Hertel's Ripa (1758-1760). Style, ornament and structure of allegory in Augsburg engravings on the themes of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia

This thesis deals with a graphic album published in Augsburg by Johann Georg Hertel with illustrations by Georg Eichler Jr., whose publication is now dated between 1758 and 1760. Hertel's Ripa is the author's abbreviation of the first page of the work in German describing and partly explaining the principle of the album: 'Pars I. des berühmten italiänische[n] Ritters Caesaris Ripae, allerley Künsten und Wissenschafften dienlicher Sinnbildern und Gedancken : welchen jedesmahlen eine hierzu taugliche Historia oder Gleichnis beÿgefüget....'. In contrast to Ripa's original Iconologia from the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, it no longer offers a continuous text, but mostly multi-layered pictorial allegories, enriched by exemplary stories which are partly revealed in short couplets. Existing research has already recognized in this form a critical form of rocaille, which functions here not so much as a decorative systém, but as a principle of narration and representation. The aim of this thesis is to use the literature to better capture the nature of the allegory in the rocaille form and to test the hypotheses that arose in the context of other works of a collective of artists, that, unlike other Augsburg artists and publishers, has not been the subject of monographs or catalogues. In..