The Dates of Variously-shaped Shields, with Coincident Dates and ExamplesGrazebrook, George
History
The Dates of Variously-shaped Shields, with Coincident Dates and Examples
Grazebrook, George
Seals (Numismatics) -- Great Britain; Shields
Instances of this style continue to occur down to 1750. We find
them so engraved in Guillim's _Display_, 1724, also in the _English
Baronetage_, 1741, and in some of the engravings in Atkyn's
_Gloucestershire_, 1768.
7.--About the year 1700 appeared for a few years, perhaps we may say
till about 1720, book-plates and dedicatory arms with great hacked
foldings twisted round and looking something like Catherine-wheel
fireworks. Two or four of these occur in book-plates, and sometimes as
many as six, three on each side. We notice that these are conventional
exaggerations of the less pronounced circular foldings and turnings
seen so early as 1677 in some of Hollar's engravings in Sandford's
_Genealogical History_. An engraving at p. 185 in Chauncey's _History
of Hertford_, published in 1700, is especially interesting; it shows
a monument, dated 1662, to Hewytt, in Sawbridgeworth Church, where
the carver has struggled to avoid the long ugly folds ("cucumbers"),
and has introduced very vigorously twisted leaves and hacks which
almost approach those conventional Catherine-wheel fireworks as found
in book-plates of a later date, say from 1700 to 1720. I would point
out that all the armorial engravings in Chauncey's _Herts_ are well
worth studying: the mantlings are hacked all over, and extend about
four-fifths down the shields in endless small and vigorous twists, the
shields themselves being variations of No. 16. Some of the engravings
in Plot's _Natural History of Oxfordshire_, published in 1705,
show the same character, also some of those in Atkyn's _History of
Gloucestershire_, published in 1768.
8.--The rebound from this taste led to small mantlings, kept a good
deal at the top of the shield, even although there were no supporters,
as in a peer's coat of arms, to prevent their downward flow. These
occur also when the bases of the shields in Jacobean book-plates are
finished off with scroll work, trellis, scales, &c., &c.; the upper
part of the shield being ornamented with such smallish mantlings. In
Blomefield's _Norfolk_, 1739, ribbon scrolls extend all round some of
the shields in the place of a mantling; while in what is, I suppose,
a book-plate, Holland impaling Upton, printed in the pedigrees at the
beginning of vol. i, acanthus leaves occur in the base, and break out
occasionally, where convenient, from such scrolls, which are arranged
round the upper part of the shield. Scrolls are strictly architectural
ornaments, and not _vegetables_. These correspond to the French style
called "Bombé," in which curves and undulations of surface in ribbons,
&c., were rolled and tossed about for artistic effect. But with our
English examples of monuments of the sixteenth century in the same
taste (see p. 80), we need not consider that our Jacobean style was
borrowed from the French, although that nation, for a full century,
ending in 1790, guided the artistic tastes of Europe.
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