Myth-Making in the Arms of the Arte della Lana

On Heraldica Nova Anna Pomierny Wąsińska has previously shown how heraldic imagery in Florence could operate as a form of political visual language. Discussing the abstract portrayal of Florence painted by Jacopo di Cione in the 1360s on the main vault of the Palazzo dell’Arte dei Giudici e Notai, she interprets this heraldic diagram as a “visual political treatise” that legitimised the hierarchy of communities and the city’s political system. Building on this perspective, the present article shifts the focus from a heraldic political diagram of Florence to the arms of a single guild, the Arte della Lana. To do so, it uses Roland Barthes’ concepts of denotation, connotation, and myth as a framework for asking how these arms naturalized institutional legitimacy.¹

Figure 1. Main vault of the meeting and judiciary hall of the Palace of the Judges’ and Notaries’ Guild, Florence. Photo by Sailko, “Palazzo dell’arte dei giudici e notai, rappresentazione araldica di Firenze 06,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A Barthesian Framework: Denotation, Connotation, and Myth

Roland Barthes was one of the central figures of twentieth-century semiotics. In his Mythologies, he examined how visual and cultural signs do not only communicate literal meanings, but can also make historically produced meanings appear natural. His concepts of denotation, connotation, and myth are useful here not because they determine the historical meaning of each heraldic element, but because they offer a way to examine how such meanings may work together as a legitimizing system.

This article uses Barthes’ model as a test. Can a model developed for modern cultural signs also help us understand how a late medieval Florentine coat of arms could naturalize institutional authority? This approach does not replace iconographic, heraldic, or historical analysis. On the contrary, the meanings of the lamb, the cross-bearing banner, the halo, and the blue field must first be examined in the contexts of Christian iconography, Florentine guild history, and heraldic convention. Barthes becomes useful only after this historical grounding, as a way to ask whether these elements simply identify the Arte della Lana or whether they also present the guild’s economic and civic authority as morally legitimate or even self-evident.

A useful example of this process can be found in Barthes’ essay The Romans in Films. In his reading of Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, Barthes discusses how the fringes placed on the actors’ foreheads function as visual signs of “Romanness”. At the level of denotation, they are simply a hairstyle. At the level of connotation, however, they become a recognizable code through which the spectator understands the characters as Roman. What matters here is not historical accuracy itself, but the production of a convincing sense of historical authenticity.²

Denotation refers to what is immediately visible in the arms: the lamb, the halo, the cross-bearing banner, and the blue field. Connotation concerns the religious, economic, and institutional associations produced by these elements. Myth, in the Barthesian sense, does not mean a false story, but a process through which historically constructed meanings come to appear natural, necessary, and legitimate. The question, then, is if and how the guild’s coat of arms presents the Arte della Lana’s authority as part of the civic and Christian order of Florence.

The Arte della Lana

The Arte della Lana, whose activities were based on wool production, trade, and manufacture, held a position of great power and prestige in medieval and early modern Florence. It was one of the principal sources of the city’s wealth. Its institutional position also placed the guild within Florence’s Guelf civic culture, where allegiance to the papal cause was closely connected to public authority and legitimacy. In his Florentine Histories, Niccolò Machiavelli states that the Arte della Lana was the guild with the largest number of workers, supporting a considerable part of the population. Wool processing had existed in Florence for a long time, but in the thirteenth century it developed into a more organized and large-scale form of manufacture. During this period, monks of the Humiliati order, who were specialized in wool production, came to the city from Lombardy. They settled in the area now known as Borgognissanti, which at that time lay outside the city walls, and began to produce high-quality fabrics using new techniques.³

The specific coat of arms discussed here is a painted stone relief of the Arte della Lana’s arms, attributed to a Florentine workshop and dated c. 1398–1414. It is located in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, on the keystone of an arch.⁴ The relief depicts the Agnus Dei on a blue field, holding a banner, and includes additional heraldic elements in the upper part of the shield. As an object displayed within one of Florence’s most important religious and civic buildings, it provides a useful example for examining how the Arte della Lana presented its corporate identity at the turn of the fifteenth century.   

