The Arms of Benedict XV

UC-NRLF B 2 7T3 Tfla '^^. / The Arms of Benedict XV By Pierre de Chaignon La Hose The Arms of Benedict XV An Introduction to the Study of PAPAL ARMORIALS BY PIERRE DE CHAIGNON LA ROSE http://www.archive.org/details/armsofbenedictxvOOphilrich r\ |M jV3 THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV. An Introduction to the Study of Papal Armorials. I. THE arms of His Holiness Pope Benedict XV may be "blazoned" (i. e. described in the technical language of heraldry) as follows: Party per fess, two coats: A, Or, a demi-eagle displayed issuant sable, langued gules ; B, Party per bend azure and or, a church, the tower at sinister, argent, essoree gules, the tower-cross of the second. This is to say, in colloquial terms, that the shield is divided horizontally into two equal compartments, each containing an independent heraldic composition. The top compartment shows on a gold ** field " or background the upper half of a black eagle with red tongue, his wings outspread (" issuant " meaning that the body springs from the partition line). This composition is, as will be explained later, a modified version of the old arms of the Holy Roman Empire. In the bottom compartment the field is divided diagonally into two theoretically equal parts, the upper triangle being of blue, the lower of gold ; on this compound background is shown a red-roofed, silver church, the tower, topped with a gold cross, rising at " sinister ", the left from the point of view of the hearer of the shield. This« second composition is the heraldic cognizance peculiar to the della Chiesa family, the design in the upper compartment being common to many Italian houses—for reasons to be shown. Thanks to the personal kindness of the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Boston, who procured for me from Rome colored prints of His Holiness's arms both as Archbishop and as Pope, I have been able to study these arms from what may be [Reprinted, with permission, from The Ecclesiastical Review, August and September, 1915. The Dolphin Press, Philadelphia.] 173 2 THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV, regarded an official version, as the print of the papal "achievement" is the embossed heading of the Pontiff's personal writ- ing-paper. The arms, although on a very small scale, are gilded and colored apparently with meticulous care, and the " charges " and " tinctures " are exactly those named in the : THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV. , above blazon. Artificers may well note a few minor details the beak of the eagle is black like the rest of his body, but the tongue, tiny as it is in the pontifical print, is carefully in- dicated as red, just as the minute cross on the church-tower is shown of gold; and although silver leaf is used elsewhere on the achievement, both keys are gilded. A question which may puzzle craftsmen when rendering these arms on a large scale, is what color may be given to the spaces of the window and door openings of the church. On the print described these small apertures are brushed in with an indeterminate, neutral grey, which may be regarded as a lower tone, in shadow, of the argent of the church itself. There is, gener- ally, no heraldic necessity for these apertures, in castles, towers, etc., to be of a different tincture from that of the main fabric. However, when the roof is blazoned of a different tincture, the openings often follow suit. So in this case, on a large drawing, to show these openings in color instead of metal, would not be a serious violation of heraldic propriety. The heraldry itself is extremely interesting, and, like all good heraldry, it is also extremely simple. Undoubtedly many sentimental effusions will be written about it by the school of amateurs who have never got beyond what Planche calls the " astrology of heraldry ", and many complications will be read into it, complications which exist chiefly in the mind of the beholder. But it is strikingly possible, by analyzing this shield and comparing it with analogous arms of other sov- ereign pontiffs, to show from it the essentially practical nature of heraldry, its simple reasonableness, before the scio- listic vaporings of the sixteenth and seventeenth century heraldic " astrologers " befogged the subject with a vast cloud of inanity. And fortunately these arms are so clear that, even in the absence of any purely genealogical data, one can analyze them, heraldically, through their own internal evi- dence, In Figure A I have drawn what, from this internal evi- dence, a herald would assume to have been the original arms of the family : simply a church, a chiesa, on a somewhat pecu- liarly parti-colored field—allusive, or " canting " arms, armes parlantes as