INTRODUCTION
One of the greatest polemicists among the early humanists, Lorenzo Valla (1406–57) intervened in jurisprudence, philosophy, historiography, and theology by straining these discourses through the sieves of his Latinity and, to a lesser extent, his Hellenism.Footnote 1 His linguistic sensibilities and combative spirit secured him a position at once prominent and equivocal in the history of humanist philology. While remembered as a pioneer for his influence on such towering textual critics as Poliziano and Erasmus, Valla appears estranged from the discipline's modern forms from the perspective of his working methods.Footnote 2 His preoccupations with language and texts mean that less is known about his interests in images and in what is today called material culture. This lacuna may also reflect some artificial boundaries that have separated philology's history from that of art history and antiquarianism.Footnote 3 It may reflect, as well, a tendency to assess Valla's engagements with images and material culture in light of the rhetorical tradition instead of the philological one for which he is principally known.
This tendency can be observed, for instance, in Michael Baxandall's celebrated study of the relationship between early Renaissance humanism and art criticism, Giotto and the Orators. Here, Valla appears with “all the marks of a critic manqué” within a chapter dedicated to “The Limits of Humanist Criticism.”Footnote 4 “More than most humanists he had the philological equipment to master the classical critical vocabulary” with which an authentic humanist criticism of art could have been formed.Footnote 5 However, Valla refrained from applying his philological equipment directly to the arts’ domain, so Baxandall argued. This conclusion rests primarily on passages in which Valla compares the so-called liberal and manual arts. For example, in his textbook on Latin grammar and vocabulary, the Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (Finer points of the Latin language, 1441), Valla describes how cultural degeneration after the fall of Rome touched both the Latin language and the “arts that most closely resemble the liberal arts—painting, carving, modeling, architecture.”Footnote 6 In the Oratio in Principio Studii (Oration for the inauguration of the academic year, 1455), he puts forward a theory of cultural progress that includes verbal and manual arts once again.Footnote 7 Baxandall considered these passages an effect of the rhetorical tradition in which Valla was steeped, with its extended analogies between arts exemplified by Quintilian, Valla's foremost ancient mentor.Footnote 8
Recent studies of Valla's methods by Mariangela Regoliosi and Christopher S. Celenza highlight more passages of this kind. In the Antidotum in Facium (Antidote to Facio, 1447), a self-defense against his critics in Naples, Valla compares Livy's Histories to a “painted panel” (“tabula”) whose “colors and lines, either because of old age or for another reason, had been destroyed and then restored to represent the truth,” on account of his own emendations of that text.Footnote 9 In one of the prefaces to his Collatio Novi Testamenti (Annotations to the New Testament, 1449), he compares his critical work on the text of Jerome's Bible to a feat of construction in the context of an even more elaborate comparison between the disciplines and various physical materials: “The ‘cities,’ so to speak, of other branches of learning, are constructed partly from bricks, like civil law, partly from tufa, like medicine, partly from marble, like astronomy, and there are likewise others. But the city of the Good News is the only one made of gems, and the only city where it is more outstanding to be the humblest construction worker than it is to be an architect in other cities.”Footnote 10 This article argues that Valla's engagements with visual and material culture exceeded these rhetorical comparisons. Despite philology's common meaning as the “discipline of making sense of texts,” images were sometimes objects of Valla's philological practices as a result of their embeddedness in language and history, and because of the important role they played in expressing, and reconstructing, the structures of social authority that he wished to see change.Footnote 11
The principal grounds for my argument is an early publication, the Epistola contra Bartolum (Epistle against Bartolus, 1433), which Valla wrote during his short tenure as the single professor of rhetoric at the University of Pavia. It is best known today for its critique of so-called medieval jurisprudence, and as the first of Valla's many iconoclastic performances against persons and texts of authority.Footnote 12 Beginning with a broad critique of civilian lawyers, it focuses on a single legal tract, the De insigniis et armis (On insignia and arms, 1358), which circulated under the name of the profession's most revered figurehead, Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–57). It incited the ire of Pavia's law faculty, lost Valla his university chair, and drew suspicion against him for the rest of his life. Subsequent historians of humanism and of law have remembered the letter as one of the most articulate and early polemics against medieval legal science in the name of humanist principles, anticipating the revolutions in so-called humanist jurisprudence to come.Footnote 13 In Giotto and the Orators, where a portion was translated into English for the first time, it appeared as a wholly critical gesture (“carrying out the liberating role of humanism”) supporting Baxandall's broader thesis about Valla's not quite positive contribution to humanist art criticism.Footnote 14 The epistle has attracted recent attention following new assessments of the legal tract it takes to task, and following Regoliosi's much-needed 1997 publication of its first critical edition.Footnote 15
It has not been considered important that Valla's target was a legal discourse about images called insignia, arma, and signa. The significance of this choice can be reconsidered in light of new scholarship dedicated to the intersections between law and aesthetics, philology and antiquarianism, as well as philology and visual culture more broadly.Footnote 16 Informed by these perspectives, I propose that in 1433 Valla intervened into a charged field of images through which authority, including the jurists’ authority, found material form and visible expression. He argued that his own intellectual preparation made him a more competent legislator of these images than the civilian lawyer Bartolus and civilian lawyers generally. In subsequent projects, he continued to engage with images connected to authority and identity with the awareness that they were implicated, with and through language, in social and cultural processes subject to change.
These engagements help to reveal underappreciated connections between humanist philological practices and several early modern discourses around images, including fifteenth-century antiquarian conversations about how Roman insignia related to the signs of distinction displayed by contemporary families and eventually called heraldry; and the sixteenth-century imprese treatises that sought to establish the proper names for and proper distinctions between such images as imprese, emblemi, and armi di famiglia in the Italian and other vernacular tongues. Modern anthropologies of images that deduce grammars of visual languages as reflections of culturally circumscribed structures, customs, and laws might be considered developments, in part, of the philological approaches to the image that Valla and his heirs deployed.
VALLA'S TARGETS: MEDIEVAL JURISPRUDENCE, BARTOLUS'S SHORTEST WORK, AND HIS GRAMMAR OF SIGNS
After saluting his addressee, Valla's friend and fellow humanist Pier Candido Decembrio (1399–1477), Valla begins his epistle with the following account of the civilian lawyers:
Among those I refer to as persons skilled in law, there is almost no one who does not seem to be simply despicable and ridiculous. They are bereft of all the learning one expects to find in a free person, especially of the eloquence that was studied diligently by all the ancient jurisprudents, and without such eloquence one cannot understand the works of the ancients. They have shallow, stultifying minds and no talent, so that I feel sad for civil law, because it does not feel the want of those interpreters that it has now. It is preferable to avoid writing than to have animals as readers: the latter either do not understand what you have wisely elaborated (for they are animals) or they badly explain it to others.Footnote 17
As a professional class, the lawyers are now understood to have emerged over the course of the eleventh century within Northern Italy's universities.Footnote 18 They were expert interpreters of a body of legal writings and a so-called ratio scripta (written reason) with origins in ancient Rome, but which had declined in the West after the empire's fall. Having made this tradition relevant to European institutions once again, they became indispensable consultants to towns, emperors, popes, princes, and members of a prestigious intelligentsia.Footnote 19 Yet from Valla's point of view they lacked the necessary background to understand and communicate about the body of texts upon which their authority was based.
