Some Florentine Heraldry Revisited

I received a picture recently from a correspondent in the midst of a nice back-and-forth conversation about some Florentine heraldry.  She was kind enough to send me the following:

From the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, this is the coat of arms of Venturi.  I had written about this coat before, in my first posting back in January 2011 about our week in Florence (and all of the heraldry that can be found there!)  the previous fall (http://blog.appletonstudios.com/2011/01/heraldry-in-florence-part-one.html).  This coat, in color, was found on and in the hotel at which we stayed in Florence, the Paris.  The arms are Azure a fess between three chess rooks Or.

And here, since I now had a name to go with the arms, is a scan of the Venturi arms from the Stemmario Fiorentino.

I remarked at that time that I didn’t really see any obvious connection to the City of Paris, France, but the first photograph above explains that; it’s the arms of the Venturi family, who may have or, likely did, own the building now housing the hotel there.

I swear, all this just makes me want to go back, if only to see how much heraldry I may have missed during our last trip there.  But it’s not in the cards for this year, at least.  So I’ll have to get my Florentine heraldry “fix” vicariously, through the emails of some of my friends and correspondents.

Heraldry in Maastricht, Part Eleven

Continuing with more highlights from our heraldic tour of St. Servaas Basilica in Maastricht, there were lots and lots of carved armorial (and a bunch of non-armorial) memorials set into the floors.  Some of the following may look like they were cast in metal, but they are all carved in stone, polished by the soles of the hundreds of feet which have walked across them over the years.

The arms to sinister (to the right as you look at it) are reminiscent - though they do not match, as this one appears to be wearing a boot and the one below is wearing only a sandal, plus there is a star in dexter chief in the coat in Florence - the following coat of arms that I photographed in Florence, Italy a couple of years ago.

We now return you to the armorial memorials found in the Basilica of St. Servatius.

Because of where some of these memorials lay in the basilica (under chairs, under portable pews, etc.), I was not always able to photograph the text accompanying the arms.  And in others, the text was simply too worn to read well.  However, for the last coat of arms above, I obtained a clear photograph of the the text, which read (in Latin, of course):


Hic iacet sepultus reveren
dus dominus Michael Crusens
iul huius ecc~liæ canonicus
obiit 1 Martii 1626 requiescat
in sancta pace amen

And finally, there was this example, which has been cut down (and probably moved from its original location in the basilica) to serve as a paving tile.  (Leading me to the question: "If they saw heraldry in half in a basilica, is it still considered to be heraldic heresy?")  Admittedly, it does not appear that the arms of the individual buried there were cut down (those would be in the circle of which you can see the bottom arc here), but "only" those of some of his ancestors down the left-hand side of the memorial.

Heraldry in Florence, Part Thirty

Okay, we’re at Part 30 of the heraldry of Florence, and it’s probably time to finish this up. I still can’t believe that we were there for only five and a half days! So as we say goodbye to Florence, I leave you with a number of different depictions of the arms of the city, Argent a fleur-de-lys florency gules, done at various times and in different styles and media, and ending with a photograph that more than any other seemed to me to sum up the juxtaposition of old and new, historical and modern, living side-by-side there: yet another depiction of the arms of the de’ Medici family sitting above the very up-to-date logo of a street-side coffee shop!

Thank you for coming along and sharing this journey to heraldic Florence with me.

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Nine

There’s another place in Florence where one can see a bit of non-Italian heraldry. It’s real name is the Cimitero Protestante de Porta a' Pinti, the Protestant Cemetery, but it is more commonly known as “The English Cemetery.” It’s a place where non-Catholics, many of whom were English, could be buried when they died in the city, including its most famous resident, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s kind of a cool place to visit. It sits on a raised island completely surrounded by busy streets.

Anyway, some of the monuments there have carved coats of arms on them, and I thought you might be interested in seeing a few of them. As with so much else of the heraldry in Florence, the arms here are only a sampling of what we found there.

 Lieut. General John Locke of Newcastle, Ireland, d. 28 February 1837.  Per fess azure and or, a pale counterchanged, three hawks with wings endorsed or.  Crest: A hawk with wings endorsed holding in the beak a padlock or.  (Per Burke's General Armory.)

Le Vicomte Henri de la Belinaye, b. London 19 November 1799, d. Florence 9 January 1873.  Argent three ram's heads cabossed sable.  (Per Rietstap's Armorial Général.)

Bentink Yelverton [1792-1837] and his wife the Hon. Anna Bingham [d. 1855, eldest daughter of John Bingham, 1st Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, County Mayo]. There is an article which outlines the life of Bentinck Walter Yelverton on-line at http://www.florin.ms/yelvertons.html  The arms here are a bit hard to parse.  Burke gives several coats of arms for Yelverton; the closest is Argent, three lions rampant gules armed and langued azure on a chief gules a crescent argent.  The arms on the sinister side of the shield are not those of Bingham, Baron Clanmoreeis, which have a charged fess between three mullets, but appear to be those of Bingham of Bingham Castle, County Mayo, Azure a bend cotised between six crosses patty argent.  (The crosses are not so easy to see in the picture here, but they are quite clear in the original high-resolution photo.)  (Identification of the Bingham arms is from O'Laughlin's The Irish Book of Arms.)

Martha Rebecca, wife of James Moore, Esq. of Strandfield, County Louth [Ireland].  Vert a lion rampant and in chief three mullets or.  Crest: A hand lying fessways couped at the wrist holding a sword erect impaling three gory heads all proper.  (Burke's General Armory.)

