The Elm and the Vine

The 'marriage' of elm trees and vines continued in Italy from Roman times into the 20th century.^[2] There are references to this both in works on husbandry and in poetry. The most famous of the latter was Ovid's account of the myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in his Metamorphoses. Vertumnus takes the shape of an old woman and urges the reluctant goddess to marriage by pointing to the vine in her orchard. In the version by the work's first English translator, Arthur Golding:

Ageinst him where he sat

A goodly Elme with glistring grapes did growe: which after hee

Had praysed, and the vyne likewyse that ran uppon the tree:

But if (quoth hee) this Elme without the vyne did single stand,

It should have nothing (saving leaves) to bee desyred: and

Ageine if that the vyne which ronnes uppon the Elme had nat

The tree to leane unto, it should uppon the ground ly flat.

Yit art not thou admonisht by example of this tree

To take a husband, neyther doost thou passe to maryed bee.^[3]

The subject was commonly painted in Europe between the 16th–18th centuries, and there are examples which feature a vine trained up an elm from Italy, the Netherlands, France and England (see the Gallery below).

The theme's continuing popularity was partly encouraged by the entry of the imagery into Emblem books, beginning with the most popular of them all, Andrea Alciato's Emblemata, in which it figures under the title Amicitia etiam post mortem durans (Friendship lasting even after death).^[4] This interpretation had been influenced by a first-century CE poem by Antipater of Thessalonica in which a withered plane tree (rather than an elm) recounts how the vine trained about it keeps it green.^[5] Alciato was followed in this interpretation by Geoffrey Whitney in England,^[6] using Alciato's illustration but accompanied by verses of his own. It has been argued that William Shakespeare borrowed from this source of imagery for his The Comedy of Errors, in which Adriana reasons with Antipholus of Syracuse,"Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine./ Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,/ Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,/ Makes me with thy strength to communicate" (2.2.166–169).^[7]

Other emblem writers who took up this theme include Otto Vaenius in his Amorum emblemata (1608), where it is interpreted as love continuing after the death of a partner;^[8] by Jean Jacques Boissard in his Emblemes latins (1588), where he takes it as a sign of undying friendship;^[9] and by Daniel Heinsius in his Emblemata Amatoria (1607), where he makes the tree a plane, following the Greek epigram, and interprets it as the sign of undying love. The French version of his Latin poem reads

Comme à la plane on voit la vigne survivante,

Mon amour survivera à l'injure du sort

– as the vine survives about the plane, So will my love the stroke of fate.^[10] Similarly Konstantin Batyushkov, with a history of borrowings from foreign sources, will later speak of receiving a beloved's last embrace "as the tendrils of the vine around the slender elm go winding" in his Russian poem "Elysium" of 1810.^[11][12]

Grateful dependence of a different sort was signified by the French emblem of Gilles Corrozet in his Hecatomographie (1540), where a fruiting vine acknowledges its debt to the 'little tree' that supports it.^[13] In the following century an adaptation of the emblem was adopted as printer's mark by the House of Elzevir for their press in Leiden. There a scholar picks grapes from the vine trained round the tree, on the other side of which is the Latin device Non Solus (not alone), pointing to the alliance between learning and literature.^[14]