Commissioned by the sixth-century emperor Justinian from Constantinople, these texts were known as the Corpus Iuris and, from the sixteenth century onward, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, or body of (civil) law. They comprised the Institutes, a textbook for students of civil law; the Code, a collection of imperial decrees; the Novels, a collection of Justinian's own legislative acts; and the Digest (also titled Pandects), with Roman jurists’ writings from the first three centuries CE.Footnote 20 The latter became a venerable text for humanist readers. As Ernst H. Kantorowicz pointed out in his classic article on Roman law and Renaissance theories of art, Petrarch already considered it an authoritative testimony and monument of Roman antiquity.Footnote 21 Valla's Elegantiae explains how the Digest informed his conception of Latinity by providing models of eloquence that, he believed, could facilitate a wholesale revival of learning in his time.Footnote 22
Valla's emphasis is more critical in the 1433 epistle, where he focuses on the obstacles to this ambitious goal. After his initial picture of the “despicable and ridiculous” jurists, here he expresses frustration with “the most unjust Justinian” for mixing the ancient jurists’ writings while seeking to preserve them in compiled form.Footnote 23 He laments how these compilations had encouraged obfuscating commentaries on the ancients’ writings, the emperor's explicit but “foolish” prohibition of legal commentary notwithstanding.Footnote 24 He singles out prominent figures in the tradition—figures subsequently called “commentators”—to compare unfavorably with their ancient predecessors: “In place of Sulpitius, Scevola, Paulus, Ulpian, and the other swans barbarously snatched away by your eagle, to put it mildly, we have geese like Bartolo, Baldo, Accursio, Cino, and all the others of the same feather, who do not speak with a Roman but with a barbarous tongue, and lacking certain urbane and civil customs, display rustic and untamed savagery.”Footnote 25 Franciscus Accursius, who had taught in Bologna between 1200 and 1263, was the author of the standard glosses on the Corpus known as the Glossa ordinaria or Magna glossa. The other figures that Valla names were among Accursius's most celebrated heirs: Cinus of Pistoia (ca. 1270–1336); his foremost student, Bartolus of Saxoferrato (ca. 1313–57); and his student in turn, Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400).
Bartolus was recognized as the leading light of this tradition in Valla's lifetime and beyond.Footnote 26 His reputation rested largely upon commentaries on the standard texts of the Corpus, the focus of his teaching career at the University of Perugia, which in the sixteenth century themselves received extensive commentaries and entered university curricula alongside the glosses of Accursius.Footnote 27 In addition, there were his legal opinions (consilia), solicited from law courts and sovereigns across Europe in Bartolus's lifetime, which continued to be collected, studied, imitated, and forged after his death.Footnote 28 His tractati, perhaps the least durable over time, were nevertheless recognized as the first autonomous texts offering legal frameworks to pressing contemporary issues that lacked coherent foundations in the Romano-Byzantine sources.Footnote 29 Their subjects included rivers, Guelfs and Ghibellines, exile, tyrants, reprisals, the government of cities, and insignia and arma.
The De insigniis et armis is the target of Valla's criticisms in his 1433 epistle. Valla accounts for this in the epistle itself with the story of an altercation that he claims transpired between himself and a well-respected jurist in Pavia. The seemingly decisive moment occurs when this anonymous interlocutor asserts the superiority of even “the shortest work of Bartolus” to any work of Cicero's: “Yesterday some big shot among the jurists—if anything great can exist in a science of little value—whose name I do not mention for he would be enraged at me, unless he himself is willing to come forward to admit his faults, had the effrontery to insult me by placing Bartolo before Cicero in doctrine, saying many other unthinking things and, in particular, recklessly affirming that none of the works of Marcus Tullius could be compared even to Bartolo's shortest work, which was the De insigniis et armis.”Footnote 30 Valla records a tense dialogue around this provocation and lays out the reasoning that led to his written response. On the premise that the jurist's affront amounted to a public offense, he describes procuring a copy of the De insigniis et armis and penning his letter that very night, revealing the greatest among the civilian lawyers to be ignorant and “unarmed” in his very tract on insignia and arma.Footnote 31
Since at least Girolamo Mancini's Vita di Lorenzo Valla (Life of Lorenzo Valla, 1891), this scene has influenced the epistle's reception. Mancini reanimated Valla's vivid account and presented the altercation as if it had really taken place on Pavia's streets.Footnote 32 The jurist's “crazy assertion” has subsequently figured as “the occasion that spurned Valla to compose the libellum.”Footnote 33 Regoliosi's introduction to the critical edition makes the important point that the altercatio was a rhetorical component of the composition, which should be considered among the dialogical forms that Valla almost always chose to integrate with his polemics.Footnote 34 Nancy Struever remembers elsewhere that the “specific and often informal human occasion” was a regular feature of the humanists’ invectives, which allowed them to frame skepticism as a “productive practice” of intervention into social life.Footnote 35 Still, the most recent scholarship on Valla's letter upholds the hypothesis that he engaged Bartolus's shortest work by chance, in reaction to external provocation.Footnote 36
In the commentary to her critical edition of Valla's letter, moreover, Regoliosi questions but discounts the significance of the humanist's engagement with the treatise's contents in light of the seemingly broader issues with which he was concerned: “I do not know how it would have been possible, with Valla's a-scientific procedure, to construct a rule of signs [normativa delle insegne] which nevertheless—so it was said—was indispensable. But this is certainly not the problem that Valla poses. He intends rather to highlight the contradictions of a logical and philosophical nature inherent in the practice of law, and to show the shortcomings of the methods that were still accepted by so many.”Footnote 37 Giovanni Rossi distinguishes the “specific assertions” of the De insigniis from the “foundations” of the legal tradition of which Valla was critical, while affirming that “the humanist was himself uninterested in the contents of the tract.”Footnote 38
From another point of view, Valla can be seen to ground his critiques of the De insigniis in the linguistic debates with which he was perennially involved. Objecting to what he calls the tract's “obscurity of speech,” Valla presses his interlocutor to clarify its title: “But, I said, please tell me once again the exact title of the book, so that I might not err, for I did not understand it clearly. … I'm not totally unfamiliar with the meaning of words, but I do not understand what this title means. I do understand the term de armis but not de insigniis.”Footnote 39 The title's problems include a grammatical error (insigniis should be insignibus) and a circumlocution (if arma and insignia refer to the same thing), amounting to a failure on the jurist's part to adequately disclose his subject. These charges explain Valla's next sarcastic remark about the novelty of Bartolus's subject, as well as the unwitting response it elicits from his interlocutor: “This must be a new and unexplored subject, I said, one that has a new title. Yes indeed, he replied, it is a new subject, discovered and fully treated by Bartolo, but it is not an obscure and new title.”Footnote 40
In the humanist debates about how ancient words were to be applied to modern subjects, Valla advocated for Latin neologisms, or new words for new things.Footnote 41 He believed that words and their referents should be bound by clear, ideally univocal, ties. In this case, Bartolus's choice of words should have disclosed whether his subject was ancient or modern. If insignia and arma referred to the same object, the jurist should have avoided both terms. If they did not, he should have made their distinction clear. Valla's target was a convenient example of the shortcomings—linguistic, and thus logical and philosophical as well—of the tradition that he wished to see reformed. It remains to be seen how and why the subject matter of the De insigniis et armis specifically drew the humanist's attention.
