Emblem 26
Doctrina or Learning is personified as a middle-aged woman with outstretched arms, long hair, and a careworn face, wearing a baggy, shapeless dress, holding an open book on her lap, and sitting on a raised piece of ground in a rolling, grass-dotted plain. Her left hand is empty but in her right hand she holds a scepter topped by a smiling rayed sun, while a mist, described by the attendant verses as "a heavenly dew", falls on her from above in a spray.
According to the verses, her open arms and the book in her lap represent "her readiness, to embrace all men, and entertain their love," thus signifying that learning is something that all people are capable of and should aspire to. She holds a scepter to symbolize the power that knowledge gives to a person, and it is topped with a sun for two reasons. First, it reiterates the theme that all are welcome, just as the sun shines on all people. Secondly, the sun is a symbol of light and implies that the light of knowledge will dispel the darkness of ignorance. She appears grim, humble, and middle-aged to transmit need for "studie, and the paine;/ Of many years, ere we our knowledge gaine." The mist, signifying heavenly approval and graces bestowed upon the learned, distinguishes this emblem's holy and humble learning, which should encouraged, from the forbidden wisdom, such as astrology, shown in other emblems, where dire consequences fall upon those with the hubris to attempt to learn such things.
A similar woman, still fairly dour, but older, somewhat more richly dressed and with her hair wrapped in a scarf, appears in the emblematic personification of Learning in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, with her arms still outspread, but now her right hand is the empty one and the left is holding the scepter topped with a sun, which continues to smile but appears more radiant and more like a ball of light than it does in the Peachem emblem, where it looked more like an ornamental representation of the sun mounted on the scepter. The book remains on her lap, but in this version another book lies closed at her feet and unlike the previous emblem, where the mist appeared to come from nowhere, it is now falling from a cloud.
In the right the scepter symbolized the power of those who have become learned, but by transferring the scepter to a different and changing the depiction of the sun, Ripa alters the meaning of this element to indicate the scepter, descending from the realistic sun, is an icon of the supremacy of Knowledge, as symbolized by Light, over "the Darkness of Ignorance." This is explained in the verses, which also reveal that the mist is now falling from because in this emblem it is a natural phenomenon and emblematic of the way "that Learning makes tender Youth fruitful," not a symbol of divine approval. The woman's age is again a symbol of the time that must be invested in an education, but the mention of pain, and the corresponding rough dress of the woman, has been dropped. The meaning of the outstretched arms and open book remains unchanged, and the verses do not comment on the presence of a second volume which most likely serves only to reinforce the emblem's meaning as a symbol of Learning.
--John Altum
