ut minima, maximum facit, 2
“To conclude, I would like to borrow from Lévi-Strauss’s terminology to characterize the sixteenth-century producer of emblems as a bricoleur. The emblematist drew from a large, but limited body of material that was not conceived for the project at hand, a project so anomalous as to consist usually in the simple compilation of a collection of emblems. Hence, the question of authority as concerns the meaning of a given emblem will remain ambiguous at best since the bricoleur can never command the same ultimate authority as the artist, who is rather an ingénieur in Levi-Strauss’s scheme.”
ex Daniel Russell, “The Emblem and Authority,” in Word & Image 4 (1988): 81-87
referring to Claude Lévi-Strauss his La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind 1966).
Briefly treated at wikipedia.
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Questions about authorship/authority (and original and copy) pertain to design (borrowings and lendings of authority, authority as a kind of capital), and to tumblr too, I suppose.
tags: authority; authorship; bricoleur; copying; didactics; emblematics; Daniel Russell; Claude Lévi-Strauss