmus’s version of this proverbial expression, the evidence elsewhere on the tapestries that these mottoes were adapted or invented by a reasonably competent

Fig. 15. E MALIS MINIMUM I[?]II (‘The least of evils, one not two’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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Latinist would support the idea that he might have known both versions, and the status of commonplace rhetoric in the educational curriculum means that even moderately gifted schoolboys would be used to assembling such variants in their Latin commonplace books. I suggest that this hypothesis is a rather more plausible explanation of this admit-tedly puzzling and problematic detail than the idea that it supplies the date when the tapestries were woven, however anxious we might be to fi nd such evidence. The weaving of all four would have taken at least fi ve or six years.

Iconography and Rhetoric

An emblem on the Summer tapestry shows a bird catcher who entices wildfowl into his net — anticipating Mozart’s Papageno — by whistling to them. This copies an emblem by La Perrière who tells us that it symbolises courtiers who entrap their gullible masters by sweet talking fl attery (Figs 16 and 17). The tapestry fi nds a highly appropriate motto, FISTULA DULCE CANIT (‘The pipe plays sweetly’), that recognises La Perrière’s source, quoting Cato (Disticha, I. 27), Noli homines blando nimium sermone probare/ Fistula dulce canit, volucrem dum decipit auceps (‘No trust in smooth-tongued men’s

Fig. 16. FISTULA DULCE CANIT (‘The pipe plays sweetly’), emblem from the Summer tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 17. ‘Flattery as a bird catcher’, Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London: Richard Field, 1614), no. 54; an earlier edi-tion of Combe’s translation of La Perrière was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1593.Reproduced by kind permis-sion of the Librarian, Univer-sity of Glasgow.

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professions lay; Sweet sounds the fowler’s pipe to lure the prey’). The third- or fourth-century ‘Distichs’ of Dionysius Cato, consisting of proverbial sayings in verse couplets, became the most popular medieval handbook for teaching Latin and remained a teach-ing aid in the classroom well into the eighteenth century. Once again this is evidence of a designer who recognises not simply the iconography of the image he is copying but also its rhetorical basis. In such a mixed medium as the emblem, combining word and image, that association between the iconographical and the rhetorical traditions was, inevitably, close. The tapestries’ designer (Tracy?) evidently recognised the literary topos which inspired La Perrière’s emblem of fl attery and was able to supply the missing Latin motto by quoting its source.

Another emblem from La Perrière on the Summer tapestry has the motto NESCIT VOX MISSA REVERTI (‘A word once spoken can never be recalled’) (Fig. 18). Whitney borrowed this emblem for his Choice of Emblemes . . . gathered out of sundrie writers, as his title-page puts it, and since he too had to supply Latin mottoes for the emblems he cribbed from La Perrière, he heads it Verbum emissum non est revocabile (‘A word once spoken cannot be recalled’), which certainly explains this picture showing a pigeon fancier who is releasing his bird into the sky (Fig. 19). The tapestry motto is not the same as Whitney’s, however, but quotes Horace (Ars poetica, 390). Whitney’s motto reworks a different sentence from Horace, which has the same meaning and is cited in a sidenote to his emblem, Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum (‘And once uttered a word fl ies irrevocably away’) (Epist. I. xviii, 71). The tapestry designer cer-tainly had access to both La Perrière and Whitney, both of whom use the same woodcut so we cannot be sure which source his picture is copying, but it seems likely that he noted Whitney’s motto before coming up with a different one from a well-known poem by the same author (Horace) that was already familiar to him. Once again we fi nd the kind of variation that refl ects commonplace rhetoric as it was taught in the classroom.

