Alciati's Emblems in Renaissance France

By the 1580s Andrea Alciati's reputation was firmly established in France, and for the French there was no doubt that he deserved an honored place among the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. In 1583, Jean de la Gessée placed Alciati between Dorat and Muret as a model to be imitated in Latin and translated into French by aspiring young poets. And hyperbole is too mild a word to describe André Thevet's feverish hymn of praise in his Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). Thevet and most of his other biographers through the end of the seventeenth century remembered Alciati primarily as the jurist and teacher who attracted the attention of François Ier by his brilliant successes at the University of Bourges around 1530. Yet no biographer could entirely neglect his collection of emblems, for they exercised immense influence throughout Europe over a period of more than two hundred years.