The emblematic poetics of the 17th century under the light of the scholastic doctrine of analogy: an example
(2018) Sapiens Ubique Civis VI — Location: Szeged (29.August.2018)
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- It has been recently demonstrated that scholastic teaching persisted until the end of the 17th century. However, its impact on arts and literature of the Early Modern period remains to be explored. In such context, the study of the metaphor and the analogy seems to be a relevant starting point. One can indeed find a definition of metaphor with terms “proportion” and “attribution”, which have experienced a thorough evolution starting from works of Aristotle, in Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (1654). The analogy (κατὰ τὸ ἀνάλογον) signifies the fourth mode of the metaphor in the Poetics, translated to Latin as “proportio”. This term refers to the situation when a poet uses a four-term relationship, employing the fourth term instead of the second one and vice versa (e. g. the shield as “cup of Ares”). In turn, the attribution itself has appeared in the Latin translations of the Arabic commentaries to the Metaphysics. The attribution indicates the situation where two identical terms refer to each other according to certain kind of relation of effect, cause or sign (the different meanings of the word "sanus" are the canonical example). Following the reflections of Thomas Aquinas on the divine attributes, the attribution would appear later in scholastic logics as another type of analogy, in line with the one of proportionality (or proportion) from the Poetics. According to these philosophical developments, Tesauro tries to merge the four types of metaphor of the Poetics with the logical system derived from Saint Thomas. Then, he provides a definition of the impresa (device) as either a metaphor of attribution, either a metaphor of proportion, the later constituting the model of the perfect impresa. Therefore, one can observe an integration of the scholastic concepts in emblematic poetics.
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Gérardy, E. (2018). The emblematic poetics of the 17th century under the light of the scholastic doctrine of analogy: an example. Sapiens Ubique Civis VI, Szeged. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/56653