William Somerville, eldest son of the historian of Queen Anne, b. Minto, Roxburghshire [Scotland] 22 April 1771, d. Florence 25 June 1860.  These are impaled arms.  The Moore coat is Azure three mullets two and one between seven crosses crosslet fitchy three, one, two and one or.  Crest: A dragon vert spouting fire proper standing on a wheel argent.  (Burke's General Armory.)  Somerville's wife was Mary Fairfax, the Scottish mathematician and astronomer.  (She is buried in Naples.)  The closest arms to the image here for Fairfax in Burke are: Argent three bars gemelles gules surmounted by a lion rampant sable.  (Other coats for Fairfax reverse the tinctures of the bars and lion.)  The bars do not appear behind the lion here (not even in the high-resolution image), but that could simply be an error.

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Eight

The Basilica of Santa Croce (Holy Cross) is a “must see” for any heraldry enthusiast, or history buff for that matter. There are a number of famous burials in Santa Croce: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Galileo Galilei, Niccolo Machiavelli, Dante Alighieri (just his monument; he’s actually buried in Ravenna). Burials of the not as famous – there are literally hundreds. I took well over 500 photographs at Santa Croce (including both the interior and exterior), the overwhelming majority of them heraldry rather than other monuments, and I wasn’t even maintaining my usual practice of taking two or even three pictures of each item in case one shot turned out poorly for some reason.

To be brief: There’s a lot of heraldry, in a wide variety of media: carved in stone, painted, carved and painted, carved in colored stone, using metal, in stained glass. If I were to continue to post only about the heraldry found in Santa Croce, I’d fill up this blog for the rest of the year, and bore you and myself to tears by the time we got done. If you want to know what heraldry can be found in Santa Croce, I urge to not to miss it if you ever get to Florence. But be sure to allow yourself at least the better part of a day; there’s just so much to see there. In the meantime, here’s a very brief sampling of the variety of coats of arms that can be found there.

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Seven

Upside-down and backwards. (Or should I say, in British fashion, “reversed and mirrored”, or in American fashion, “inverted and reversed”?)

Today’s post about heraldry seen in the city of Florence is a bit of a mystery. The flag here was being carried by the leader of a tourist group. If all of the main tinctures were reversed, that is, white where they are red, and red where they are white, then this would be the flag of Poland charged with the arms of Poland. But they aren’t, and so it isn’t.

I am assuming that because the tour guides are not representatives of the government of Poland, that they are not permitted the use of the flag and arms, and so have reversed them in order to denote who they are without appearing to be “official.”

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Six

Today, for your viewing pleasure, here are couple of other "foreign" arms which we found in our wanderings about the city of Florence: the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the arms of the Republic of Estonia.  Note the pensive lion and the happy unicorn supporters with the UK arms!

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Five

The offering for today is a series of arms set into roundels in the exterior of a church in the heart of Florence. Some are simply painted (and weathered!). Others look like they have been done in ceramic. All of them are beautifully done.

da Calamaria: Or a ram clymant sable [one armorial states that the ram is charged on the shoulder with an inescutcheon of argent a cross sable].

Agolanti: Gules an eagle displayed or.

I am not certain of the identity of these arms. The canting arms of Portinari are: Or a door between two lions combattant sable, but the arms here do not match that blazon. The field here seems to be argent; the door is argent set in a stone frame that I think is gules (red).

The paint is faded and thus the tinctures are trickier to identify. It may be Del Rosso: Vairy argent and gules, or Marchi: Vairy sable and argent.

Florence (Commune): Per pale gules and argent. (This coat is also seen as the reverse, Per pale argent and gules.)

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Four

While walking down one of the streets of Florence, we ran across these very three-dimensional depictions of an uncommon heraldic charge, a fireball. (A fireball is a type of grenade, but where an heraldic grenade has but one flame out its top, a fireball will have flames at the sides and, in two-dimensional drawings, at the bottom, as well.)

This one was placed above the doorway to the building, and it just drew me in. What a tremendous rendering of this charge, with the flames spurting from it in several directions! (The little metal spikes set into the concrete around it are designed to keep the pigeons off. The pigeons in Florence, like pigeons everywhere, seem to have very little respect for either art or heraldry.)

Another version of the fireball was found along the metal fence in front of the building. The sections of the fence were of upright bars each terminating in a fleur-de-lis. At each post to which these sections were attached was placed a fireball.

What a great use of this heraldic charge!

Heraldry in Florence, Part Twenty-Three

Lest you think that all of the heraldry that we saw in Florence are just painted or just carved in stone (or both carved in stone and painted), here are a couple of coats of arms we ran across which are done in metal.

This first one is interesting because it is a relatively complex quartered coat. Based on what I could find in the Florentine armorials and ordinaries I have, the first and fourth quarters (the ones in the upper left and lower right) are the arms of Lucas Bartoli Ricciardi: Gules a griffin segreant or overall on a bend azure three [sometimes, four] fleurs-de-lys or. The arms in the second and third quarters look like they might be a variation of the arms of Pelli: Azure a fess between three wheels or, but the “fess” has a couple of waves on its upper edge, and I have not been able to find any variants with the cross and ladder/cross of Calvary surmounting the unusual fess. (I also looked under things like "wall" and "church" and came up with nothing.) So, at least at this point in time, I haven’t been able to positively identify those arms. Back to the books, I guess!

The second coat of arms will also require some more time going through armorials, if only to identify the main charge on the field. (It reminds me of some kind of a pith helmet, but I’ve not been able to find it in the Florentine ordinaries that I have, either under “hat,” “helm” or “helmet.” I’m confident that it is not a tree. Still, isn’t is a great rendering? I’d love to have my coat of arms done this way for a doorway or window at home. What a beautiful piece of work!