Fig. 18. NESCIT VOX MISSA REVERTI (‘A word once spoken can never be recalled’), emblem from the Summer tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 19. Verbum emissum non est revocabile, Geffrey Whitney, Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 180.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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The Four Seasons Tapestries

Religious Emblems

Although its iconology is largely classical and secular, there are a number of specifi cally religious emblems on the tapestries. Whitney’s Quis contra nos? emblem shows the snake which bit St Paul’s fi nger as he was lighting a fi re, but from which he suffered no harm while he was on his evangelising mission (Acts 28: 3–6) and the motto quotes Romans 8: 31 (Fig. 20). The tapestry copies his woodcut closely but, once again, shows a recognition of the source by quoting a fuller version of the same biblical text, SI DEUS NOBISCUM QUIS CONTRA NOS (‘If God is with us, who can be against us?’) (Fig. 21). It is a text that was well known in both heraldry and religious polemic at this period (e.g. Adagia, IV ii 36). Whitney’s Sol non occidat super iracundiam vestram (‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath’) has another biblical motto, and goes back to the fi rst ever religious emblem book, Georgette de Montenay’s Huguenot Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Lyons 1567/1571) (Fig. 22). The picture shows two enemies who have thrown down their swords and embrace, holding branches of laurel. The tapestry, in this emblem, sacrifi ces the biblical motto and fi nds a familiar classical substitute, FINIS BELLI PAX EST (‘Peace is the end of war’) (Fig. 23).

Changes to Emblems

Changes to the emblematic pictures can also be either pragmatic or strategic. An emblem on the Summer tapestry with the motto AEMULATIO FOR[M]AE MAXIMA[E] (‘Beaut y contest’), expects the viewer to recognise it as a version of the Judgement of

Fig. 20. Quis contra nos?, Gef-frey Whitney, Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 166.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 21. SI DEUS NOBISCUM QUIS CONTRA NOS (‘If God is with us, who can be against us?’), emblem from the Summer tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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Paris and its three partially draped fi gures as the goddesses, Juno, Minerva and Venus, to the most beautiful of whom Paris famously awarded the golden apple inscribed ‘To the fairest’ in classical legend (Fig. 24). The young child holding the hand of the fi gure on the left has to be recognised as Cupid. It is his presence accompanying his mother Venus which helps us to identify Sambucus as the source of this emblem, which Whitney also copies with the same woodcut, showing the three classical goddesses partially draped and accompanied by Cupid (Fig. 25). The fi gures are certainly repositioned, and the tapestry also ignores the seated fi gure of Paris, whom the woodcut shows awarding his prize to the victorious Venus. It also omits the helmeted fi gure of Mercury, Zeus’s messenger who, classical authors tell us, conducted the goddesses to their fateful com-petition. The omission of the two male fi gures is likely to have been for pragmatic reasons, since weaving six plausible human fi gures into the available space of the tapes-try would certainly have been a challenge. This is a subject which famously offered artists the chance to paint female nudes, though Sambucus’s illustrator is certainly not at all exceptional in providing his fi gures with caches sexes: the tapestry makes them rather more substantial, in line with its policy throughout, where nudes are invariably draped. Both Sambucus and Whitney give the emblem a title Iudicium Paridis (‘The Judgement of Paris’) and the tapestry’s motto is therefore original; once again, however, we witness abbreviations requiring a competent reader to supply a missing nasal in for[m]ae and the concluding letter of maxima[e].

Equally generic is the designer’s insistence on supplying the emblem pictures he was copying with a rural background which seldom owes much, if anything, to that in the source picture. His competence in supplying and handling such detail is perhaps sug-gested by the centre panels, whose seasonal landscapes are all, of course, rural, copying the landscapes in Maarten de Vos’s prints whilst supplementing them with much further

Fig. 22. Sol non occidat super iracun-diam vestram, Geffrey Whitney, Emble-mes (Leiden, 1586), p. 216.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 23. FINIS BELLI PAX EST (‘Peace is the end of war’), emblem from the Summer tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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detail.11 Sometimes the outdoor setting in the emblems is quite inappropriate, however, as with the emblem CUM TEMPORE MUTAMUR (‘We are changed with time’) which shows a baby in a cradle alongside an aged man who hobbles on crutches (Fig. 26); we may well wonder why this cradled infant has been abandoned in the open fi elds, where his grandfather is apparently taking the air; Whitney’s woodcut (and this is one of the original emblems in Whitney that has no continental source) situates them more sensibly indoors (Fig. 27). We fi nd two similarly cradled infants in an unsourced and puzzling emblem on the Winter tapestry where they lie amongst the fl owers and we know they are cradles, not coffi ns, because the motto tells us so, CUNABULA INDICANT HO[S]TEM (‘The cradles reveal an enemy’). I cannot explain this emblem (Fig. 28).

