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The Graphic Works of Bernard Salomon
illustrations for
Aesop's Fables -- Les Fables d'Esope Phrygien -- Æsopi Phrygis Fabvlae

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I. Editions with images attributed to Bernard Salomon:

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II. Notes for an Attribution history:

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III. Development of the de Tournes Aesop cycle:

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IV. Sources for Salomon's designs:

Janot's Aesop, Paris, 1542. 2nd ed. 1544 (Harvard, 1964, No. 4.). See this catalogue for discussion of the history of Aesop cuts in France and Italy. First edition of G.Corrozet's translation into French. Photos: 01996-35 to 02032-37

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V. Copies after Bernard Salomon's woodcuts:

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VI. de Tournes editions viewed for this analysis:

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VII: Editions listed for possible comparison:

Notice to the reader: The following list is composed of items to which reference is made in this Aesop section, and miscellaneous items that have been collected during the process of research. These are listed for potential future reference. They may prove not to be useful.

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VIII. Miscellaneous notes and observations:

Dating issue:
The use of woodcuts to illustrate books for which they were not designed can give us some evidence of which production preceded the other, or, if they were being produced at the same time, which story took precedence. The illustration for Aesop's fable No. 84 in the de Tournes 1547 edition may be a case on point. Fable 84 uses the same woodcut that was employed in the de Tournes 1547 Alciati for emblem No. 11. The Aesopian tale is about two enemies on a sinking ship (Handford edition, No. 817 "Hating unto Death."), one wishing to be placed on the part of the boat that will sink last so that he can watch his nemesis die before him. The emblem in Alciati that corresponds to this woodcut is about Arion, famous as a musician and as a composer of dithyrambs who was thrown overboard when returning to Corinth from Sicily where he was teaching music. A dolphin rescues him and carries him to land. The woodcut clearly represents Arion and not the Aesopian tale. Arion's harp, cited in the de Tournes edition of Alciati, and shown in the image, was a fixture of the illustration (Arion's attribute) that appeared in the first illustrated Alciati -- Steiner's Augsberg 1531 edition. But it has no meaning in Aesop's tale, for Alciati's emblem moralizes on the evils of greedy men and how a fish, innocent of greed can save men. Maurice Scève, who, of course, had a close connection with de Tournes and who must certainly have been familiar with the Alciati and related emblemata, wrote of Arion in an elegiac on the death of Francis I's son, the Dauphin François. The other two woodcuts shared between de Tournes' 1547 Aesop and Alciati, one, illustrating the captured trumpeter, and the other on the theme of buying safety with money, do not offer similar possibilities to determine the text of origin, for these cuts are used to illustrated the same stories in each of the two texts.

Style issue:
Lieure (Graveur, 1927, p. 15) (see above) speaking of the 1582 edition of de Tournes's Aesop (Cartier 624) as if it was the first edition, believes that the style shows evidence of the school of Lyon, but that the treatment is less refined, the drawing not quite sure enough, or perhaps not accurately followed by those charged with cutting the blocks. I suspect that Lieure, thinking of these designs as products of the 1580s may have missed their connection to the style of the 1540s, to their newly acquired lyrical naturalism, and may have missed the significance of the simplicity given to the figures as a means of making them suitable for their moralizing, emblematic, purpose and perhaps also may have overlooked the tug of the stylistic tradition of illustrating Aesop in early printed books. Today we think of Aesop's tales as children's literature. Indeed, the library of the University of California in Los Angeles, places sixteenth-century Aesop literature in the children's, rare book collection. If these works were produced for consumption by children of the sixteenth century (and they were), it is possible that the simplicity of style they promote is intended to be a reduction for use by children, to focus on the essentials of the narrative without offering annoying diversions for the eye and mind? Indeed, the first edition of the French translation of Aesop by Gilles Corrozet -- published by D. Janot at Paris in 1542 was dedicated to Henri II, when he was still the dauphin (Harv. Fr. 16th C. Bks., #4).

Indeed, the fables have a long currency as material suitable for children. Their popularity through the middle ages could be attributed as much to their use as an excellent tool with which to teach grammar, as to their didactic content or the obvious pleasure they bring (Lenaghan, p. 12). As a popular literature they have a longstanding history of being illustrated, but unlike the Bible, Aesop's Fables were understood to bear a level of unreality to them, and unlike Ovid's Metamorphoses, they were continuously accessible.

[note: McKendry (p. 5) states that unlike the Bible and Ovid, Aesop's "fables' combination of freedom of approach and constant appeal has kept them steadily popular as a subject for book illustration from the fifteenth century to the present.]

Steinhöwel, the translator of the late fifteenth-century Aesop that was published in Ulm and Augsburg, and whose translation was used into the mid sixteenth century, noted "that fables are not about things which actually happened but are only verbal inventions, and they have been composed so that through the invented words of unreasoning animals lower than himself a man may recognize an image [ynbildung] of the ways and habits of human virtue" (Lenaghan, p. 11). It would seem from the above that early on the metaphorical nature of the tales themselves, and, by association, of the images that accompanied them, were seen as analogous manifestations. Contemporary critics and observers may not have used the expression "ut pictura poësis" in their regard; but that is the essence of their functionality as illustrated literature. With the benefit of hindsight, one can easily see how the metaphorical substance of the fables could lead directly to their merging into the full stream of emblem literature.