BARTOLUS'S SUBJECTS: INSIGNIA, ARMA, SIGNA, AND THE FORTUNES OF AN OBSCURITY
As an exercise of textual criticism, Valla's epistle asks its readers to become readers of the De insigniis et armis. However, this puts moderns in a paradoxical position, since reading the tract at a distance calls for many of the philological skills that the humanists and their heirs generated. It requires, first, establishing a text to read.Footnote 42 As is typical for Bartolus's writings, the De insigniis circulated in a very large number of manuscripts, and the one which Valla himself consulted is unknown.Footnote 43 Since the nineteenth century, editors of the De insigniis have followed different approaches for presenting the tract to a modern public. Some have reproduced early modern printed editions, while others have collated several variant copies, including manuscripts alone in some cases, and both manuscripts and printed editions in others. A critical edition does not yet exist. A second step involves evaluating the meaning and, even more fundamentally, the subject matter of the tract. In this enterprise, several questions—Valla's questions—have proved decisive in its modern reception history: What are insignia and arma? Are these two words synonymous or distinct? Are ancient or modern (i.e., medieval) subjects at stake? The answers have changed, even as the questions have remained stubbornly durable. As the De insigniis is read with the tools of humanist philology, meanwhile, some achievements and consequences of Valla's polemical reading are missed.
There are two dominant interpretations of the subject matter of the De insigniis et armis. According to one tradition, it is primarily about heraldry; it elaborates rules for using and composing coats of arms. This reading is partly supported by an early modern reception history of the tract among heralds throughout Europe, who understood it in this way and/or used it for writing treatises on the images for which they were responsible.Footnote 44 The De insigniis et armis alone, in any case, has been presented as a heraldry treatise in three of its four editions since the nineteenth century. Felix Hauptmann (1856–1934), a Prussian jurist and historian of heraldry, was perhaps the first who edited the text as “the oldest treatment of heraldry,” anomalous in Bartolus's oeuvre for having “always had significance only for heraldists.”Footnote 45 These claims were reiterated in the edition of the tract prepared by Evan John Jones in Medieval Heraldry: Some Fourteenth Century Heraldic Works, and in the 1998 edition prepared by Mario Cignoni.
A different reading of the De insigniis appeared in 1994, with the edition and commentary of legal historians Osvaldo Cavallar, Susanne Degenring, and Julius Kirshner in A Grammar of Signs: Bartolo da Sassoferrato's Tract on Insignia and Coats of Arms. This was based on the greatest number of manuscripts that had hitherto been consulted, twenty-three of the approximately one hundred in existence. The editors tied their ambitious philological enterprise in this respect to new claims about the tract's context, authorship, meaning, and legacy. The central claim was that Bartolus had written not a “heraldry treatise,” but a legal tractatus that “set forth the principles … governing the assumption, protection, and transmission of signs ranging from coats of arms to trademarks.”Footnote 46 The editors emphasized Bartolus's preeminent position within the tradition of civil law and his use of the Digest and the Code in his formulation of arguments.
They also argued that Bartolus had not authored the tract's second half. Whereas the first half poses questions about how insignia, arma, and signa are to be used and transmitted, and by whom, this latter section poses questions about what the 1994 editors called “the material execution of coats of arms”: How should they be arranged on specific material supports, such as banners? What are the relative values of the different colors, and are there principles governing their arrangement for display? How might certain display spaces (i.e., the ground) present legal problems?Footnote 47 These questions, the editors suggested, are “unremittingly alien to juridical discourse.”Footnote 48 Despite the continued references here to the Digest and the Code, the editors characterized this section as a “patchwork of non-legal sources” amounting to “a conventional medieval treatise on optics and colors, if not … a manual for painters.”Footnote 49 An “autonomous heraldry treatise” had been appended onto and mistaken for Bartolus's work, probably by his nephew and successor at the law school of Perugia, Niccola d'Alessandri, who prepared the text for presentation to that university in 1358, shortly after Bartolus's death.Footnote 50 This explained both “the tract's appeal to the heraldists,” they argued, and Valla's disdain for it, since “the target of his entire assault was the second part alone, which the jurist did not compose.”Footnote 51
A Grammar of Signs put Valla at fault, finally, for having failed to recognize the spuriousness of the tract's second half, and for having contributed with his critique to perpetuating the belief that it was authentic.Footnote 52 This was an ironic legacy for the humanist now famed for his textual criticism and for the debunking of a forgery (the Donation of Constantine) above all.Footnote 53 At the same time—and this was a point that Regoliosi would make in her 1997 critical edition—some aspects of Valla's polemic seemed not to have changed.Footnote 54 Above all, he was still a humanist critic of heraldry, or of a heraldry treatise. The treatise in question simply appeared confined now to the second, spurious half of the De insigniis et armis.
This is a crucial point because Valla's purported disdain for heraldry resonates with a long tradition of scholarship affirming the incompatible relationship between humanism and heraldry. Within heraldry studies, the thesis has been a mainstay of the field-defining scholarship of Michel Pastoureau since the 1970s, which has articulated to a broad interdisciplinary audience heraldry's twelfth-century origins, constitutive laws, and historical development.Footnote 55 The latter involved a notable period of decline in the Renaissance, according to Pastoureau, under the influence of new and more flexible forms for visualizing identity such as the portrait medal, impresa, and emblem.Footnote 56 Outside of heraldry studies, Howard R. Bloch's Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages presented heraldry alongside feudal models of kinship and inheritance, genealogical historiography, and etymological grammar as one of the constituent structures of medieval civilization.Footnote 57 For cultural historian Maurice Keen, heraldry's Renaissance decline resulted from the decline of cultural forms associated with chivalry in favor of classical models.Footnote 58 In the Anthropology of Images proposed by Hans Belting, humanism itself appears “inimical to heraldic thinking” for “wresting the concept of the ‘subject’ from … the ordre social of medieval feudal society.”Footnote 59 It is consonant with these perspectives that an attack on the first articulation of heraldry's laws should have come from Lorenzo Valla, one of the most outspoken harbingers of humanist learning and culture.