The tapestry sometimes shows mistakes, as with the emblem which Alciato invented to express one of the highest ideals of Renaissance humanism under the motto Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri (‘Immortality is achieved through literary stud-ies’) (Fig. 29). The picture shows Neptune’s trumpeter, Triton, blowing on a conch-shell and encircled by the serpent known as an ourobouros, biting its tail: the trumpet repre-sents fame, the encircling serpent eternity. Alciato explains in his epigram that Triton is a sea monster and Neptune god of the sea which is why his picture places them in a marine setting, and this must be what misled the weavers into depicting Triton as a mermaid (Fig. 30). Their representation of the ourobouros and their abbreviation of Alciato’s motto, however, both preserve the emblematic meaning: LITERIS FIAS IMMORTALIS (‘You are made immortal by letters’).

Rather graver is their mistake in the representation of Alciato’s Iusta vindicta (‘Just recompense’) emblem based on Homer’s tale (Odyssey, IX) of Ulysses and Polyphemus in which Ulysses blinds Polyphemus after he has killed and eaten several of Ulysses’

Fig. 24. AEMULATIO FOR[M]AE MAXIMA[E] (‘Beauty contest’), emblem from the Summer tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salis-bury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 25. Iudicium Paridis, Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata cum aliquot nummis (Antwerp: Officina Christo-pheri Plantini, 1564), p. 161.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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Fig. 28. CUNABULA INDICANT HO[S]TEM (‘The cradles reveal an enemy’), emblem from the Winter tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 26. CUM TEMPORE MUTAMUR (‘We are changed with time’), emblem from the Autumn tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 27. Cum tempore mutamur, Geffrey Whitney, Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 167.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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fellow travellers (Fig. 31). The one thing one needs to know about Polyphemus is that he was a Cyclops, one of those classical monsters who, by defi nition, had only one eye and it is thus a cardinal error for the tapestry, in the emblem which it re-titles DORMIENS FACILE SUPERATUR (‘Sleeping, he is easily overcome’), to show him with two (Fig. 32).

Fig. 29. Ex litterarum studiis immor-talitatem acquire, Alciato, Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), p. 159.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 30. LITERIS FIAS IMMORTALIS (‘You are made immortal by letters’), emblem from the Autumn tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 31. Iusta vindicta, Alciato, Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), p. 171.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

Fig. 32. DORMIENS FACILE SUPERATUR (‘Sleeping, he is easily overcome’), emblem from the Autumn tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the changes to the print sources which we discover in the tapestries are all misunderstandings. Nor are they all merely pragmatic, for in a number of cases it is possible to show that their designer not only understood what he was copying, but amended or improved it in deliberate ways. This can be seen, for instance, in an emblem under the motto INVIDIA SIBI MA[GNUM] TORMENTUM (‘Envy is a great torment to itself’) (Fig. 33). The picture shows us a female fi gure with pendulous, exposed breasts and hair formed of snakes; she supports herself with a staff whilst her other hand is holding something up to her lips. She is the fi gure of Envy, and goes back to an emblem which Whitney copied from Alciato (Fig. 34). The tapestry shows signifi cant differences in its handling of both the received motto and the picture. Envy is one of those moral qualities that had never disappeared from the iconography of vices and virtues which came down through the Middle Ages, but Renaissance humanism tends to return their iconography to its classical roots wher-ever possible, and Alciato’s description of Envy goes back to Ovid (Metamorphoses 2.760 ff.) describing Envy as a hideous woman, whose breasts fed poison and whose tongue was venomous, carrying prickly thorn branches to wound her victims. Emblems were well adapted to moralise such allegorical fi gures, explaining their symbolic attri-butes, and Faith, Hope, Justice, Envy, Fortune and Nemesis are among the examples that the tapestries include. Because, as allegory, they are speaking pictures, they attracted writers who were drawn to ekphrasis which is why Whitney expands Alciato’s motto/title for this one, Invidia (‘Envy’), to read Invidia descriptio (‘The description of Envy’): descriptio is a term in rhetoric, where it means something very close to ekphrasis. The tapestry, however, has a different motto which owes nothing to these, but is arguably a key to the most signifi cant change it makes to the picture. Both Ovid and Alciato stress that Envy not only does harm to others but is a torment to herself.

