ABSTRACT
The engraved title-page of Leviathan is regarded by most readers of Hobbes as a curiosity, a quaint but insignificant appendage to an otherwise serious discussion of the generation, nature and characteristics of civil society. The responsibility for the designs of engraved title-pages lay in differing degrees with the three or four parties involved – author, publisher, artist and engraver. The tradition of Medieval allegory and the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs both invested the appreciation of emblematic imagery in engraved title-pages with a greater moral and philosophical force. The most common design or layout for engraved title-pages in the first thirty or forty years of the period in which the convention flourished, was the architectural facade. The conception of a human figure made up of countless smaller figures, is unique to Leviathan in the history of this convention of engraved title-pages. In the engraved title-page of Leviathan and in the discussion that follows it, Hobbes’ answer is vividly and uncompromisingly expressed.
