15.  Jean-Jacques Boissard, Theatrum vitae humanae

Jean-Jacques Boissard produced several emblem books including the Emblematum Liber, in collaboration with Theodore de Bry who worked in Frankfurt. Unlike the,also produced in collaboration with de Bry, Theatrum vitae humanae contains 60 pictures (each with a Latin quatrain and prose commentary) dealing with the episodes from the Bible as well as from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology.

The motif of the four ages of man is represented on the engraved title-page [1], but its lesson is not to teach the natural growth from childhood to old age, each age with the appropriate moral, but to emphasize the constant presence of death. As can also be seen in Holbein's Dance of Death (no.46), Death is equally imminent to a new-born child in a cradle, a newly-wed youth, a successful and industrious trade merchant in the middle age, and the old man nearing the end of his life.

The recognition of the mutability of life is also the theme of the first emblem [2] which states that 'the life is the theatre where tragic episodes are acted.' Man is attacked in the theatre of life by Death, Satan, Sin and Senses. The idea of the theatre of life often appears together with the motif of the ages of man, as one may see in the speech of Jacques on the seven ages of man in As You Like It. In comparison with Shakespeare, the idea of the 'comtemptus mundi' is prominent in Boissard.

The fall of the rebel angels is represented by a picture which resembles, in its grotesque detail, the painting by Pieter Breughel on the same subject (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) [3]. The hell-mouth is often represented as that of Leviathan.

Adams, B2344; BL STC German, p.136; Landwehr, German, 135; Landwehr, Romanic, 167; Praz p.277