Cominus et eminus. L’emblematica rinascimentale e barocca nella concezione semiotica del linguaggio primordiale di Vico

This dissertation explores the relationship between image and word in the correlation between Vico and early modern emblematics at the intersection of critical literary studies, historical and philosophical studies, and visual and cultural studies. Emblematics is a genre of crucial epistemological and cultural tensions, centred on the problematic relationship between the visual and the verbal. Within this field, the literature of emblems and imprese, two major forms of Renaissance and Baroque icontext, has a long and complex theoretical history. Vico’s work draws on this tradition. At the same time, however, he radically innovates the concept of the impresa and places it at the centre of his philosophy of language. This study is therefore an investigation, comparison and interpretation of the presence of the emblematic in Vico’s philosophy. The aim is to establish what kind of continuity exists between the Renaissance and Baroque traditions of the emblem and the impresa in Vico’s works, what are the constants and what are the differences between two different forms of iconotextual devices over a time span of two centuries. The corpus of sources is divided into three parts: Vico’s works, treatises on imprese and, finally, treatises belonging to the genre of emblems and hieroglyphics. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first is a detailed presentation of the explicit occurrences of the emblematic subject in Vico’s works, the cultural context of emblematics, and the history of the theoretical development of imprese. On the basis of this general framework, the second part of the study is an examination of the corpus in terms of three particularly crucial themes in Vico’s work, in emblematic treatises, and in theories of visual culture: the body, rhetoric, and narration.These three themes highlight the continuity between emblematic literature and Vico’s thought from an anthropological, rhetorical and cultural perspective. On the one hand, imprese and emblems acquire a hermeneutic dimension through the framework of Vico’s philosophy, which focuses on the concept of medium, body and iconic presence. On the other hand, Vico’s thought is more firmly rooted in a Renaissance and Baroque background and gains a fundamental verbo-visual dimension through the comparison with early modern emblematics. The thematic comparison between Vico’s philosophy and early modern emblematics provided by this dissertation also allows for testing the usefulness of methodological concepts and tools. Concepts such as trans-mediality, iconic act, narrativity of images, and pictorial turn are shown to be effective and useful in a chronological period different from their usual use, allowing for the hypothesis of further applications of them.