PREFACE

...this maiden Atalanta achieved victory over men by killing a boar of remarkable size the Calydonian Boar, for which she was rewarded with a prize by Meleager. Near the Stethaeum, at the temple of Aesculapius original: "Æsculapifanum", she drew forth water from a rock she had struck, which she drank when she was thirsty. Since these things are truly allegorical and emblematic symbolic images paired with text to convey a deeper moral or philosophical meaning and in no way historical, I wished to designate this intellectual treatise as "Emblematic" in commemoration of this heroine—especially since the apples thrown to her from the Hesperian gardens by Venus, the goddess of sweetness, were supplied to Hippomenes.

In those measures or musical fugues original: "fugis"; a musical form where voices follow one another, mirroring the "flight" of Atalanta, you see this observed: that the individual distichs original: "disticha"; two-line verses or couplets adapted to those three voices can be expressed appropriately by singing. In these, since so many varieties of fugues are accommodated to one simple voice, every wise and intelligent person will appreciate this emblematic figuration—both in these melodies and in the adaptation of the verses to each little note—and will consider it of no small value.

For if some merchants value and purchase a work of painting for a great sum of money where only the eyes are deceived—judging it to be most near to nature—why should the learned not hold in high esteem and value these figures? They serve both the intellect and multiple senses in such a way that great utility, beyond mere delight, is to be hoped for from them. Farewell.