Figure 2. Rilievo Stemma dell’Arte della Lana, Florentine workshop, post 1398–ante 1414, painted stone relief, Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, keystone of an arch. Image: BAMSphoto / © Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Catalogo unico dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, no. 0900289716; cropped by the author.

A Semiotic Perspective

Denotation

At the level of denotation, the relief shows a white lamb on a blue field. Behind the lamb’s head there is a cross-shaped halo, and the lamb carries a banner surmounted by a cross. A red cross also appears on the banner itself. In the upper part of the shield, a red label and golden fleurs-de-lys are visible. These are the visible elements of the image before any broader religious, economic, or political interpretation is introduced.

This first level of reading is important because it prevents the analysis from moving too quickly into symbolic interpretation. At this stage, the relief is treated as a visual arrangement rather than as an immediate statement about wool, Christianity, , or institutional legitimacy. These meanings emerge only at the next level, when the visible elements are considered within the contexts of Christian imagery, Florentine guild identity, and heraldic convention.

Connotation

At the level of connotation, the lamb first refers to wool itself, the raw material on which the wealth and identity of the Arte della Lana depended. In this sense, the animal functions as a direct reminder of the guild’s economic activity: wool production, trade, and manufacture. Yet the lamb is not only an economic sign. The halo around its head makes the Christological reading explicit, identifying it with the Agnus Dei, the “Lamb of God”, a title rooted in the Gospel of John, where John the Baptist identifies Christ as the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.((John 1:29.)) In Christian iconography, the lamb is one of the established symbols of Christ, especially in relation to sacrifice and redemption.⁵ The emblem therefore produces a double connotation: it links the guild to the material basis of its power, while also elevating that identity through a sacred Christological image.

In this sense, the arms of the Arte della Lana present the activity of the guild not simply as production or trade, but as a morally and religiously legitimate form of corporate identity. The guild is represented not only as an institution involved in wool production and commerce, but as a corporate body whose wealth and authority could be understood as serving the civic and Christian order of Florence. This was not only a symbolic claim: from 1331 onward, the Arte della Lana exercised control over the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the institution responsible for the construction and administration of the cathedral.⁶

The banner, on the other hand, should not be understood only as a devotional attribute of the Agnus Dei. In Florence, the gonfalone had a strong civic and collective function. In the political culture shaped by the Primo Popolo, the first government of Florence’s organized popolo between 1250 and 1260, the city’s armed neighbourhood companies possessed distinctive standards, which served as signs of neighbourhood identity and solidarity. Their symbolic force was so strong that the territorial units themselves came to be known metonymically as gonfaloni.⁷ This civic dimension is especially relevant because the banner carried by the Agnus Dei displays the red cross on a white field, corresponding to the arms of the Florentine people. As Alessandro Savorelli notes in his discussion of the Florentine “Bossolo”, the earliest heraldic displays of the commune often presented the two principal arms of the city: the fleur-de-lis of Florence and the red cross on argent of the Popolo, understood as the social and political organization of the non-noble classes ruling the commune.⁸ This does not mean that the banner of the Arte della Lana reproduced a specific neighbourhood standard,

The red label and golden fleurs-de-lys in the upper part of the shield recall the visual vocabulary of the capo d’Angiò. In Italian civic heraldry, this chief is described as azure, with a red label and three golden fleurs-de-lys, and is associated with the Angevin dynasty and, traditionally, with loyalty to the Guelf cause.⁹ This association is particularly relevant in the Florentine context, where Guelf identity could function not only as a factional affiliation, but also as a marker of political reliability and civic legitimacy. The importance of this identity within the mechanisms of government is suggested by the use of a special Borsellino, or selection bag, from which half of the priors assigned to the Arti Maggiori could be selected among “true Guelf guildsmen” considered loyal to the ruling group.¹⁰ Therefore, the red label and golden fleurs-de-lys in the Arte della Lana relief should not be read as mere decorative additions. Rather, they place the guild’s emblem within an Angevin-Guelf visual language and connect the corporate identity of the Arte della Lana to the broader political order of late medieval Florence.