The identification of heraldry as the target, or one of the targets, of Valla's criticisms in 1433 is nevertheless problematic. It reveals some of the continuities and humanistic assumptions that have undergirded modern editions of the De insigniis et armis and their corresponding modern language translations. In each of the above, Bartolus's subjects—insignia, arma, and signa—have been carefully distinguished from one another. Insignia and arma have been treated as distinct subjects, even though they appear most often as synonyms in the tract. The word arma has been translated as coat of arms, and signa has been rendered with different vernacular words including trademark, watermark, and brand.Footnote 60 This has had the effect of clarifying Bartolus's subjects for modern readers artificially, so as to erase the obscuritas orationis (obscurity of speech) that Valla himself decried. Heraldry has thus appeared as one of several distinct subjects of the De insigniis, even as disagreements have emerged about its relative importance and place in the tract in relation to Bartolus's authorship.
It can be argued from a different perspective that heraldry is quite absent from the tract, since heraldic and other signs are undifferentiated by their names there, and since the historical context of the whole is impossible to pin down in a humanistic sense. This emerges most apparently from the web of legal references that support the tract's arguments, and from the jurist's mode of incorporating these references with his observations of contemporary customs. The tract's very first paragraph illustrates this phenomenon:
On the first point, I say that there are some insignia of rank or office, which anybody holding that rank or office can bear, like the insignia of proconsuls and legates, according to law i of the Digest’s title on the Duties of the Proconsul and Legates, and the law sanctum of Things Subdivided and Qualitatively Analyzed, just as in fact we see the insignia of bishops today; and anyone having that dignity can bear these, according to the above-mentioned laws. This is not permitted to others, however, and indeed bearing them one incurs the charge of fraud, as according to the Digest’s title On Forgery, the law Eos, at the final paragraph. Similarly, I think that those who bear the insignia of the doctor when they are not doctors should be held to the same punishment.Footnote 61
The paragraph references three separate sections of the Digest, none of which are primarily about insignia, but each of which alludes to the topic in connection to specific ranks or offices (two of the three cases use the word insignia itself). The first is a title dedicated to the duties of the Roman office of the proconsul, in which mention is made of his insignia: “A proconsul holds his proconsular insignia wherever he is from the moment he leaves the city. But he only exercises power in that one province which has been assigned to him.”Footnote 62 The second is a passage dedicated to defining the word sanctum: “Sagmina are certain herbs which legates of the people of Rome customarily carry to ward off outrages, just as ambassadors of the Greeks carry the things which are called cerycia [wands or staffs].”Footnote 63 The third reference comes from a title dedicated to the crime of forgery, in which the bearing of illicit insignia—insignia belonging to an office or rank that the person does not in fact hold—appears in a longer list of related crimes.Footnote 64 Interspersed throughout these references, the passage gives the examples of the insignia used in contemporary times by bishops and doctores, which is to say the jurists themselves. The different layers of historical and cultural contexts at play in the passage convey a sense of how and why the civilian jurists’ method—which relied on applying Romano-Byzantine legal sources to contemporary circumstances—produced the obscurities that Valla abhorred.
The existence of multiple layers of historical contexts, in fact, characterizes the treatise's first and second halves. Passages referenced from the Corpus in both sections compare the subjects at hand (insignia, arma, signa) to images of different kinds, and with different names, in various ancient contexts. In the first half, for instance, it is argued that “some insignia are proper to anyone of a particular rank. So we see a certain king, prince, or other potentate has his own arma and insignia; and it is permitted to no one else to bestow them or to depict them on their own belongings, as in the title of the Code: Those Who Affix Real Estate Placards with the Names of the Powerful [tituli potentium] or Who Fraudulently Use Their Names in a Lawsuit.”Footnote 65 In the tract's second half, it is argued that insignia and arma belonging to higher-ranked persons should not be depicted on the ground, with the support of the Code’s similar prohibition for the signum salvatoris, the sign of the cross.Footnote 66 Throughout, sections of the Corpus Iuris that discuss topics different from signs altogether are invoked. In determining the limits of duplicating or sharing insignia and arma, for instance, the tract refers to passages relating to the division of rivers and other public spaces.Footnote 67 Its guidelines for the inheritance of signs within collectivities, including families and partnerships, refer to ancient passages on wills and estates.Footnote 68
Despite the tendencies of modern readers to distinguish Roman insignia, medieval coats of arms, and such proto-modern signs as trademarks and watermarks, finally, the words insignia, arma, and signa frequently appear together and act as synonyms. Arguably, the distinctions between these images were created by some of the methods of reading that Valla and his followers developed as they discovered classical antiquity and the Middle Ages as separate areas of scientific investigation, and distinguished their respective languages, customs, and laws. If the humanists would later appear radically incompatible with heraldry, it was in part because they had discovered the means to understand heraldry as a visual language of a foreign law and culture, specifically that of medieval feudalism.
VALLA AND THE INTEREST IN IMAGES
A handful of surviving contemporary sources describe an event at which the jurists’ outrage toward Valla, following the circulation of his epistle, erupted publicly, causing Valla to leave his university post and the city: this was a ceremony inside Pavia's cathedral, at which graduating law students were awarded the doctoral rank and insignia. Footnote 69 The anecdote tells us that Valla's attendance was intolerable to many of the jurists and students present, and may also suggest why. Besides being authored by civil law's figurehead, the De insigniis deals with a class of images and objects that made manifest the authorities and hierarchies of the social order, including the jurists themselves.
Images were integral to the peninsula's multilayered legal cultures, even after the revival of Roman law asserted “textual methods of social organization and of institutional action” that are still recognizable today.Footnote 70 As Gaetano Salvemini showed in his classic study of knighthood in Florence, La Dignità Cavalleresca Nel Comune di Firenze (The dignity of knighthood in the commune of Florence, 1896), university-trained jurists early on began to appropriate images used by older noble classes as their social status grew.Footnote 71 Buildings in which jurists practiced and transmitted their art to younger generations eventually came to support these images, as is testified, for example, by Padova's studium and by the Archiginnasio, home of Bologna's law school since the sixteenth century and purportedly the largest architectural display of heraldic images still in existence today.Footnote 72 Podestas empowered to execute the law within given jurisdictional boundaries displayed insignia and arma on their persons, private residences, and on the public buildings where they administered justice.Footnote 73 In several civic traditions of the peninsula, insignia and arma were depicted on official procedural records and on statues, both to decorate and to authenticate their contents.Footnote 74
Images were not merely decorations of the law: they also helped to sustain legal authority and secure its transmission. A growing body of scholarship has emphasized this in recent years, much of it inspired by the work of Pierre Legendre. This scholarship shows that images in the Roman legal tradition have served to connect the law's invisible, textual, and institutional structures to the sensory, private, and intimate experiences of subjects, fostering their submission to legal authorities.Footnote 75 At the same time, images have provided openings for critics of the law, and for legal change, both by acting as targets of destruction, modification, and satire, and by allowing new conceptions of legal practices and practitioners to take material form.Footnote 76 This dual potentiality of images with respect to the law helps to account for Valla's double-faced interest in the De insigniis in his 1433 epistle: with its pars destruens degrading the jurists’ authority through these legal guidelines for insignia, arma, and signa; and its pars construens proposing new images of authority in their place.
