Generally, the lion icon was a way of depicting a person considered for his or her qualities of strength and courage. When, in relation to the finality of a tale, this animal was without a tongue – one of the most important characteristics of man in that it is the tool of the word, and one of the signs of his dignity – or when it was depicted as expressing the emotion of “laughter”, much symbolism linked to the “silence” of the word was made to derive from it. The lioness too was part of this process. It was in this direction that an Ancient Greek tradition, dating back to the sources of Plutarch, had oriented its “humanisation”, which, as it flowed into subsequent literature, was used in various ways both in the personifications of the emblemists (by Alciat, for example), and in iconological and moralistic literature (by Reusner and Valeriano, for example). The word and silence, human and – together – divine categories, became a paradoxical oxymoron intended both as a “silence of the word”, i.e. in mutism, and as a “silent word”. They could be linked, in a manifest or inferred way, explicitly or implicitly, to different themes, such as that of the difference between man and animal, or that of the futility of teaching brutes or the impossibility of animals understanding art. In the proverbial sequel that seems to have been the ineluctable destiny of much of ancient literature, this type of “silence” also came to be used in sententious expressions of various kinds, which, behind their literal meaning, hid an abundant crop of philosophical and iconographical references. The “silence of the word”, a much noted paradox in literature, had something of the mystical intuition about it and could well have been put in relation to the “gnome”, thanks both to the mysticism and the need for a “gesture”, because “gesture” and “gestuality” were what made the iconic representation visible and its connected ethical substrate comprehensible. This gesture therefore became “talking” through its very silence and the silence became visible in its icon. Given that the “gesture” always made itself visible, it was a form of “unsaid (mute) gnome”, but always visible as it was related to a thought image: it had something to do with the intelligentia spiritalis, i.e. with the metaphor and the symbol and had, therefore, a long literary life.

The Laughing Lion: From ‘Silence’ to the Gesture, to the Emblem

MARANINI, ANNA
2010

Abstract

Generally, the lion icon was a way of depicting a person considered for his or her qualities of strength and courage. When, in relation to the finality of a tale, this animal was without a tongue – one of the most important characteristics of man in that it is the tool of the word, and one of the signs of his dignity – or when it was depicted as expressing the emotion of “laughter”, much symbolism linked to the “silence” of the word was made to derive from it. The lioness too was part of this process. It was in this direction that an Ancient Greek tradition, dating back to the sources of Plutarch, had oriented its “humanisation”, which, as it flowed into subsequent literature, was used in various ways both in the personifications of the emblemists (by Alciat, for example), and in iconological and moralistic literature (by Reusner and Valeriano, for example). The word and silence, human and – together – divine categories, became a paradoxical oxymoron intended both as a “silence of the word”, i.e. in mutism, and as a “silent word”. They could be linked, in a manifest or inferred way, explicitly or implicitly, to different themes, such as that of the difference between man and animal, or that of the futility of teaching brutes or the impossibility of animals understanding art. In the proverbial sequel that seems to have been the ineluctable destiny of much of ancient literature, this type of “silence” also came to be used in sententious expressions of various kinds, which, behind their literal meaning, hid an abundant crop of philosophical and iconographical references. The “silence of the word”, a much noted paradox in literature, had something of the mystical intuition about it and could well have been put in relation to the “gnome”, thanks both to the mysticism and the need for a “gesture”, because “gesture” and “gestuality” were what made the iconic representation visible and its connected ethical substrate comprehensible. This gesture therefore became “talking” through its very silence and the silence became visible in its icon. Given that the “gesture” always made itself visible, it was a form of “unsaid (mute) gnome”, but always visible as it was related to a thought image: it had something to do with the intelligentia spiritalis, i.e. with the metaphor and the symbol and had, therefore, a long literary life.
2010
The International Emblem. From Incunabula to the Internet, Selected Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, Winchester College, 'Word and Image, 1500-1900: Figure, Form and Function'
338
349
A. Maranini
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/88818
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