Personifications in Early Modern Thesis Prints in the Southern Low Countries: Noetic and Encomiastic Representations

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the public defense of academic theses entailed the publication of a written presentation of the conclusions, printed in the form of broadsides or booklets distributed to the audience. Initially decorated with coats of arms and dedications to scholarly, religious or political personalities, the thesis prints evolved progressively into copiously illustrated frontispieces, intended to glorify the applicants’ protectors. The paper I propose focuses on the two main functions of personifications (mostly of Virtues and Liberal Arts) depicted in the thesis broadsheets produced in the early modern Southern Low Countries. These allegorical figures are either noetic images, related to the system of knowledge transmission, or encomiastic, linked to the dedicatory practice aiming to promote the dedicatee and assert the applicant’s position in society. Therefore, this communicational device needs to be studied within its institutional and sociopolitical framework, but also through the visual and semiotical means conceived to convey messages to the readers/spectators. From a corpus of engravings designed by Peter Paul Rubens, Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Cornelis Schut, Erasmus Quellinus and Antoine Sallaert, I examine the ways in which the use of personifications facilitates the transmission of the message (scientific as well as rhetorical) and highlights the intellectual, sociocultural and political environment of this visual material from the Baroque period