Identification

Pere Costa i Cases, «Nobiliario catalán», Library of Catalonia, call number Ms. 513 (153/1 and 153/2), manuscript, illustrated, Volume I: 443 pages; Volume II: 153 pages, Barcelona, 1701-1800.

A search process

This manuscript armorial, likely an autograph by Pere Costa i Cases, contains a compilation of lineages from the Crown of Aragon and other kingdoms. It features hand-painted coats of arms in color. Volume I includes an alphabetical index of families starting on folio 218 (modern pencil numbering), noting that the family names are in the Catalan language. The manuscript is a significant piece of 18^th-century heraldry, combining political, religious, and family armorials.

I reviewed it digitally for the first time while performing the search described below.

I was asked to find and document a Roca coat of arms corresponding to «azure, three chess rocks argent», which are canting arms.

Below is a summary of the search process illustrated with images from the «Memòria Digital de Catalunya» available under «Creative Commons» licenses.

I found online that it could refer to «...the Lords of the castle of Roca del Vallès. Year 1038. [P. Costa, ms]...».

The manuscript armorial created by Pere Costa i Cases during the 18^th century is sometimes cited as «[P. Costa, ms]».

As mentioned, this armorial is available online at the «Memòria Digital de Catalunya», MDC, «Library of Catalonia», where I searched for it.

This armorial contains political, religious, and family coats of arms, as seen in the previous image.

This armorial consists of 2 volumes; the first volume has more pages. To find Roca, I started with the first one, searching the Family Index located at the end of the first volume (the second volume has the index at the beginning). One must be careful because the pencil numbering on each page jumps backward upon reaching the index: from the last page with painted shields, numbered 430, to the first page of the index immediately following, numbered 218.

Under the letter R, I found 'Roca del Valles,' which refers to page 33, coat of arms number 69 of this armorial.

There it was, 'de la Roca,' from the castle of Roca del Valles, depicted as an «azure shield, three chess rocks argent».

I checked the following page for more information; there was another shield with three chess rocks, but it was not what I was looking for. I sent all this information to the person who requested it. This type of research can take hours, days, weeks, months, or even years, and most do not reach a conclusion; that is why I try to avoid them, though in this case, it only took a few hours.

Another search on the other side of the Pyrenees

The previous search for the «azure, three chess rocks argent» turned out to be the simplest one. The next search, considerably more complex, concerns a similar coat of arms, but located on the other side of the Pyrenees, «gules, three chess rocks argent», which is shown in the following photograph taken by Jon Sneddon in Saint-Lizier Cathedral, dating from the 11th century, with later additions, which was one of the two former co-cathedrals of the town of Saint-Lizier, in the French commune of the department of Ariège, in the region of Midi-Pyrénées.

First, I attempted to locate this coat of arms, with little confidence, in this same manuscript armorial by Pere Costa i Cases and, as expected, I found nothing.

Second, I attempted the search in the manuscript [Vincent, MS; 1285] and the closest match I found was the «gules, tres roques de armiños» ~ «Gules, three chess rooks ermine», which corresponds to Simón FitzSimon, as indicated in [Vincent, MS; 1285; coat of arms number 254]. The only possibility that this might be the same coat of arms is that the sable tails of the ermines may have been erased over the passage of time.

For this reason, I decided to repeat the search in [Rietstap, J. B.; 1861], where I found the following possibilities:

• Aux: «d'azur, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent».
• Bilhard: «de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent, 2 et 1, acc. en chef d'un lambel».
• Frescobaldi: «de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent, au chef d'or».
• Lembeke (van): «de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent, à la bande d'azur, brochant sur le tout».
• Pareil d'Esperuc: «écartelé: aux 1 et 4, de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent; aux 2 et 3, d'azur, à trois fasces d'or».
• Roche-Macé (de la): «de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent».
• Roque-Toirac (de la): «de gueules, à trois rocs d'échiquier d'argent».

Of these, the last two are the most promising, since in the literal text of [Rietstap, J. B.; 1861] they are described in the following manner; note how the region of origin is specified immediately after the family name:

• «Roche-Macé (de la) — Forez. De gu. à trois rocs d’échiquier d’arg.» in [Rietstap, J. B.; 1861; Tomo II, página 585, columna 2^a].
• «Roque-Toirac (de la) — Quercy. De gu. à trois rocs d’échiquier d’arg.» in [Rietstap, J. B.; 1861; Tomo II, página 603, columna 1^a].

The historical region of Quercy and the town of Saint-Lizier are approximately 200 kilometres apart, which is significantly shorter than the distance between Forez and Saint-Lizier, which is about 400 kilometres.

