Thinking with Heraldry on the Eve of the Reformation: A Drawing by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch

This essay addresses an understudied drawing of a fictional coat of arms by the Swiss artist Niklaus Manuel, called Deutsch, suggesting that it gently subverts heraldic conventions, reflecting contemporaneous concerns about the instability of earthly insignia. By evoking iconographies of Fortuna and the homo viator, the drawing challenges the security of armorial prestige. Manuel – like Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer before him – used the heraldic framework to probe pictorial conventions and to signal their artistic authority as arbiters of ornamental meaning. Produced on the eve of the Reformation, the drawing prefigures the intensified scrutiny of earthly and spiritual sign systems that would occur just a few years later. Art historians have tended to dismiss heraldry as a distinctly medieval and utilitarian category of image, too rule-governed to nourish the imaginations of Renaissance artists. However, Manuel's drawing unlocks a window onto a world in which the heraldic provided a common point of reference for thinking about signification and identity during a period of transformative cultural change.