Emblemata of Zinne-werck: voorghestelt, in beelden, ghedichten, en breeder uijt-legginghen, tot uijt-druckinghe, en vergeteringhe vam verscheyden feylen onfer eeuwe.

Rare first edition of one of the most remarkable Dutch emblem books of the seventeenth century, illustrated with an engraved title bearing the device "SPE ET METU" and fifty-one emblems designed by Adriaen van de Venne and engraved by the artist himself together with Willem van de Passe, Johannes Gelle, Christoffel Le Blon the Elder, Albert Poel and Jan Gerritsz Swelinck.

Although the title page bears the imprint of the Amsterdam bookseller Jan Evertsz Cloppenburgh, the volume was printed in Middelburg by Hans van der Hellen, in Johan de Brune's native city. The first edition is thought to have comprised approximately one thousand copies. Unsold sheets were reissued in 1636, with alterations to the opening gathering and additional material at the end, before Jan Jacobsz Schipper published a new edition in 1661 with new plates and supplementary maxims.

Late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century half caramel sheep with small corners, raised bands ruled in gilt, brown calf lettering-piece. Upper joint split at the head and foot, boards rubbed. Page 108 restored in the margin over a length of 6 cm. Occasional pale foxing.

Each emblem unfolds according to a carefully controlled sequence. A motto of one or two lines introduces the engraving, which is followed by a verse epigram and an extended prose commentary, sometimes running to several pages. Latin quotations, classical maxims and occasional passages in French enrich these "wt-legginghen", which do not merely explain the image but establish its meaning and direct the reader towards a moral conclusion.

In De Brune's work, the image attracts, surprises or amuses, but the text immediately reasserts its authority over the viewer's response. The author remained wary of the instability of visual meaning, capable of leading the mind in several directions, whereas the written word appeared to offer firmer ground. Yet he never rejected the persuasive power of illustration. On the contrary, he selected immediately recognisable scenes drawn from domestic interiors, leisure, trades and everyday objects, allowing readers first to recognise their own world in the image before discovering themselves to be the targets of its lesson.

A lawyer trained at Leiden who subsequently served as advocate, secretary to the States and raadpensionaris of Zeeland, Johan de Brune (1588-1658) placed this emblematic machinery at the service of an exacting moral vision. His Calvinism, humanist learning and extensive knowledge of classical literature converge in a single ambition: to correct the "faults of our age" by examining the behaviour of his contemporaries. His commentaries accumulate examples, quotations and learned parallels, expanding each familiar scene into a miniature treatise on human passions, failings and duties.

This moral programme would have been far less compelling without Adriaen van de Venne. Rather than translating the author's ideas into conventional symbols, he sets them firmly within the material world of the Dutch Golden Age. Clothes, furniture, food, gestures and expressions are observed with a precision that brings many of the engravings close to contemporary genre painting. The marital scene in emblem II, the opened and already decaying cheese in emblem VII, and the games and conversations of Zeeland's bourgeois society together provide an exceptional record of contemporary manners, dress and domestic objects.

Van de Venne's realism never serves anecdote alone. The opened cheese becomes the image of a perfection threatened by its own excess; a domestic interior reveals the disorders of married life; an ordinary gesture opens into a moral meditation. The text keeps watch over the image, yet the image retains sufficient independence to preserve its own density, humour and occasional harshness.

Emblem XLVII offers one of the most striking encounters between modern observation and moral interpretation. An elegantly dressed man directs a spyglass towards something beyond the edge of the composition. The recently invented instrument is employed not to magnify the wonders of the heavens, but the misfortunes of others: it embodies envy, searching the distance for suffering from which it might derive a corrupt satisfaction. Published in 1624, the engraving belongs among the early representations of the Dutch telescope in an illustrated book.

A handsome copy of this major Zeeland emblem book, in which Adriaen van de Venne's acute eye records the gestures, objects and faces of his age, while Johan de Brune labours, page after page, to close the trap of his moral argument around each image.