An impresa (plural: imprese) is a combination emblem & motto used to describe someone. Creating clever and fitting imprese for prominent nobles and other public figures, and sometimes institutions, was a popular pastime in the 15th-17th centuries, and a healthy number of books comprised of these little devices, related wit, & verse exist, especially coming out of Italy.
For example, the above impresa is from Camillo Camilli’s Imprese illustri di diversi co i discorsi (1586), for Annibale Pocaterra, who makes it into the history books for writing the first treatise exclusively about shame: Due Dialogi della Vergogna first published in 1562. But nevertheless she was a poet and a composer of music, the side that describes her essence here with the motto “CRESCIT SPIRANTIBUS AURIS”, roughly ‘Hearing/The Ears thrive by the blowing winds’ (but full disclosure: a c17th emblem book by Otto Vaenius disagrees with me, translating the motto as ‘Love Grows Where the Winds are Blowing’ and sourcing the quote to St. Augustine, and this also makes sense given the image of the fire).
Imprese originated in the 14th century as a kind of sub-genre of heraldry, but into the 15th century took on a life of their own. While they often draw from heraldic imagery, they also work outside its rigid framework, as in the above. William Camden defines them in his Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britain...(1605) thus:
An imprese, as the Italians call it, is a device in picture with his Motte, or Word, born by noble or learned personages, to notifie some particular conceit of their owne . . . . As for example: Wheras Cosimi Medici Duke of Florence had in the ascendent at his nativitie the signe Capricorne, under which also Augustus and Charles the fifth, two great and good Princes were borne: he used the celestial signe Capricorne, with this Motte; FIDEM FATI FORTUNA SEQUEMUR, for his Imprese, particularly concerning his good hope to prove like unto them . . . .
There is required in an Imprese (that we may reduce them to few heades) a correspondence of the picture, which is as the body, and the Motte, which as the soul giveth it life. That is, the body must be of fair representation, and the word in some different language, wittie, short, and answerable thereunto neither too obscure nor too plaine, and most commended, when it is an Hemistich, or parcell of a verse. (via Ursula Georges)
Sometimes rather than describing an individual or family , the maker of impresa would apply his art elsewhere– namely to those groups of intellectuals in Italy who formed ‘academies’. “Between the early 16th century and the end of the 17th century, there were over 500 Academies operating in Italy alone. These institutions brought together scholars and experts in all branches of the arts and sciences and were places of cultural discussion, inspiring the founding of major institutions across Europe such as The Royal Society and the Académie Française. The Academies also had a more playful aspect, devising amusing names which were often represented visually in punning illustrations and devices.” (link). This impresa, also by Camilli, was for the Accademia degli Unanimi (Academy of the Unanimous, or Harmonious) founded in 1564 and the precusor of the modern-day University of Salò. The depiction of a hive-minded group of bees and the “IDEM ARDOR” or “The same passion” crops up again in a much later Theatre Company of the same name in the 18th century, which adapted the same arms but a slightly longer motto “OMNIBUS IDEM ARDOR”, the same passion BY ALL. And finally, the BL’s database of Italian Academies (a fab fab fab fab resource) locates a third instance of Unanimi in late 17th century Bologna. So these icons and mottos can have a life that far exceeds the people and places they initially modify.
