In August 1975 whilst working with my grandfather for the Summer vacation at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden I happened upon a building one evening on my walk home to Shoreditch via the Embankment in London.
The building was just down from St. Paul’s Cathedral and was an imposing edifice in the Queen Anne style surrounding a courtyard on three sides and with an ornate set of iron railings to the front. It was not the building that caught my eye, beautiful as it was, but the coats of arms on the building and the heraldic banner that fluttered gently in the breeze.
I stood by the railings looking at the gold glinting in the sun and felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned to see a very tall, distinguished and impeccably dressed man who introduced himself as Sedley Andrus, Lancaster Herald of Arms. He asked if I should like to go inside and see the coats of arms. I was shown books on heraldry and introduced to an artist working in his Dickensian attic, He was painting a red eagle on a piece of vellum and the colours jumped out at me. I still feel that sense of excitement when I see colour on vellum.The artist was the late Norman Mainwaring who was at the time considered to be the chief herald painter at the College.
I had always been interested in knights and heraldry ever since seeing the movie The Black Shield of Falworth starring Tony Curtis! The scene in the Library where he finds the ‘great book of heraldry’, caught my imagination. I spent many hours as a child sat in the reference section of the local library, absorbing as many pictures of shields as I could find. However that chance meeting outside Her Majesty’s College of Arms on that warm August day set into motion a series of events that would see me go to art school and become a fully trained and professional heraldic artist.
So what is it about this subject that had such an impact on a small lad growing up on a working class council estate in East London ?
The colours, certainly, bright and pure and the symbols some of which are as old as mankind itself and of course it is possibly the first sustained form of Fantasy Art. Maybe it was an escape from my urban surroundings but whatever the reason I was hooked!
Heraldry has been defined as the systematic and hereditary adoption of symbols or devices arranged on the surface of a shield. It was born in the tempestuous maelstrom that was 12th Century Europe. A continent that was emerging from the so called ‘Dark Ages’ and a time of relative stability and growing self-confidence.
It was an age of awakening; new cathedrals soared into the medieval sky, their new gothic style testament to belief in God and Holy Mother Church. Mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen preached radical doctrines, The Knights Templar were at their zenith and the troubadours, the ‘Courts of Love’ and the code of Chivalry were all flourishing, thanks to writers like Cretian de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. In France Abbot Sugar of St. Denis believed that high art was the way for man to aspire to heavenly perfection and the Cathedrals of Europe with their coloured glass, brightly colourful interiors and painted murals typified this belief.
Little wonder then that heraldry was adopted so willingly in a mostly illiterate society that loved colour and display. It spread throughout Europe like a new religion, its priests were the wandering Herald/Minstrels and its plain chant was blazon. Kings, nobles, clergy and merchants all became willing disciples and the adoption of hereditary devices became an affirmation of personal confidence and status.
This ‘scyaunce’ of heraldry had it’s own language and code called Blazon, a unique language which governed strictly how the symbols should be placed and displayed on the shield. However it was and still is the art that is the point of contact for most people. Without the pictorial display the ancient, obscure and academic language of heraldry would be lost on most people and that is why the art of heraldry is more important than some heraldic academics would care to admit.
The heraldic artist takes this written description and ‘translates’ it into a recognisable image. The art of course came before the language, which as we have seen was needed to bring some kind of governance and stop people from adopting the same devices in the same form on their shields or personal seals.
The art and the subject are still thriving in the 21st century, and whilst in past times a coat of arms may have been seen as a sign in some nations of superiority of class today it is quite different. In a technological age of impersonality a coat of arms marks out an individual and it is in a modern sense a unique personal ‘logo’ or brand. I cant abide snobbery in any form, and whilst I have come across many who still rather pathetically think a coat of arms gives them some kind of ‘nobility’ thankfully for the most part most of my clients just have the same almost childlike passion for the colour and symbolism, of what is after all a deeply romantic subject.
In the next instalment we will begin our journey into the strange landscape that is the fantastic realm of the heraldic imagination and art.
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