Nowadays we know that they are a written language of mainly phonetic signs, but in the 1400s and 1500s they were believed to have a much more mystical significance. This stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of hieroglyphics’ original use. One of the most famous appeared in a romance of 1499 titled The Dream of Poliphilo where the translation of an Egyptian single eye symbol was ‘God’. At that time, scholars and artists had a fascination with Egyptian writing the only problem was that they didn’t fully understand it, and attempted translations were normally riddled with inaccuracies. This and other Egyptian hieroglyphs of isolated human eyes went on to affect European iconography during the Renaissance. But what are the origins of that eerie disembodied eye? God had been depicted in numerous cryptic ways before, such as by a single hand emerging from a cloud, but not as an eye. The rays of light that are often shown emanating from the symbol are also a pre-existing sign of God’s radiance in Christian iconography. The triangle was a long-standing symbol of the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit sometimes in previous centuries God was even depicted with a triangular halo. Nobody is certain who originally invented it, but whoever did crafted it out of a set of previously existing religious motifs. As the name of the symbol and its early usage suggest, it was invented as a sign of God’s compassionate watchfulness over humanity. In later editions, the Eye of Providence was included as an attribute of the personification of ‘Divine Providence’, ie God’s benevolence. Another key source of the icon was in a book of emblems called the Iconologia, published first in 1593.
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