The former, Valla's critique, is most evident where he animalizes his adversaries. At the letter's opening, he calls the jurists beasts, and then makes an extended comparison between them (geese) and their counterparts (swans) in antiquity.Footnote 77 He alludes to a more elaborate set of binary oppositions between animalitas and humanitas, and barbaritas and latinitas in the letter's body, especially where he comments on the tract's propositions for representing animals on insignia and arma:
He says that the head of a ram and a bull should always face toward the sky, as if they were the signs of the zodiac that have the same name. Although he admits that the lion should always be red, always roaring, always rising, and tearing something apart, he does not provide the lion with prey on which it can display its ferocity. … The horse should always be running, but Bartolo forgets to place a rider on the horse, someone who presses the horse to run. The right leg of the horse precedes, as if wild animals have a certain dignity in their right leg, just as we have with respect to our hands. Aren't these fooleries verging on madness? He who does not observe in practice what he professes and does not know which hand should move first requires from horses the style of orators! Why are you caviling about horses, you ass? Flags, quarters, bands, arms, nails, and hindquarters—aren't those the words of an ignorant ass? Why didn't you include clubs with which we could hit your back and beat your entire body to the point of death?Footnote 78
Classical authorities have been identified as Valla's sources for this critical strategy, above all Virgil and Cicero.Footnote 79 It could be emphasized that Valla's animal motifs engage the legal tract and its subject(s) as well.
Animal imagery is a conspicuous part of the visual culture that the De insigniis describes and proposes to regulate. Near the beginning of the treatise, Bartolus describes an insignia or arma that he received from Emperor Charles IV: a “red lion with two tails on a golden field.”Footnote 80 Animal imagery later converges with the tract's representation of the natural foundations of its own arguments and authority. When the question is posed of how representations taken from “among the things that exist” (“ex aliqua re existente”) should appear as insignia, arma, and signa, it is argued that they should be shown according to their nature: “Having said these things, we look into how signa that refer to a preexisting thing are born on banners. Regarding this I say that art imitates nature as much as it can, whence the sign should be figured according to the nature of the thing and not otherwise, as in the title on Adoptions in the Digest, the law si pater, and the following law sequenti; and in the title On human status, the law non sunt liberi.”Footnote 81 These two passages from the Digest involve other attempts to interpret and imitate the natural order in the domain of the law. The title on adoptions affirms that “adoption may take place as between those persons for whom the natural relationship could in principle hold good.”Footnote 82 This prohibits a situation in which a legal parent would be younger than his child, a situation impossible in nature. The next title discusses when human status might be legally withheld from a newborn child—for example, in some cases of physical abnormality.Footnote 83 Both seemingly oblique legal references support the idea of jurisprudence as an imitation of nature—a foundational claim of the civilian lawyers—as well as the jurisprudential possibility, in the present context, of discerning natural standards by which insignia and arma should be made. The tract articulates these standards, finally, through examples of animal imagery. It argues that the head or face of an animal should be looking toward the staff of the banner on which the animal is portrayed, since it is natural for the face to come before the body.Footnote 84 Animals “should be depicted in their most noble act and in that act in which they show their greatest vigor.”Footnote 85 Wild animals “should be depicted in their most ferocious act,” whereas tame animals should be depicted in their noblest postures.Footnote 86
When Valla describes animal themes and imagery, he not only evokes the classical opposition between human and animal, but also remembers (as foreign to classical models) the jurists’ discourse of natural reason. His descriptions also target the jurists’ authority at the vulnerable juncture where this authority took on concrete visual form, typically in the form of animals. In the image of the animal, Valla finds an opening to convert images of jurisprudential authority into images of derision and shame.
More important to Valla's constructive agenda, and to what I am calling his philology of images, are the images that he posits as challenges to Bartolus's rules. These differ in their style and content from the latter's animal images. Gleaned from everyday life and from classical, mostly Roman, precedent, they also point toward more authentic foundations of authority, in Valla's conception, than jurisprudential reasoning and rules. An example from his life and personal experience is the image of the writing hand:
I had a maternal uncle, Melchior, in every respect praiseworthy, and especially because, after he studied civil law for a few years, he devoted himself totally to the study of rhetoric. … We have to decide how to adorn his tomb. And we decided to affix to the tomb of such an illustrious person signs [signa] to alleviate the grief of his close kin, as is the custom. Enlighten us, Bartolo, as to how we should go about this. It is the right hand with the upper arm in the act of writing, as if he were the offspring of the Scribani clan. In any case, you require that the countenance of the writer should face the staff. I see no other solution than that, on the other side of the tomb, the right side should turn to the left. Yet writing with the left hand is contrary to nature, or should I show you the external instead of the internal part of the hand?Footnote 87
Valla uses this image to show the fortuitous nature of one of the jurist's specific proposals, that figures face toward the staff on which they are displayed. As a visual pun on the Scribani name, meanwhile, the image recalls Valla's provenance from a distinguished Piacentine family whose members had been established in the papal curia for over three generations thanks to their expertise in rhetoric.Footnote 88 Valla's mention of Melchior's conversion from law to rhetoric alludes to this family history, to say nothing of the history of intellectual conversion away from legal study that Petrarch had already inscribed in humanist cultural mythology.Footnote 89 Besides acting as a counter-image to the tract's technical directions, the image of the writing hand visualizes a genealogy of humanistic scholarship to which Valla was heir.
