Further Details About This Book:
And why is Time, who appears in so many of Colines’s books,
always depicted there as a satyr? ( Why, in other words, is he human
from the waist up, goat from the waist down? ) The old French slang
for satyr is again bouquin – in this case the diminutive of bouc, which
is a good French word for billy goat. Time can soar like a bird and run
like a goat; a goat is a book; a book is a rabbit; the rabbits are code
for Colines. But from 1527, he seems to feel that the clock is ticking.
Time is his primary emblem from this date forward, always winged
and moving briskly in a brisk wind, always carrying a scythe. (Many
in those days may have had a similar sensation. The mechanical clock
was then a recent and rapidly spreading innovation.)
Not all the images that Colines put on his title pages are puns.
Some appear to show quite openly his aspirations as a publisher. The
Six Philosophers border, which he first used in 1522, features hypothetical
portraits of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Cicero,
and Seneca. Then there are the two Quadrivium borders, celebrating
the fourfold path of Western Europe’s oldest universities, with four
portraits personifying astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic.
The earlier border of these two adds portraits of four high priests of
these four fundamental subjects: Ptolemy, Orpheus, Euclid, and al-
Khw1rizm3. In the Medical Arts border, which Colines began to use
in 1530, nearly the whole title page is filled with healing scenes and
portraits. Hippocrates, Galen, Oribasius, Paulus Aegineta, Asclepiades
of Prusa, and Dioscorides – the great pagan authorities – are all placed
under the image of Jesus healing the leper, flanked by the medical
profession’s patron saints, Cosmas and Damian. 7
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