Heraldic Badge - The Renaissance and Early Modern Personal Device

The Renaissance and Early Modern Personal Device

In the Renaissance, the badge, now more likely to be described as a "personal device", took an intellectual turn, and was usually combined with a short text or "motto", which when read in combination were intended to convey a sense of the aspirations or character of the bearer. These "impresas" or emblems were used on the reverse of the portrait-medals that became fashionable in Italy, and used the vocabulary of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, often dropping links to the actual heraldry of the owner completely. Indeed, by the 16th century, emblems were adopted by intellectuals and merchants who had no heraldry of their own. Later emblem books contained large numbers of emblems, partly to allow people to choose one they thought suited them.

By the later sixteenth century, allegorical badges called impresa were adopted by individuals as part of an overall programme of theatrical disguise for a specific event or series of events, such as the fancy dress jousts of the Elizabethan era typified by the Accession Day tilts.

The device spread far beyond the aristocracy as part of the craze for wittily enigmatic constructions in which combinations of pictures and texts were intended to be read together to generate a meaning that could not be derived from either part alone. The device, to all intents and purposes identical to the Italian impresa, differs from the emblem in two principal ways. Structurally, the device normally consists of two parts while most emblems have three or more. As well, the device was highly personal, intimately attached to a single individual, while the emblem was constructed to convey a general moral lesson that any reader might apply in his or her own life.

Particularly well-known examples of devices – so well known that the image could be understood as representing the bearer even without the motto – are those of several French kings, which were freely used to decorate their building projects. These include the porcupine of Louis XII with its motto "Eminus et cominus" or "De pres et de loin" (left, over a doorway at Blois) and the crowned salamander among flames of François Ier with the motto "Nutrisco et extinguo" (right, at Chambord). These and many more were collected by Claude Paradin and published in his Devises héroïques of 1551 and 1557, which gives the motto of Louis XII as "Ultos avos Troiae". Later the sun of Louis XIV was equally famous.