The first French printed translation of the Fables derives from Steinhöwel's. Steinhöwel's preoccupation, Lenaghan notes (p.18), was to establish an authoritative corpus of fables, bringing together the various strains that filtered through the middle ages from antiquity -- merging the so-called "Romulus" fables with those of the Avianus collection, adding the tales of Poggio, and so on. The earliest editions bearing his translation present multi-lingual texts and an elaborate preface that attempts to analyze the meaning, significance and didactic purposes of the fable (Lenaghan, p. 12). In contrast, Lyon's first edition, bearing the French translation of the Augustinian Monk Julian Macho, underlines the moral function of the tales: "Every fable is invented to show men what they ought to follow and what they ought to flee, for fables mean as much in poetry as words in theology. And so I shall write fables to show the ways of good men. (Lenaghan translation, p. 18). And yet, concludes Lenaghan, the French edition places less emphasis on their instructive purpose, and, as a consequence, "permits relatively more attention to entertainment."

As entertainment, the fables are steeped in contradiction, for in the sixteenth century Aesop's "entertainment" taught young minds to approach the world with no small degree of suspicion and caution; today we may call some of his lessons programmed paranoia. In his world of insecurity and treachery, there are wise lessons to be learned in these animal parables. Even though these stories project a world of human frailties, foolishness and subterfuge into the animal world, the fables yet rely upon the imagery of a Golden Age, which, on one hand, gives these lessons an ironic pungency, and on the other serve to remove the sting of real life. The myth of the Golden Age, of course, is retold by Ovid -- in the first chapter of the Metamorphoses. This is a world in which man and animals live together without the benefit or need of law, for their own will and their own faith leads them naturally to live in peace. The Golden Age in Ovid, is a place and time with no cities, where horizons are limited and the world bounded, where nature's bounty is sufficient for all needs -- in short, a place where there is no need to strive -- a peaceable kingdom, where no soul suffers the pain of self-knowledge. Of course, the story of the Golden Age, was included in the preface of many books, not just Ovid's Metamorphoses. One couldn't begin a history, even a mythological history, in mid stream; one had to begin at the root of things, no matter how briefly put. So, in one of the ancient strains of aesopic tales that made its way into the middle ages, the "Fables of Babrius," the prologue recounts the evolution of the race of men. In the Golden Age, Babrius tells us: "not only men but all the other living creatues had the power of speech and were familiar with such words as we ourselves now use in speaking with each other. ... The fish swimming about in the sea chatted with the friendly sailor, and quite intelligibly, too. ... and good fellowship prevailed between gods and mortals. That this was so, you may learn and fully understand from wise old Aesop..." (Perry, 1965, p. 3) Of course, this is not what we learn from wise old Aesop; instead, we learn of a world filled with treachery and deceipt. The animals do speak to each other, however.

If in the sixteenth century Aesop was to be understood as a contemporary allegory, one by which the world of innocense is inverted into a world of experience, one should not forget that Ovid's idealized, romantic animal kingdom was just one act in the mythic drama of the origin of the world. Earlier, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as demonstrated in the works of Piero di Cosimo, for instance, animals could inhabit a fictive world of innocence. In his book Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (p. 47-8) Richard Turner speaks of the vision of the Golden Age found in Piero's painting, perhaps taking its cue from Loranzo de' Medici's manuscript of Selve d'amore in which the world described within has not yet turned cynical -- "where the wolf and the bear played peacefully with the grazing flocks, where the hare and the hound rested together in a thicket..." We seem to recognize this mythic construct in Salomon's dainty Aesop, but it is a false recognition, perhaps deceptively so.

Though the narratives and dramas in Aesop's world take place on the stage of the Golden Age, as noted, they are filled with self-delusion, guile, treachery and overbearing self-interest. For an age that had begun to question its inherited values and beliefs, where non-belief is a possibility, and where conflict of ideologies take center stage -- as Europe was so consumed during the sixteenth century -- the stories found in Aesop could well have found special favor and have been considered suitable and just warnings to young and maturing minds. The number of editions of these stories that were produced so rapidly, so frequently and ubiquitously, and the need to illustrate so many of the tales, speaks to the degree of importance this age newly gave to this literature, as proven by the number of illustrated Aesop editions that suddenly appeared.