Other images that Valla includes in his epistle come from the textual and material heritage of antiquity with which he was familiar as a scholar. One among this group Valla gleans from the ekphrastic description of Turnus's shield in the Aeneid:
Pay attention now, Bartolo. Raise your eyes a little and be vigilant: your king of Bohemia and Emperor has consulted you! He just recently read in Virgil that on the shield of King Turnus there was “father Inachus pouring water from a well-wrought jar.” Imagine now that the Emperor wishes to bear the effigy of Inachus not on a shield, for he does not use one, but on a banner. Teach me, you who are such a great jurist and counselor of the emperor, how this effigy has to be depicted: Caesar, civil law, geometry, mathematics, and philosophy command that every gesture should be directed toward the staff, and it is not permitted to depart from this law. You will place the god in the inferior and hanging part of the banner, almost flat on his back, pouring water upward from an inclined jar.Footnote 90
Another Virgilian image, the image of Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf, he remembers in order to show that it would be inappropriate for animal figures to face forward relative to the direction of their bodies, as the jurist suggests: “Bartolo, what you forbid me, namely that the face of the animals should look toward the right or left side, seems to me on certain occasions magnificent, for instance … ‘the seated she-wolf with its smooth neck turned backward,’ as the poet says. If the she-wolf is recumbent, how can she be seen to go forward, since she is resting? Nevertheless, her face should be turned toward the direction in which she is being carried. But it is much better for the she-wolf to face the little boys, whom she is stroking one at a time.”Footnote 91 In a similar fashion, Valla uses the four-letter sign of the Roman Republic to point out that letters were ignored by the jurist's discussion of the orientation of figures on banners: “The Roman people have four letters as their sign: S.P.Q.R. Where would you wish them to begin? Will you write them as if moving toward the staff?”Footnote 92 He remembers fantastical imagery from both textual and material sources to flout Bartolus's prescriptions for representing figures according to nature: “I am unable to discern the reason for not giving preference to, and not finding meaning in, those things that depart from the order of nature, things that our forbearers find agreeable, like the centaur, chimera, sphinx, Minotaur, and, as we find in Plautus, ‘the rising sun riding a chariot pulled by a four-horsed team,’ as well as winged people in early coins and reliefs.”Footnote 93
Each of these examples perform what might be called a technical function in Valla's critique, as their very existence calls into doubt one or more of the jurist's prescriptions. The whole subset of classical examples, meanwhile, endows ancient usage with normative status for images. Usually implicit in Valla's text, this sometimes becomes explicit. To contradict Bartolus's point about banners having principal and accidental (reverse) sides, for instance, Valla introduces “an example which is suitable everywhere”: “Roman consuls and emperors carried signs, as one can see from sculptures representing battle scenes, not as if the signs were fluttering or almost turning backward, as we do now, and tossed around by the wind, but in an open and visible manner … just as, in keeping with ancient customs, our clerics do on feast days.”Footnote 94 This suggests the intent on Valla's part not to abolish norms for images entirely, but to reposition their norms on new grounds, those of ancient usage, to which humanist learning held the key. The point has not been stressed because much of Valla's rhetoric in the epistle insists on the freedom of his position with respect to the jurist's apparently overweening laws.Footnote 95 Thus the sarcastic suggestion to “impose a law on the girls of Pavia … that they should not weave garlands except in the manner prescribed by Bartolo. And let's not permit them to weave garlands in accord with their own taste and wishes. For as the satirist says, ‘Each has his own desires, nor do we all pray for the same lives.’”Footnote 96 This rhetoric of freedom can be deceiving, however, if one forgets that freedom for Valla was inextricable from the example and legacy of Rome.
As is well known, the notions of custom and usage were central to his thinking about the Latin language.Footnote 97 The most famous testimony of this is his Elegantiae, which directs readers to examples from ancient texts, instead of the grammarians’ laws. As Lodi Nauta has shown, Valla consistently presented the classics “as an archive of common usage in speaking,” “of common sense in thinking,” and as a bank “of norms to which he held philosophers, like everyone else, accountable.”Footnote 98 Nauta has also discussed how Valla often conflated common or natural linguistic usage with a more selective notion of normative usage from antiquity.Footnote 99 In the 1433 epistle, some of these assumptions about normativity, paradoxical as they were at times, reached beyond the realm of texts, as Valla intimated a philology of images as well.
HUMANIST PHILOLOGIES OF THE IMAGE IN VALLA AND BEYOND
In several projects, beside and subsequent to the epistle, Valla shows interest in images, in their names, and in their relationships with language, history, authority, and nature. One of these is the proposal for philosophical reform that Valla began in his Pavian years (1431–33), first called the Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie (Reploughing of dialectic and philosophy, 1439) and continued elaborating and revising until his death.Footnote 100 Among many other topics, this work develops a critique of the distinction between abstract and concrete terms. As Nauta describes, it involves a critique of “the process of abstraction that leads to abstract entities such as whiteness and blackness, as if a quality such as whiteness can exist apart from a subject or can be invented merely by the mind.”Footnote 101 Valla writes:
But first of all one ought to mock their belief that quality can exist without any subject or at any rate that quality can be separated mentally. They call abstract, words like “whiteness” and “blackness.” I do not remember ever thinking of things like this even when I was burning with a fever. For whoever pictures these things must imagine them united with some subject or substance: either snow, or a cloud, or a wall, or a piece of clothing, if he thinks of whiteness: or again coal, or a crow, or a piece of clothing, or a cave, or night-time, if he is thinking of black. But these people want to imagine man, horse, lion, animal without any individual instance. Not even angels could grasp this with their imaginations.Footnote 102
Valla's criticisms here echo his criticisms of Bartolus's evaluations of the colors and proposals for representing figures naturally in the De insigniis:
Although he admits that the lion should always be red, always roaring, always rising, and tearing something apart, he does not provide the lion with prey on which it can display its ferocity. … The horse should always be running, but Bartolo forgets to place a rider on the horse, someone who presses the horse to run. …Footnote 103
A little later he [Bartolus] says that white is the noblest of colors, black the lowest, and that the remaining colors are good as they approach white and inferior as they approach black. Of all these things, which should I approach first? That he did not recall that there are many varieties of golden color, as if fearing my rebuke? That he placed white above all colors? … What should I say concerning the color black? I don't find it unfavorably compared to white, for both the raven and the swan are sacred to Apollo; and Horace calls attractive someone with black eyes and hair.Footnote 104
The echoes between these projects suggest that Valla's ideas for reform, across the domains of jurisprudence and philosophy, may have been grounded in some visual norms from antiquity, in addition to the linguistic ones that he emphasized more explicitly. Ancient traditions of realism, it seems, respected the existences of things in concrete instances, real or mythical as these might be. In contrast, the language and visual imagination of Valla's adversaries—jurists and philosophers—appeared to him to obfuscate reality, by abstracting colors and figures from particular contexts in time, space, and/or narrative.