Fig. 33. INVIDIA SIBI MA[GNUM] TORMEN-TUM (‘Envy is a great torment to itself’), emblem from the Spring tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 34. Invidia, Alciato, Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), p. 90. Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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As Ovid puts it, ‘Gnawing at others, and being gnawed, she was herself her own tor-ment’, and it is Ovid’s expression suppliciumque suum est (‘and is a torment to herself’) which must lie behind the tapestry’s new motto INVIDIA SIBI MA[GNUM] TORMEN-TUM. It also lies behind the most signifi cant change it makes to the picture, for whilst Ovid describes her as ‘gnawing at others, and being gnawed’ and Alciato goes so far as to describe her as ‘gnawing her own heart’, it is only the tapestry which shows her actu-ally holding her heart up to her mouth, for this is what she holds in her hand. Alciato’s woodcut certainly shows her holding her disembodied heart to her breast, but her mouth is left unfi lled because out of it come Ovid’s snakes: Envy, we are meant to think, spits poison. One consequence of this is that the snakes had to be relocated, which is why they are now shown in her hair. Iconographically this is a bit obtuse — she is not Medusa.

These changes are likely to have been infl uenced by the proverbial saying cor ne edito, which is still current in English when we say ‘Don’t eat your heart out’. It is known as one of the ‘Pythagorean Symbols’, a set of exhortatory maxims attributed to the Greek philosopher by later writers such as Plutarch which include such gems as: ‘Don’t eat beans’, ‘Don’t poke the fi re with a sword’ and ‘Don’t put meat into a pisspot’. The expression had become proverbial and is recorded, as one might expect, by Erasmus in his Adagia. English readers could fi nd it quoted in Richard Taverner’s selection of these, Proverbs or Adages by Desiderius Erasmus Gathered out of the Chiliades and Englished, fi rst printed in 1539: ‘Cor ne edito. Eate not thy harte (that is to saye) consume not thy selfe wyth cares and thoughtes of worldlye thynges, for that eateth and knaweth a mans harte’.12 In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon cites it in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ to refer to someone who cannot open his heart to friends: ‘The parable of Pythagoras is dark, but true: Cor ne edito, “Eat not the heart”. Certainly, if a man would give it a hard phrase, those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts’ (Bacon, Essays, xxvii). Again, our tapestry designer would have encountered this saying in the schoolroom.

Perhaps some of the most interesting and signifi cant changes to a source picture are those we fi nd being made to an emblem copied from Sambucus showing Helen observ-ing the arrival of the Trojan horse at the gates of Troy (Fig. 35). One knows that this is Helen because her name appears carved on the battlements over which she is leaning. The motto may be translated ‘Take trouble over the unknown’, warning about the dan-gers of raising one’s guard against a hidden threat. The fi gure in Sambucus’s woodcut is not Helen herself but rather a statue of her, which may well be why Sambucus’s art-ist has inscribed her name on the wall above it — sculptures often have such identifying labels: people leaning over walls do not (Fig. 36). There are, as it happens, a number of occasions in Homer (and in Virgil’s retelling of the Troy story in the Aeneid) when the action is described as witnessed by one of the characters — invariably Helen — over-looking it as she stands on the walls. In Iliad, III, Helen is led out onto the walls of Troy to view the battle between her abductor Paris and her husband Menelaus, and Virgil imitates Homer’s technique by placing Dido on the walls of her tower to curse the fl eeing Aeneas in Book IV of the Aeneid. This point of view, as a narrative technique, was suffi ciently well known to have its own name in rhetoric, where it is called a teichoscopia, which means ‘a view from the walls’ (from τειχίον, ‘a wall’) and is a nar-rative strategy in Greek literature when a character describes events as they are actually

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happening in front of her eyes from such a vantage point (and it is always ‘her’ eyes). Spanish Golden Age dramatists such as Lope de Vega made notable use of this vantage point for their characters in plays which seldom, if ever, ignore its strongly Homeric associations.13

