Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The art of the Middle Ages was mainly religious, reflecting the relationship between God and man, created in His image. The animal often appears confronted or dominated by man, but a second current of thought stemming from Saint Paul and Aristotle, which developed from the 12th century onwards, includes animals and humans in the same community of living creatures.
There are many meanings attached to this symbol, and it was introduced in France in the early 1760s as the emblem of the Knight Kadosh degree. [ 29 ] The martlet , a stylized swift or swallow without feet (sometimes incorrectly, at least in the Anglophone heraldries these days, said to have no beak), is a mark of cadency in English heraldry ...
The characteristic of the lion as royal animal in particular is due to the influence of the Physiologus, an early Christian book about animal symbolism, originally written in Greek in the 2nd century and translated into Latin in about AD 400. It was a predecessor of the medieval bestiaries. At the time, few Europeans had a chance to encounter ...
The word "crest" derives from the Latin crista, meaning "tuft" or "plume", perhaps related to crinis, "hair". [1] Crests had existed in various forms since ancient times: Roman officers wore fans of feathers or horsehair, which were placed longitudinally or transversely depending on the wearer's rank, [ 2 ] and Viking helmets were often adorned ...
Animals and animal-like creatures are presumed to be shown in profile facing dexter. This attitude is standard unless otherwise stated in the blazon. As a warrior will usually carry a shield in the left hand, the animal shown on the shield will then face toward the knight's body. Humans and human-like beings are presumed to be shown affronté.
Coat of arms of Łobez, Poland. The wolf has been widely used in many forms in heraldry during the Middle Ages. Though commonly reviled as a livestock predator and man-eater, the wolf was also considered a noble and courageous animal, and frequently appeared on the arms and crests of numerous noble families. It typically symbolised the rewards ...
Heraldry developed in the high medieval period, based on earlier, "pre-heraldic" or "ante-heraldic", traditions of visual identification by means of seals, field signs, emblems used on coins, etc. Notably, lions that would subsequently appear in 12th-century coats of arms of European nobility have pre-figurations in the animal style of ancient ...
Matthew Paris' Chronica Majora (c. 1250) displays a coat of arms with a black double-headed eagle in a yellow field for Otto IV. Segar's Roll (c. 1280) displays the same coat of arms, or, an eagle sable beaked and armed gules for the "king of Germany" (rey de almayne). Outside of these exceptional depictions (in sources from outside of Germany ...