the heralds say, where the composition expresses or alludes to the name of the bearer. That the original funCr- : 4 THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV. tion of a coat-of-arms was mere identification is now, unhap- pily, too often ignored. The late J. R. Planche, Somerset Herald, in his invaluable little book. The Pursuivant of Arms, " 1 85 1, writes: It is scarcely possible to find an ancient coat that was not originally canting or allusive (that is to say, al- luding to the name, estate, or profession of the bearer), ex- cepting, of course, those displaying simply the honorable ordi- naries, which, as I have already stated, took their rise from the ornamental strengthenings of the shield, and even these were occasionally so." And Father Marc Gilbert de Varennes in Le Roy d'Armes, 1540 (I use Planche's translation) Fig. a observes: " Our ancestors, less curious and more simple than we are at present, usually took care in the composition of their arms that there should be a correspondence between their name and the figures with which they emblazoned their shields which they did namely to this end, that all sorts of persons, in- telligent or ignorant, citizens or countrymen, should recognize easily and without further inquiry, to whom the lands or the houses belonged wherever they found them as soon as they had cast their eyes upon the escutcheon." In an age when heraldry served a very practical purpose, the endless romantic and symbolical complications of the later school of heraldic sciolists would have seemed nearly as grotesque as they do to modern scholarship. It is too often forgotten that the simple canon of medieval heraldic usage, evolved from a practical military necessity, was well-nigh completed nearly three hun- dred years before the first heraldic romanticist was able to burst into print. Let us consider a few clearly allusive papal coats. The very first that may be regarded as approximately free from the : THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV. C suspicion of being either apocryphal or " retroactive " is that of Lucius II, 1144-45, His shield has on it simply a ramping bear. Now, first, for a little " astrology " on the subject, which even some modern minds seem always to crave when anything so recondite (!) as heraldry is involved. We will ^ " begin at random with Guillim : It is written of the She-bear that she bringeth forth her young Ones imperfect and de- formed like a lump of raw Flesh and licks it till it comes to Shape and Perfection. The She-bear is most cruelly inraged against any that shall hurt her Young, or despoil her of them As the Scripture saith, in setting forth the fierce Anger of the Lord, that he will meet his Adversaries as a Bear robbed of her Whelps" etc. See how satisfactory it would be to a cer- tain type of mind to use this as the basis for a serious explana- tion of the real, heraldic, significance of Lucius II's coat. One more " astrological " quotation, from Sylvanus Morgan,^ will give details less accidentally germane (note especially the " logic of the passage) : Next to the Lyon is the Ursa minor, having the preheminence, because it is nearest of all the rest to the North Pole; it is called Helice minor, by reason of its small Revolution; or rather of Elice, a town in Arcadia wherein Calysto the Great Bear and Mother of the Less was bred. It is called Cynosura, because this Constellation, though it carry the name of a Bear, it hath the tail of a Dog; and therefore [sic] Lyons or Bears, being in Arms, and yet not of their own native color are esteemed Honourable, because the inward qualities of the mind, are denoted by the outward tincture; and an Ass cannot be a Lyon, though it hides its ears with the Lyon's skin."—But we are now pretty far away from Lucius II's bear, whose presence on that Pontiff's shield can be quite reasonably explained to all but heraldico-astrological votaries by the fact that the Pontiff's family name, long before he became Pope, was "Hunt", in Italian Caccia (Caccia- Memini), that Lucania and Umbria at that period were still infested with bears, and that the bear-hunt, caccia d'orso, was a welcome pastime even among the Roman nobles. We may now proceed perhaps more freely with some of the more obviously allusive charges on the arms of subsequent "^ A Display of Heraldrie, 1611. Ed. 1724, p. 190. 2 The Sphere of Gentry, 1661, p. 90. — 6 THE ARMS OF BENEDICT XV. Pontiffs. The next to be noted is the sieve, crivello, of Urban III, 1 185, of the Crivelli family. Follows shortly the perfect rebus of the lion holding the castle of Celestin IV, 1241, of the house of Castiglioni, which has furnished a series of Popes to Pius VIII, 1829.

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