A genre of descriptive poetry, closely connected with the emblem. It has its origins in 15th-c. poetry and heraldry, was practised principally in the 16th c., but lasted well into the next. Sebillet defines it rather restrictively as ‘a continual praising or blaming of the subject on which one has chosen to write’. Its clearest manifestation is to be found in the ‘Blasons anatomiques’ or ‘Blasons du corps féminin’, a kind of love-poem in vogue in the 1530s and 1540s. The first of these Renaissance blasons, the ‘Blason du beau tétin’, was written by Clément Marot in Ferrara in 1535, and he was soon followed by Scéve (five poems) and other poets who gave detailed poetic praise to different parts of the body, and later to various objects and abstract qualities. The common nature of the poems was soon perceived and the first collected edition dates from 1543. The blason was sometimes paired with a contreblason (see Marot's ‘Blason du laid tétin’ or Peletier's poems on the heart). A further development was the ‘Hymne-blason’ of the Pléiade. The scope was later extended to include religious and satirical poems. The visual, even painterly, element is paramount, at least in the earlier blasons.
[Peter Sharratt]
