Alciati is most famous for his Emblemata, published in dozens of editions from 1531 onward.
Saavedra's Idea de un príncipe político cristiano ("The Idea of a Christian political prince", 1640) was a very erudite work that uses the literary sort of emblem, put by Andrea Alciato with his Emblemata translated in 1549 and that has a mainly moral and philosophical character.
The 1531 publication in Augsburg of the first emblem book, the Emblemata of the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato launched a fascination with emblems that lasted two centuries and touched most of the countries of western Europe.
Andrea Alciato wrote the epigrams contained in the first and most widely disseminated emblem book, the Emblemata, published by Heinrich Steyner in 1531 in Augsburg.
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This is understandable, given that the first emblem book, the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, was first issued in an unauthorized edition in which the woodcuts were chosen by the printer without any input from the author, who had circulated the texts in unillustrated manuscript form.
Produced by the publisher Heinrich Steyner, the unauthorized first print edition was compiled from a manuscript of Latin poems which the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato had dedicated to his friend Conrad Peutinger and circulated to his acquaintances.
He was the composer of the most renowned Hungarian Emblemata book: Emblemata cum aliquot nummis antiqui operis, Ioannis Sambuci Tirnaviensis Pannonii. (1564).
The earliest of these was Andrea Alciato, whose influential Emblemata was published in many formats and in several countries from 1531 onwards.