From emblem to album: transhistorical comparisons of text/image interplay in cover art and renaissance emblems

Vezza, Christopher Marco (2025) From emblem to album: transhistorical comparisons of text/image interplay in cover art and renaissance emblems. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Drawing upon a transhistorical perspective that has, over the past two decades, gained traction in visual culture and text/image scholarship (Daly, Mödersheim, Rypson, Van Dongen, and Grove), this thesis considers text/image interplay as exhibited in album cover art and Renaissance emblems (and emblematic manifestations) by drawing comparisons in form and function. Rather than provide an account of each form’s historical evolution in its multifarious cultural contexts, this study uses album covers and emblems as part of wider transhistorical comparisons of recurring communicative procedures in Western visual culture.

Chapter 1 begins by briefly addressing questions of definition with respect to the terms ‘emblem’ and ‘emblematic’, and then moves to explore what the existing literature has offered as a theorisation of emblematic text/image interaction. The second section of the chapter looks at the work previously carried out by text/image scholars who have also made transhistorical comparisons between the Emblematic Age and our modern text/image culture. These studies show that current-day emblematic parallels are discovered in symbolic advertising, tattoo art, American paperback covers, contemporary art, and bande dessinée. As such, Chapter 2 builds on this work by introducing album cover art to the critical discussion; an exploration of its design origins from a text/image perspective, a survey of existing scholarly approaches, and finally an ‘emblematic reading’ of cover art’s visual/verbal characteristics opens up new comparative dimensions. To draw a formal parallel between album covers and emblems, a set of threefold criteria is proposed and applied to a case in point.

The conclusions drawn in Chapter 2 are then applied to Chapters 3-5, which feature close analytical readings of text/image interplay in three examples of album cover art, spanning 1940–1970. By way of the criteria of visual topoi, bi-medial structure, and interactive hybridity, emblematic counterparts to these album covers are discovered and analysed. The overriding conclusion of this study is that through close analysis of selected cultural objects, we can identify analogous communicative tendencies involving the interaction of text and image across disparate historical periods and contexts in Western culture. To that end, this thesis asserts that album covers and emblems can further advance Grove’s notion of parallel mentalities with respect to the Renaissance period and our modern age.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities
• Supervisor's Name: Grove, Professor Laurence and Harris, Professor Louise
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85138
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 30 May 2025 06:38
• Last Modified: 01 Jun 2025 20:53
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85138
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85138