Evidence of Valla's philological interests in images surfaces in the projects that he undertook for Alfonso of Aragon as well. His De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione Declamatio (Oration on the forged and falsely believed Donation of Constantine, 1440) took issue with the “standards, banners, and imperial decorations” (“signa atque banna et diversa ornamenta imperialia”) that had supposedly passed from Constantine to Pope Sylvester along with the former's land and power:
We confer on him as well the imperial scepters: What a way to talk! What glamor! What balance! What are those imperial scepters? There is just one scepter, not several. If only the emperor carried a scepter, will the pontiff carry a scepter in his hand? Why shall we not give him a sword, a helmet, and a javelin? And at the same time all standards and banners: What do you understand by standards? Standards are either statues—we often say “standards and panels” for “sculptures and pictures” since the ancients did not paint on walls but panels—or else legionary ensigns, hence standards and matched eagles. … Was Constantine giving Sylvester his statues or his military eagles? What could be more absurd?Footnote 105
The above is just one of several passages in which Valla showed the forger to have been ignorant of the ceremonial images and objects that were appropriate to Constantine's position, as well as the terms that would have designated them in the fourth century. The whole critique reveals his awareness of the embeddedness of things—especially the trappings of power—in social and linguistic realities subject to historical change.Footnote 106
In Valla's Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Araganorum (Deeds of King Ferdinand of Aragon, 1445–46), the fourteenth-century monarch's biography involves courtly ceremonies and crusades that seemingly encouraged Valla to feature banners (vexilla), military signs (signa militaria), and other images quite prominently in his narrative.Footnote 107 Meanwhile, Valla sought to model his language and style on that of the best ancient historiographers, as his famous preface to the Gesta declares.Footnote 108 Words describing the material trappings of power, much like words describing military technology, turned out to be an area of Latinity that revealed gaps between ancient and modern usage. Valla's critics at the Neapolitan court would single out his image descriptions, among other passages, and force him to defend his choices to describe these things in several instances, and also defend his choices of terminology for them.Footnote 109 These were some of the continuities in Valla's philological engagements with images across several of his works, even as each project called for different emphases. But what would these various inquiries amount to, if anything, from the perspective of his legacy?
With regards to Valla's investigations into the words insignia and arma, it can be seen that other humanists pursued the topic further in their antiquarian and philological studies. By the sixteenth century, humanists were producing works dedicated specifically to the decoding and standardization of images as visual languages, or signs. Biondo Flavio's (1392–1463) monumental study of the institutions and customs of ancient Rome, the Roma Triumphans (Rome in triumph, 1459) treats the subject along with military institutions in book 6: “Arma, Varro says, are the things with which we combat the enemy. And Festus says that strictly we call arma weapons which are suspended from the upper arms, that is the shoulders, such as the shield, sword, dagger, knife, and spears with which we engage in battle from a distance. Ulpian the jurist [in the interdict] on armed violence says that arma are all kinds of weapons, that is, even cudgels and stones, and not only swords and spears and javelins, as Caius affirms in De verborum significatione. Aulus Gellius uses the word arma often without distinguishing a staff, heavy javelin, missile, and small sword.”Footnote 110 Biondo himself then distinguishes weapons (arma) from the “signa, insignia, clothing, and military ornaments” that Roman armies used.Footnote 111 He touches on the signa militaria that featured images of eagles, wolves, minotaurs, horses, and “other various animals”; the media that displayed them; and the vestments and ornamenta with which they were typically, and sometimes atypically, paired.Footnote 112
Biondo distinguishes here among arma, insignia, and signa on the grounds of Roman usage in practice and in language, offering a firmer and more systematic correction than Valla had offered to the proper (i.e., ancient) uses of such terms.Footnote 113 Other events in Biondo's career suggest how Valla's conception of the normative status of ancient images had indeed anticipated a broader shift, in favor of the humanists, in the ways that authority over contemporary signs (and contemporary signs of authority) were conceived: for example, the quarrel over the relative prestige of the military and jurisprudential arts, which Biondo was asked to adjudicate at the Council of Mantova (1459). Recorded in the short tract Borsus, sive de Militia et Iurisprudentia (Borso, or on the military and jurisprudence, 1460), his response drew on the Roma Triumphans to compare how these professions and their signs of distinction compared to ancient precedents.Footnote 114 Acting as a humanist legislator of social status and its visual codes, Biondo as antiquarian now embodied a possibility only intimated in the embattled Epistola contra Bartolum.
A later intervention on the subject of insignia and arma comes from Guillaume Budé (1467–1560), a self-described heir to Valla, in his philological commentary to the Digest, the the Annotationes in Quattuor et Viginti Pandectarum Libros (Annotations on twenty-four books of the Pandects, 1508). This is known today for its speculations on how Roman customs had evolved and adapted to new circumstances after the empire's fall, contributing to the emergence of medieval studies in France.Footnote 115 The discussion of signs, appearing in the commentary on the De Origine Iuris, exemplifies these tendencies.Footnote 116 Budé repeats Biondo's findings on the signa militaria of the Romans, then questions the evolution of the Roman practices, as well as the origins of the images used in the present day to express familial identity and distinction. He points out the close connection in Roman culture between gentilitas and the right to possess and publicly display the imagines of ancestors. He posits, as a possible origin for the modern image practices, the Roman practice of arranging clipeatae imagines (ancestors’ shield portraits) in family villas, and of visualizing connections between them with painted lines: “Pedigrees [stemmata] were traced with lines between the painted portraits [imagines pictas]. The archive rooms were kept filled with books of records and with written memorials of official careers. Outside the houses and around the doorways there were images of those mighty spirits fastened together with spoils taken from the enemy, which were not allowed to be taken down, and which were displayed even when the house changed ownership. So much is in Pliny. I believe that insignia gentilia, which are vulgarly called arma, derived from these practices since they too were originally prizes of true virtue and decorations for the accomplishment of great deeds.”Footnote 117
In contrast to Biondo Flavio, who distinguishes insignia from arma as two distinct words designating two distinct classes of objects in antiquity, Budé makes a crucial distinction between the ancient practices and their derivatives in postclassical times. Budé calls the modern images insignia gentilia at the same time gesturing to, and to some extent explaining, their common vernacular names in the present, armi and stemmi, words still used in modern Italian for what in English is now called the coat of arms.Footnote 118 Budé’s philology of images thus fills in an early piece in a history that remains to be fully reconstructed: the history of the appearance of heraldry's nonclassical name, and of its definition as an originally medieval form.Footnote 119
What is apparent is that the findings of Biondo and Budé on these subjects interested their contemporaries and spread beyond their erudite tomes. In a letter from the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Neapolitan humanist, academician, and poet Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458–1530) described several of their findings as common knowledge of the learned:
All good men of letters universally hold as a certainty that these very insegne, vulgarly called arme, by which families are distinguished today are without a doubt modern inventions. One should not deny, however, that the Romans had insegne in their armies, like that of the eagle, which was the principal banner of the Roman troops. They also had the insegna of the wolf and other images, and these belonged to the republic. There existed also insegne that were not perpetually used, but which captains would choose at their own will, as one can discern in the war between Octavio and Marc Anthony. These were similar to the ones we use today as well, and which in the vernacular we call divise and imprese. With regards to the family insegne that today we call arme, everyone of intelligence agrees about this: That the whole matter of these arme was an invention of the French.Footnote 120
The insignia of Roman antiquity, the imprese and divise used by Sannazzaro's contemporaries, and the so-called arme invented by the French are finally—as they are still today—legible here as products of distinct cultural and historical contexts, and as subjects therefore of distinct trajectories of research.Footnote 121
By the middle of the sixteenth century, so-called imprese treatises in the Italian vernacular provided a home for concerted humanistic discussion of the proper names for such images, the distinctions between them, their historical origins and development, and the rules of their composition and use. The history of this tradition has been considered mostly apart from the longer history of humanist philology, its origins traced to the Dialogo dell'Imprese (Dialogue on imprese, 1555) by Paolo Giovio (1483–1552).Footnote 122 Curiously, the three major sections of this text all suggest connections with Valla's 1433 challenge to supplant a juridical with a humanistic law of images: from the historical background that Giovio provides for his subject, beginning with the shields, crests, and ornaments described in classical literature (first and foremost the Aeneid); to his five condizioni, later called leges Iovianae (Giovio's laws), for a perfect impresa; to the anecdotal list of imprese used by illustrious men and humanists of Giovio's day.Footnote 123 In the second and most widely disseminated edition of Giovio's treatise (1556), prepared and enlarged by Italian philologist Girolamo Ruscelli, it is imperative to establish still-clearer distinctions between the impresa and the other kinds of images (and words) for which it was often confused.Footnote 124 As Ruscelli complains, “today we call imprese things that are completely different from them. And for not knowing how to make the distinction that I will outline below, many fool themselves into believing that they know how to make imprese.”Footnote 125
Ruscelli's influential approach resulted in the expansion of his and later treatises to include the proper names, historical origins, and rules of not only the impresa, but also of many other image types. For example, the Ragionamento di Luca Contile Sopra le Proprietà delle Imprese (Discourse of Luca Contile on the properties of imprese, 1574) treats nine “inventions, improperly called imprese” in separate chapters—insegne, armi delle famiglie, divise, livree, foggie, emblemi, riversi delle medaglie, cifre, and hieroglifici—each beginning with a discussion of the subject's proper name.Footnote 126 Contile's chapter on armi delle famiglie begins with Budé’s insight about the uses of the word in postclassical times: “These armi are called insegne in Latin, which is attributed sometimes to a defect in the Latin language and sometimes to their being (which they are) a new invention, such that for these figures that denote nobility a more appropriate name could not be found. We are informed about this by Budé, who affirms that in some centuries after Roman times this invention became customary as a sign of gentility, and to similar figures of much worth and worthy of being discussed fully, justly and not without reason the name arme was applied.”Footnote 127 Influences from the philological tradition are apparent here, and yet they have gone underappreciated in scholarship that describes the imprese treatises as a self-contained genre of image theory with its intellectual roots in poetics and rhetoric exclusively.Footnote 128 Shared imperatives to clarify distinctions between words and between images have been lost among separate accounts of sixteenth-century philology and image theory. The political and social stakes of the imprese treatises have also been neutralized under the assumption that “the grammar of symbolic forms was in the process of being intuited” in the sixteenth century,Footnote 129 rather than purposefully created at this time, as if each bid to establish or correct the grammar of signs did not also involve a vision of social hierarchy and a theory of knowledge.
In the case of the emblem, a subject discussed within many of the impresa treatises, many more connections with philology have been proposed and studied.Footnote 130 Then, as now, the emblem was most often remembered as an invention of the Milanese-born jurist and humanist, Andrea Alciato (1492–1550). Denis L. Drysdall has pointed out that Alciato's miscellany of philological notes arising from his legal studies, the Parergon Iuris (Asides from the law, 1543), includes a commentary on Valla's polemic with Bartolus.Footnote 131 It would be worth investigating the possible relationships between the jurist's emblems, his discussion of the Valla-Bartolus polemic, and his contribution to the 1552 edition of the Notitia Dignitatum (Register of offices), the late antique illustrated manuscript surveying administrative hierarchies and their respective images of distinction in the Eastern and Western Roman Empires.Footnote 132 Still in connection to Valla's polemic, it could be worth returning to the question of the production and use of emblems by humanist lawyers, and eventually by common lawyers in England, as self-consciously new representations of their profession, distinction, and philological practices.Footnote 133 These issues lie beyond the scope of this article, however, which concludes instead with an example of the continued reach of humanist philologies of images in a founding text for the anthropology of art.
In Franz Boas’ Primitive Art, heraldry appears in some prominent passages dedicated to the decorative arts of the indigenous communities of the Pacific Coast of North America. Heraldry helps Boas to describe a “symbolic decoration” characterized by geometric and animal motifs, “governed by rigorous formal principles,” and constitutive of “an integral part of the structure of Northwest coast culture” in which social standing is both expressed and reinforced symbolically:Footnote 134
The fundamental idea underlying the thoughts, feelings, and activities of these tribes is the value of rank which gives title to the use of privileges, most of which find expression in artistic activities or in the use of art forms. Rank and social position bestow the privilege to use certain animal figures as paintings or carvings on the house front, on totem poles, on masks and on the utensils of everyday life. Rank and social position give the right to tell certain tales referring to ancestral exploits; they determine the songs which may be sung. … It is as though the heraldic idea had taken hold of the whole life and had permeated it with the feeling that social standing must be expressed at every step by heraldry which, however, is not confined to space forms alone but extends over literary, musical and dramatic expression.Footnote 135
This is not an anachronism, as Boas is not contesting his contemporaries’ histories of heraldry's unique historical origins and development within the confines of medieval Europe.Footnote 136 However, he is implicitly transferring medieval Europe's visual language of distinction, as it had come to be understood in early modernity, onto the visual culture of his subjects. The analogy seems to rest on the fact that both symbolic languages, medieval and indigenous heraldry, are characterized by marked surfaces instead of depth and by animal and geometrical motifs. Perhaps more importantly, there is a system of formal principles and rules to which both visual systems are perceived to be internally ordered, on the one hand, and externally linked to the orders of a social hierarchy, on the other.
Whitney Davis has pointed out that one of Boas's most profound insights in Primitive Art is the “individuality and subjectivity”—or, in other words, the “unruliness”—of visual culture. As Davis writes, this insight “drives a stake into the heart of any iconology and visual semiology predicated on a model of deciphering (or even ‘reading’) a ‘visual language’ or a visual text with its stable system of visible characters, its signs.”Footnote 137 To the extent that the attempt to decipher the images of his subjects still remained a worthy goal to Boas as an anthropologist, however, he seems to have used medieval heraldry as he inherited it from the humanists: to describe what was ruled, regular, and therefore readable, about the signs of others.