Aesop's modern popularity was not a phenomenon that grew out of the sixteenth century, of course. In France Aesop manuscripts are known to date from as early as the tenth century. (Handford, xvii) Natalie Zemon Davis, in her essay "Printing and the People" (p. 201ff), notes that Aesop was commonly read from "old" editions at village gatherings such as the veillée, a frequent winter's night ritual of story-telling, social gathering and common chores. These villagers did not use the modern editions of Aesop that were becoming available in the cities, but old, treasured editions -- perhaps one of the few secular books they may have owned. Did the interest in new Aesop editions in Greek and Latin, appropriate an ancient rural regard for these less than bucolic tales; was village life more accurately mirrored in the fables than was city life? The ancient Aesopic literature, seemingly, was much closer to the world painted in the sixteenth-century versions of the fables. Today, we see them expurgated and softened, in a manner recalling how the fairy tales of the brothers Grim have lost favor, having passed through a Victorianizing filter. In ancient times, says translator Robert Temple, the fables offered "largely a world of brutal, heartless men -- and of cunning, of wickedness, of murder, of treachery and deceit, of laughter at the misfortune of others, of mockery and contempt. It is also a world of savage humor, of deft wit, of clever wordplay, of one-upmanship [and] of 'I told you so' (p. xvi-xvii)." If Aesop's ancient world was brutal and anti-humanistic, some of the fables, as we know them, have been altered in post-classical times, and especially in modern times, by adding moral tags on to them [note], transforming them, thereby, into crypto-christian parables and moral exemplars by softening their message and turning the animal-eat-animal reality eventually -- by adding an overlay of nostalgia -- into what might evolve into a soft and furry kingdom.

[note: The newness of the moralizing tags is disputed. Only few are obviously Christian, and these, it has been suggested, may have been substituted for earlier interpretations. (Handford, xviii) The fables were sanitized in the 15th and 15th Centureis, too. The Aesop portrait that appeared in Caxton's edition, for instance, was cleaned up by removing the "hind-sight" image -- which shows a man gazing at his own buttocks. He also removed a section from the preface on the subject of urinating. (See further Lenaghan, p. 19-20. Perry (1965, introd.) suggests us that the epigramatic morals that follow many of the fables could have originally been placed before the tale and might have served as a user's device to locate a story he needed.]

The fables, of course, were not intended to teach brutality, but to present it as an object lesson. Their voice is that of the common man and its audience is, likewise, common. It provides practical lessons on how to live life and avoid strife. Handford (xx) explains that the virtues found in Aesop are not philosophical virtues; they do not evolve directly from the great tradition of Greek philosophy; they are common virtues, "social virtues which make life comfortable and redound to the credit and interest of those who practice them -- loyalty, gratitude, moderation, resignation, industry" a world that teaches prudence and worldly wisdom, as useful to the common man as a farmer's almanac. Ben Perry, in his introduction to his edition of the fables of Barbrius and Phaedrus (two of the strains that brought the Aesopic tradition to modern times), tells us that it has been shown that the "moral truths" that accompany the fables are not necessarily moral, per se, but rather convey "matters of worldly wisdom and shrewness ... and even the moral lessons [that they do convey] are formulated more often than not on that basis." (Perry, 1965, xxii)

On the moral content of animal stories (fables): Benesch (Art of Renaissance in Northern Europe, p. 20), referring to Dürer's investigations and depictions of the natural world, notes that "nature was never an end in itself ... but always had to contribute to the greater glory of God..." "Fables and animal stories," he continues, "like the one of the fox who lures the chickens by sweet music, are even inserted into the marginal illustrations of Emperor Maximilian's prayer book, where the text deals with temptation." It is this medievalizing tendency to see the entire world as bearing moral secrets hidden in everyday reality that informed the development of illustrated emblem books such as Alciati and the pairing of the moral teachings of the Aesop stories with illustrations -- a combination that became quite popular, as the de Tournes productions, themselves, amply demonstrate.

The economy with which the fables are formed as literature effortlessly lead toward their being paired with images. It has already been noted that Steinhöwel's introduction to the Fables calls them images (see above), a term that underlines the fact that because fables (to use Perry's phrasing) "'picture' the truth, they are merely metaphors in the form of a past narrative" (Perry, 1965, xx). Under such conditions it is an easy step to turn an illustrated literature into illustrations with textual, caption-like explanations, as seen for the first time in the Janot 1544 edition, where each image and its moralized caption are enclosed in a framework, in effect turning each story into its own frontispiece. The Janot edition is the direct predecessor and the typological source for the one created in 1547 for Jean de Tournes by Bernard Salomon.

It is not difficult for us to view the fables of Aesop when presented in the Renaissance tradition as moral keys suitable for reconstructing a new faith, one liberated from the scholastic accretions of the centuries and free to use, instead, a natural, seeming secular literature that conveys traditional moral content. Posed, as they are, on the dividing line that separates the state of Eden from the state of self-knowledge readers (young minds especially) of the Fables are asked to re-live the dramatic dilemma of having to choose between innocent, hence unwilled grace, and having to make conscious moral choices. The world of Aesop's moral fables is a world of continual contradiciton, where both the Golden Age and the Age of self-awareness offer untenable choices.

The neutrality of their settings, the rudimentary personas that populate their stories have aided illustrators through the ages. McKendry (p. 6) notes that "the fables are not fixed firmly in a time or place" and this is one reason why they were favored by illustrators who could seize upon their anonymity to fashion contemporary scenographies for them.