ÉVA VÍGH The Image of the Baroque Prince in Guido Casoni’s Political Emblems The paper presents and analyzes briefly the Italian Baroque poet, Guido Casoni’s (1561–1642) Political Emblems, which contains twenty chapters. In the work the...
moreÉVA VÍGH
The Image of the Baroque Prince in Guido Casoni’s Political Emblems
The paper presents and analyzes briefly the Italian Baroque poet, Guido Casoni’s (1561–1642) Political Emblems, which contains twenty chapters. In the work the author fused the visuality of the iconology with the key terms of treatises on the reason of state. The twenty emblems cover the issues of the just regal government, considered important by Casoni, without any thematic or political‐ideological classification. Otherwise each of these (wisdom, justice, religion, silence / dissimulation, flattery, etc.) is discussed in detail by the political literature of the counter‐reformation, and exquisitely reflects the antiMachiavellian position that, in the name of the reason of state, subordinates the political action to the Catholic religion and morality. We can read in fact a small treatise rhymed on the reason of state by which we can have an idea of how an average intellectual, during the counter‐reformation, in the first three decades of the 17th century, could
interpret the relationship between politics and morality.
