Two Ends of the Emblem JAMES ELKINS School of the Art Institute of Chicago T his article focuses on the wider contexts within which em- blems exist in Western pictorial practices. Emblems repre- sent a high point of organization and systematization in Western pictorial practice, and in that regard they are parallel to heraldry, to some traditions of mapmaking, and to coded systems such as scientiic, theological, and mystical schemata. Because they are so highly structured they also have a tendency to deliquesce: to melt into the surrounding image practices, gradually losing their attributes one after another until nothing much is left of them ex- cept the memory of what they once were. Parenthetically, emblems can also ramify, becoming more and more intricate instead of less so, and that tendency leads toward such things as alchemical “emblems”—with the word in quotation marks—by which is meant complicated verbal and visual assem- blages that are not meant to be read with any inality. Heinricus Khunrath’s astonishingly complex inventions are an example. 1 But for the most part, emblems melt away rather than continue their crystallization. If part of the wider history of emblems is that process of melting into neighboring forms of image making and writing, then there may be tendencies, if not laws and genres, that can help describe their dissolution, and in theory those tendencies could become the subjects of an expanded ield of emblem studies. 1. See Khunrath. An example is analyzed in my book What Painting Is.