Therefore, the identification of the «gules, three chess rocks argent» would correspond to the de la Roque-Toirac family, which held the title of «seigneur de Puechmouriez et de Larroque-Toirac», and it could therefore reasonably be attributed to this lineage.

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Bibliographical reference of century XVIII.

Classification: Manuscript, Armorial roll, Castilian language and In color.

Author: Costa i Cases, Pere.

Bibliographic reference mentioned in the following articles:

• Balaguer, municipality of
• Ermengol IX of Urgell

External resources:

• Library of Catalonia, Volume I.
• Library of Catalonia, Volume II.

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Categories: Identification, Bibliography, Manuscript, Armorial roll, Castilian language, In color and Century XVIII.

External resources:

• Library of Catalonia, Volume I.
• Library of Catalonia, Volume II.

F. S. Stych, University of Sheffield, «The Flow Chart Method and Heraldic Enquiries» RQ, volume 6, number 4, pages 169-174, published by American Library Association, Chicago, summer of 1967.

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This article describes, using a flowchart, a method to identify the holder of a coat of arms. This method is applicable to the armories of the United Kingdom, as it follows their heraldic norms and most important sources. One of the target readers of the article are librarians who, finding coats of arms in books, plates, ex libris, etc., need to classify them.

The most notable aspect of the article is the 1967 flowchart, which is shown in the image above. This image has been extracted, cleaned, and enhanced from the original diagram contained at the end of the article. Note that some functions appear repeated within the scheme, such as, «Check families listed in Anson, etc. in Burke's General Armory. Arms found?» which, in turn, is represented with a task rectangle, when it really is a rectangle containing a question, a bifurcation, which should be a diamond «Arms found?», that is, it has been represented by a rectangle what should have been represented by a rectangle and a diamond. This same issue occurs in other processes and is probably due to not complicating the flowchart further.

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Bibliographical reference of century XVIII.

Classification: English language.

Author: Stych, F. S..

An antiquarian, writing from Rostov-on-Don, sent me this image asking about the coat of arms with the tortoise.

The coat of arms with the tortoise is that of the city of Bugia, or Bujía in Spanish, or Bougie in French. It is a city in Algeria with a port on the Mediterranean. Bugia was conquered by the Crown of Castile in 1510 and remained under its rule until 1555. Therefore, Bugia belonged to Charles I of Spain and V of the Holy Roman Empire (1500–1558), and in some books and documents concerning the territories of Charles V the coat of arms of Bugia is included, whose blazon in English is «Gules, a turtle fesswise Or», and in Castilian, «escudo de gules, una tortuga puesta en faja de oro». For its identification I relied on [Sánchez Badiola, J. J.; 2010; pages 102 and 103].

In my humble opinion, I believe that in this illustration the city of Bugia is given greater importance than it actually had, especially when compared with the rest of the coats of arms represented in it, for example, León, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Minorca, Sardinia or Granada. It is possible that the city of Bugia was included because it was an African possession.

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Categories: Identification, Gules, One, Turtle, Fesswise and Or.

There are identification processes that take years or months, and others in which, almost immediately, the elements fall into place. In this specific case, the identification was surprisingly rapid, largely thanks to the exceptional quality of the photographic material.

When Dr. Germán Corcho Sánchez consulted me about the small coats of arms that appear repeatedly on the image of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the Cathedral of Plasencia, a work from the second half of the thirteenth century, covered with gilded silver, the visual documentation he provided proved decisive. His photographs, of extraordinary sharpness and detail, made it possible to clearly observe shields barely a centimetre and a half wide, punched and retouched with repoussé engraving tools.

Two of the shields raised no doubts for anyone in Plasencia: the castle of Castile and the lion of León. The third had been attributed either to Plasencia or to Segovia, the latter, I understand, because the shield may appear to depict the arches of an aqueduct. And it was this one, the third, about which Dr. Germán Corcho Sánchez was asking me.

My proposal was to interpret it as a vair fur, and in this case, that of the Monroy vair, whose ancestral seat is located in the municipality of Monroy.

My reasoning was that the arms of Castile functioned as the common element linking the quartered arms of Castile and León and the quartered arms of Castile and the Monroy vair, hence the sequence visible in the photographs: vair, castle, lion, vair, Castile, León,... as shown in the following visual composition, in which I combine the arms of Castile and León and those of the Monroy lineage with the excellent photographs by Dr. Germán Corcho Sánchez of the Virgin of the Sagrario of Plasencia.

