Boschius’s Ars Symbolica

Symbolographia, sive, De arte symbolica sermones septem, 1701-1702,

is a symbolic compendium very different from the much better known collections of mythological iconography of the late Renaissance, such as Alciati, Cartari, and Ripa, just to give an idea.

Jacob Bosch’s book, aka Boschius, offers a vision of the world influenced by new scientific and technological discoveries, as well as by the search for simplicity, typical of the Age of Enlightenment. Thus we will see how the esoteric concepts underlying the legends of the ancient Greco-Roman deities will be interpreted through a vast collection of everyday objects, machinery, ordinary gardens, landscapes, and boring furniture. Of course, all adorned with the sun and stars that we can see in the sky.

The common pieces of everyday reality represented in Ars Symbolica do not possess the evocative properties of the elaborate fantasies in the drawings of Alciati, Ripa, or Cartari, where the elegant and imaginative graphic part, in itself, was planned to be much more explanatory than the caption. The true core of wisdom in Jacob Bosch’s work lies in the essentiality, conciseness, and precision of the written text, whether it consists of simple titles, mottos, or aphorisms. These succint rules do not benevolently accompany the reader to understanding, but require refined erudition in order to be inserted into a complete message. Proof of this is the fact that some images were deliberately omitted by the author, who instead provided a numbered motto in the list of aphorisms. Would the design have been too complex, or was Boschius aware that readers, in general, tend to follow images in a mesmeric way?

Despite the formal indexes and groupings, Boschius’s intention was certainly not to make Ars Symbolica an effective artistic tool for memory. Indeed, shuffling our mnemonic capabilities like a fallen deck of cards made those aphorisms even more isolated. It’s no surprise, then, that Ars Symbolica is actually a collection of mottos that Boschius’s contemporary scholars and erudite personalities had engraved on medals and coats of arms.