Devises Heroïques (1551) - The Heroic Devices of Claude Paradin
Claude Paradin (c. 1510–1573) was a French canon of the collegiate church of Beaujeu in the Beaujolais region of France. A churchman and scholar of the French Renaissance, he is remembered almost entirely for one work — his Devises Heroïques, first published in 1551 by the celebrated Lyon printer Jean de Tournes and his partner Guillaume Gazeau. It was the first printed collection of devices ever published, and it became one of the most influential emblem books of the sixteenth century.
Little is known of Paradin's life beyond his clerical office and his literary output. He also wrote a history of Lyon and a chronicle of Savoy. But it is the Devises Heroïques that secured his place in the history of symbolic art — a small, exquisite book that gathered the personal devices of kings, princes, popes, noble families, and illustrious figures into a single printed gallery.
The Devise: Image, Motto, and Meaning
The devise (or impresa, in the Italian from which the tradition descends) is a particular form of symbolic expression that emerged in the courts of Renaissance Italy and was adopted enthusiastically by the French aristocracy. A devise consists of two essential elements: a picture and a motto — an image paired with a brief phrase, usually in Latin, that together express a personal ideal, aspiration, moral principle, or declaration of identity.
The image alone is incomplete — it requires the motto to unlock its meaning. The motto alone is abstract — it requires the image to give it body. Neither element makes full sense without the other. This is the essential principle of the devise: a marriage of word and image that creates a third thing, a meaning that exists only in the space between them.
Devices were worn on clothing and armor, carved into the facades of palaces, woven into tapestries, engraved on rings and medals, and embroidered into hangings. They were marks of identity, statements of philosophy, and emblems of aspiration. A king's devise was as recognizable as a coat of arms — but where heraldry indicated lineage and rank, the devise expressed the inner character and chosen purpose of the individual.
The Emblem Book Tradition
Paradin's work belongs to the broader Renaissance tradition of the emblem book — a genre that originated with Andrea Alciato's Emblematum Liber, first published in Augsburg in 1531. Alciato's emblems established the classical tripartite structure: a motto (inscriptio), a picture (pictura), and an explanatory verse or prose passage (subscriptio). The emblem book became one of the most popular and widely printed genres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, produced across Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, and England.
Paradin's Devises Heroïques follows this pattern loosely. Each entry presents a motto (most in Latin, some in French or Greek), a woodcut illustration, and a brief explanatory passage in French prose describing the origin and significance of the device. The entries encompass devices of historical and contemporary rulers, biblical and classical symbols, natural emblems (animals, plants, celestial bodies), and moral allegories drawn from the full range of Renaissance humanist learning.
Bernard Salomon and the Woodcuts
The woodcut illustrations in the Devises Heroïques are attributed to Bernard Salomon (c. 1506–1561), known as Le Petit Bernard, one of the most accomplished woodcut designers of the French Renaissance. Salomon was the principal illustrator for the Lyon printing house of Jean de Tournes, and his elegant, finely detailed woodcuts graced dozens of books — Ovid's Metamorphoses, biblical illustrations, Aesop's fables, and numerous emblem books.
Salomon's woodcuts for Paradin are small, precise, and richly symbolic — each one a miniature world enclosed in a simple frame. Animals, heraldic beasts, celestial objects, human figures, architectural elements, natural forms, and mythological scenes are rendered with a clarity and grace characteristic of the Lyon school of woodcut illustration. These images were designed not merely to decorate but to encode — each one a visual cipher that, combined with its motto, opens onto a field of meaning.
Influence and Legacy
The Devises Heroïques was republished in an expanded second edition in 1557, adding new devices and refining the text. From 1561, publication was taken over by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp, who added 37 new devices and included a Latin translation to reach a wider European audience. The book was subsequently published in Dutch (1563), English (1591), and in further French editions throughout the seventeenth century.
The influence of Paradin's devices spread far beyond the printed page. The English emblem writer Geffrey Whitney borrowed extensively from Paradin for his own Choice of Emblemes (1586). Mary, Queen of Scots, during her long imprisonment, used Paradin's devices as patterns for elaborate embroidered hangings — the famous Oxburgh Hangings — transforming the printed symbols into textile art. Craftsmen across Europe used the woodcuts as models for work in every medium: stonecarving, metalwork, stained glass, plasterwork, and painted decoration.
The Devises Heroïques thus stands at a crossroads of Renaissance culture — where the art of the printer, the learning of the humanist, the symbolism of the court, and the craft of the artisan all converge. It is a book of pictures and words that speaks in the universal language of symbol.
A Seletion of Emblems