These episodes, and the teichoscopic narrative technique, nearly always occur at dra-maturgic moments when the trustworthiness of women’s judgement is at issue, which may well be why whoever decided on these changes (and it can hardly have been anyone other than Sir John Tracy), chose to introduce it into this emblem illustrating the folly of fi ghting over what Sambucus characterises as a thoughtless and worthless woman. Because of its Homeric basis teichoscopia is also used when issues of war and peace are involved, moments when, as Sambucus’s motto suggests, one should take particular trouble not to be caught out. If we are inclined to doubt whether Tracy, or his designer, could possibly have been motivated in adapting his source picture by such a — to our eyes — obscure rhetorical device, we should perhaps bear in mind that a knowledge of rhetoric would have been routinely instilled in grammar school pupils at this time in England. Jacobean schoolboys, after all, learned their Latin by studying grammar and rhetoric, and by memorising the kind of proverbial sayings or classical adagia that supplied nearly all these emblems with their mottos. The change to Sambucus’s picture was certainly not unmotivated, and Helen’s gesture in the tapestry (though not in the woodcut) is clearly demonstrative.

Conclusions

What we are witnessing, if this analysis has any plausibility, is a designer who made changes to his source pictures which were strongly infl uenced by his rhetorical training.

Fig. 35. PRO IGNOTIS SUMERE LABOREM (‘Take trouble over the unknown’), emblem from the Spring tapestry.Reproduced courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

Fig. 36. Pro ignotis sumere labore m, Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata cum aliquot nummis (Antwerp: Officina Christopheri Plantini, 1564), p. 163.Reproduced by kind permission of the Librarian, University of Glasgow.

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This is not the kind of training which a master weaver would be likely to have acquired, but would have come quite naturally to any graduate of the English grammar schools. The only plausible candidate for this role, I suggest, is Sir John Tracy himself, the patron who undoubtedly commissioned these tapestries sometime after 1590, when he must at least have supplied the weavers with the pattern for his coat of arms, Tracy impaling Shirley, woven top centre of each of the tapestries following his marriage in that year to Anne Shirley. It seems likely that he would have also supplied them with copies of emblems selected from the four emblem books — by Alciato, Sambucus, Whitney and La Perrière — that I have identifi ed. We have no record of Sir John’s library, but the likelihood that he owned such books is suggested by the fact that three of the four were published by the Plantin press in Antwerp or Leiden, where Tracy had served under the Earl of Leicester during Leicester’s campaign as Governor General of the Netherlands in the 1580s. Whitney’s book was dedicated to Leicester and composed whilst Whitney himself was also in the Netherlands with Leicester, to whom it is dedicated, which is why this, the fi rst English emblem book, was published not in London but in Leiden. Anne’s father, Sir Thomas Shirley (c. 1542–1612), politician and courtier, had also served in the Low Countries with the Earl of Leicester in the 1580s, when he was Queen Elizabeth’s go-between over the vexed question of fi nancing Leicester’s expedition. He ended up as Elizabeth’s treasurer-at-war with overall responsibility for funding the campaign, a responsibility which he turned to his own advantage by blatant peculation that ensured that much of the one-and-a-half million pounds laid out for the troops ended up in his own pocket. It would not, therefore, be surprising if copies of these three emblem books had ended up in Sir John’s library. Indeed, as a law student — admitted to the Inner Temple in 1580 — he would have had exactly the kind of education that would attune him to the classical and rhetorical techniques that went into the makeup of emblems, that genre of speaking pictures whose pater et princeps was the greatest of sixteenth-century jurists, Andrea Alciato. This is not to say that Sir John Tracy was the actual designer of these tapestries — he certainly would not have drawn the cartoons — merely to suggest the likelihood that he supplied the emblems which the weavers used for their border detail and made whatever suggestions were necessary for changes to their pictures and mottoes. There was, after all, no one else in a position to have done so. The relationship of these marginalised emblems to the main subjects in the seasonal centre panels of the tapestries is a much bigger issue, which I cannot open here, but which will be found fully addressed in my book.

