Abstract. This article considers the connection between the Renaissance emblematics and the teaching of the «significance of things» (significatio rerum) elaborated in the medieval hermeneutics. Emblematic understanding of thing as a sign capable of combining different or even contradictory meanings was also rooted in the medieval tradition. However, the religious basis of the significatio rerum teaching was, for the most part, lost in emblematics. From the viewpoint of the medieval hermeneutics the meanings of things constituted a whole of «God’s language» (because things were understood as the words in this language), whereas in the emblematics the meanings of things were isolated from each other. Each man, however, was allowed to link these meanings according to his own individual experience thereby creating his own «book of emblems».