Abstract EN:

This phd deals with the inheritage of the humanistic theory of symbolic images (interpretations of Aristoteles’s de interpretation and Dionysius the areopagite; m. Ficino ; arts of memory), actualized by the xxv th session of the council of Trente, to the last treatises of the French Jesuit cl. Fr. Menestrier and the beginning of the enlightening. It finds its best development 150 years during in its own invention: the literary form of emblematics. The first section examines how combining, into what is named symbol, an engraved picture with a verbal motto, to create in the mind the intellectual vision of the invisible idea, forms the best linguistic sign and gives an answer to the verbal apories of the fallacious words, an inadequate structure in delivering signification. The iind section develops wich adaptation to the aristotelician mimesis symbolics presents through emblematics at the eyes of the theoricians, and how, integrated into a general poetics, it allows new rhetorical possibilities. The iiird section is devoted to the specificities of the different emblematics's genres, and their theoretical definitions. The ivth proposes some explications to the end of emblematic invention, even if books are printed until the beginning of the xxth c. : rise of modern and vernacular grammars, reconsiderations of rhetoric ; the linguistic humanist symbol has no place more.