On the other hand, the influence of the Monroy in Plasencia was such that the presence of their coat of arms on the Virgin’s mantle is coherent and perfectly contextualisable within medieval Plasencia. But sometimes I think that the speed with which the pieces fell into place may not be due solely to that, but rather to the fact that, as a child, from a pastureland near the Tagus, the silhouette of the castle of Belvís de Monroy formed a habitual part of my horizon.

I would like to expressly thank Dr. Germán Corcho for his generosity in citing my interpretation on his page dedicated to the Virgin of the Sagrario of Plasencia on his website dedicated to the coat of arms of Plasencia.

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Categories: Identification, Collage, Photographic and Vair ancient.

This portrait, attributed by the seller to Frans Pourbus the Younger, was described on the market as that of a Venetian lady holding a «Venetian Lace Fan» and was said to come from a private collection in Florence, Italy. More precisely, its sales title was «Portrait of a Lady with a Venetian Lace Fan c.1595, Remarkable condition 1597».

From a heraldic point of view, the work presents, as a significant element, a coat of arms of oval shape painted on the column accompanying the figure. Oval forms are often associated with the shields of married women; if this late-sixteenth-century shield originated, for example, in England, one could be more confident that there is a relationship between the oval shape of the shield and the lady depicted. Originating in Italy, and more specifically in Venice, this oval shape may have been chosen either because the sitter was a woman or simply as a matter of fashion, since in that period and region oval shields can also be found in ecclesiastical contexts and used by men, the oval then being regarded as a form more architectural and artistic than combative.

I became aware of this painting because I was asked by a university whether I could identify the coat of arms on the column. The identification of coats of arms in historical painting is a slow, uncertain task and, in most cases, an unproductive one. It may require hours, days, weeks or even years, and often does not lead to definitive results. For this reason, I generally try to avoid this type of research.

In this particular case, I was unable to identify it. However, coats of arms, once seen, remain in visual memory; that is precisely what they are designed to do. Twenty months later, while casually reviewing a series of heraldic records published by the Italian heraldist, «Vittorio|Gifra», one of them caught my attention at an unconscious level. I continued moving through the series, but an unmistakable sense arose that something relevant had been overlooked, which led me to go back and examine the entry again with care. At that moment, the lady with the Venetian fan and the coat of arms painted on the column of the portrait immediately came to mind.

The consulted entry stated verbatim: «Stemma famiglia #VOGANZI. @voganzi Arma: d’azzurro, a due tibie in decusse al naturale, accantonate da quattro gigli d’oro. A.S.Mi. Reg. 0002: stemmario Marco Cremosano - 1673; [...] et anco di diverse Famiglie d’Italia, Vol. II°, p. n°333, posizione, 3^ fila e 3° stemma da sx a dx. [Cfr.: Archinto: «de #VOGANZA de Venetia» (I 13 V a)]. Vittorio Gifra. Lun01-12-2025».

Indeed, it had been found: the coat of arms on the column belongs to the Voganzi family of Venice, whose arms are, in Italian «d’azzurro, a due tibie in decusse al naturale, accantonate da quattro gigli d’oro» ~ in English «Azure, two tibiae proper in saltire, between four fleurs de lis Or» ~ in Castilian «escudo de azur, dos tibias al natural en sotuer, cantonadas de cuatro flores de lis de oro».

I then proceeded to document the finding and inform the interested parties.

In the Archinto, the form «Voganza» appears, referring to a specific individual or to the nominal origin of the lineage, in the singular; for example, «una dama de la casa Voganza». By contrast, in the stemmario by Marco Cremosano the form «Voganzi» is recorded, which corresponds to the plural commonly used to designate the collective body of members of the Voganza family. Taking into account that only about 70 years elapsed between the portrait (1597) and the stemmario (1673), it is plausible that at the time the painting was made the surname could already appear as «Voganzi» or in a very similar form. Although surnames do evolve over time, the interval considered is not one of centuries, but of 7 decades.

My most important doubt in this identification concerns the colour of the field; when I first saw it, I hesitated between sable and azure. It seemed too light to be sable, I thought; it could be azure, but it is not very azure, so in my notes I left it as: «either sable or azure».

When I depict elements in saltire, I usually give precedence to the bend over the bend sinister, so my natural inclination would be to place the tibia bendwise above the tibia in bend sinisterwise. In this case, however, I have placed the tibia bend sinisterwise above, in order to remain consistent with the coat of arms on the column. In any event, this is merely an artistic detail, with no relevance from the standpoint of heraldic description, which is the same in both cases.

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Categories: Identification, Interpreted, Watercolor, Outlined in sable, Illuminated, Without divisions, Azure, Two, Tibia, Proper, In saltire, Cantoned, Four, Fleur de lis and Or.