References 1 E. A. B. Barnard and A. J. B. Wace, ‘The Sheldon tapestry weavers and their work’, Archaeologia,

lxxviii (1928), pp. 255–314. Sheldon’s will was deposited in the Register of Births, Marriages

and Deaths, Somerset House, ref. P.C.C.8 Holney, and is cited at some length by Barnard and Wace,

pp. 255–58.2 H. L. Turner, ‘A case of mistaken identity: the “Sheldon” Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield

House reconsidered’, Emblematica, xix (2012), pp. 1–28.3 Ibid., p. 20.4 M. Bath, The Four Seasons Tapestries at Hatfield House (London: Archetype Publications and

The Pasold Research Fund, 2013, in press). Research on the emblems had previously been undertaken

by P. M. Daly, ‘The Four Seasons tapestries made for Sir John Tracy of Toddington’, in R. Smith ed.,

The Sudeleys — Lords of Toddington (London: The Manorial Society of Great Britain, 1987),

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pp. 169–89 and P. M. Daly, ‘The Sheldon Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield House: a seventeenth-

century instance of significant emblematic decoration in the English decorative arts’, Emblematica, xiv

(2005), pp. 251–96.5 For the history of emblem books see, for example, J. Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion

Books, 2002); M. Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London:

Longman, 1994).6 Bibliographical details of these emblem books can be found in M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-

Century Imagery (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 1975). Combe’s translation of La Perrière

survives in only two known copies, of which the fragmentary Glasgow University (Stirling Maxwell

Collection) copy lacks the title-page which might have confirmed the date, but is a different type setting

from the Huntington Library copy, printed by Richard Field in 1614; see M. Silcox ed., Thomas

Combe, The Theatre of Fine Devices (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990). For La Perrière, see also

A. Adams, S. Rawles and A. Saunders, A Bibliography of French Emblem Books of the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries (Genève: Libraries Droz, 1999); S. Rawles, ‘The earliest editions of Guillaume

de la Perrière’s Theatre des bons engins’, Emblematica, ii, no. 2 (1987), pp. 381–86; A. Saunders, ‘The

Theatre des bons engins through English eyes (La Perrière, Combe and Whitney)’, Revue de Littérature

Comparée, lxiv, no. 4 (1990), pp. 653–73. For Sambucus, see A. S. Q. Visser, Joannes Sambucus and

the Learned Image: Forms and Functions of a Humanist Emblem Book (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Facsimiles,

with translations and notes, of Alciato, Sambucus and La Perrière can be accessed online at http://

www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk [Accessed: 7 September 2012] and an online facsimile of Geffrey

Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes is available at http://www.mun.ca/alciato/wcomm.html [Accessed: 16

December 2012].7 Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 31–48; see also A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the

Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).8 P. M. Daly, ‘England and the emblem: the cultural context of English emblem books’, in

P. M. Daly ed., The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition (New York: AMS Press, 1988),

pp. 1–60. 9 Greek lettering is used on the Griffin tapestry from Chastleton, Oxfordshire, where the inscription

EXΩN OYK EXOMAI is, however, both untranslatable and also not original but a later insertion; see

Barnard and Wace, ‘The Sheldon tapestry weavers’, p. 292; A. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in

Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1997), fig. 386.10 J. Kendall, ‘The Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire’, Text: for the Study

of Textile Art, Design and History, xxxix (2011–2012), pp. 22.11 The iconography of the centre panels is fully discussed in Bath, Four Seasons Tapestries, ch. 2.12 R. Taverner, Prouerbes or Adagies Gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus . . . (London:

Richard Bankes, 1539), fol. 54v.13 F. A. De Armas, ‘Venus in Taurus: epic and emblematic astrology in Lope de Vega’s Las Almenas

de Toro’, in J. T. Cull and P. M. Daly eds, In Nocte Consulium: Studies in Emblematics in Honor of

Pedro F. Campa (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 2011), pp. 112–13.

Michael Bath, Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Strath-clyde and Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, is author of The Image of the Stag; English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture; Reading Poetry: An Introduction; Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland; Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots. He is editor of the journal Emblematica.