Directed study
Friday, January 07, 2005
Overview of Tinctures/ Rule of Color-on-Color
The art of heraldry dictates the standards and principles governing the use of colours in the world of the knights. Heraldry stipulates the form, the proportions and the tinctures in a knight's coat of arms, with a fundamental difference being drawn between the enamels (which can here generally be regarded as the primary colours) and all other colours (the secondary colours, therefore), which are non-enamels.
With regard to the primary colours: interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the enamels — the term most probably relates to the physical quality of their surface — were understood to be not only the actual colours of red, blue, green and black (the latter being worn by knights as a sign of mourning) but also metals (gold or yellow, and silver or white) and furs (ermine, reversed ermine, sable and reversed sable, squirrel). Purple or violet were regarded both as colours and metals (referred to in the following as colour-metals).
The rules of composition for the basic form of coats of arms and banners were that tinctures and metals must alternate, so that one tincture is never placed next to another, nor a metal next to a metal.
With regard to the primary colours: interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the enamels — the term most probably relates to the physical quality of their surface — were understood to be not only the actual colours of red, blue, green and black (the latter being worn by knights as a sign of mourning) but also metals (gold or yellow, and silver or white) and furs (ermine, reversed ermine, sable and reversed sable, squirrel). Purple or violet were regarded both as colours and metals (referred to in the following as colour-metals).
The rules of composition for the basic form of coats of arms and banners were that tinctures and metals must alternate, so that one tincture is never placed next to another, nor a metal next to a metal.