The blue field, however, should be approached with caution. Since it functions as the field tincture of a coat of arms, it cannot be interpreted as carrying a fixed symbolic meaning by itself. Its significance is rather relational: it frames the Agnus Dei and participates in the visual context through which the lamb is read as both a guild emblem and a Christological image. Pastoureau’s discussion of blue is useful here not as direct proof that azure always had a specific heraldic meaning, but as broader historical context. As he has shown, from the twelfth century onward the symbolic status of blue changed profoundly, as it gradually acquired associations of prestige and sanctity, especially through its growing use in representations of the Virgin Mary.¹¹ In this sense, the blue field does not determine the meaning of the arms on its own; rather, it supports the sacred and institutional connotations already produced by the Agnus Dei.

Myth

At the level of myth, these connotative layers are brought together and can be understood as producing a naturalizing effect. This does not mean that every viewer necessarily read all these meanings consciously, read them in the same way, or understood the image as having one single fixed message. Rather, the point is that historically grounded elements of the arms work together in a coherent visual system. The lamb links the guild to wool, the material basis of its wealth, while the halo and the Agnus Dei association elevate this economic identity into a sacred register. The red-cross banner links the Christological image to the civic-political visual language of the Florentine Popolo, in which arms, banners, and gonfaloni marked collective bodies. The red label and golden fleurs-de-lys connect the guild’s emblem to an Angevin-Guelf language of political legitimacy, while the blue field supports the sacred and institutional atmosphere of the image.

In this way, the arms do more than identify the Arte della Lana. They present the guild’s economic activity, religious belonging, civic service, and political reliability as if they naturally belonged together. Although the Arte della Lana was a powerful institution with material and political interests, the coat of arms allows this power to appear as part of the Christian and civic order of Florence. In Barthes’ terms, the historical construction of authority is not erased, but visually transformed into something that appears natural, necessary, and morally legitimate.

Conclusion

This short analysis suggests that the arms of the Arte della Lana can be read as more than a mark of identification. In this specific relief, the lamb, halo, banner, blue field, and Angevin-Guelf elements work together to connect the guild’s economic identity with religious, civic, and political legitimacy. The test of Barthes’ model is not meant to suggest that the same method can be applied to every coat of arms in the same way. Some arms may function primarily as signs of identification, lineage, or territorial claim, and their mythic dimension would require a different kind of evidence. The arms associated with the Plantagenet kings, for example, could certainly be discussed in relation to kingship and royal authority, but it is not self-evident that Barthes’ model would explain them in the same way as it does a guild emblem placed within the civic and religious space of Florence. In the case of the Arte della Lana relief, the model becomes useful because the heraldic sign brings together economic activity, Christian iconography, civic service, and Guelf political language within a specific historical setting. Barthes’ framework should therefore be understood not as a universal key to heraldry, but as a tool that may work well when it is supported by heraldic, iconographic, and historical evidence.

1. Anna Pomierny Wąsińska, “Florence and its Signs: A Late Mediaeval Diagram of the City,” Heraldica Nova, September 14, 2016, https://doi.org/10.58079/phzc. [↩]
2. Roland Barthes, “Sinemada Romalılar” in Çağdaş Söylenler, 2014, p. 23. [↩]
3. Luciano Artusi, Firenze araldica: Il linguaggio dei simboli convenzionali che blasonarono gli stemmi civici, 2006, p. 131. [↩]
4. Catalogo unico dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, “Rilievo Stemma dell’Arte della Lana,” no. 0900289716. [↩]
5. George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 19. [↩]
6. Caroline King, “The Duomo,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, April 4, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-Duomo. [↩]
7. John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 67. [↩]
8. Alessandro Savorelli, “The Arms of the Florentine Republic in the ‘Bossolo’ (End XIV s.): An Ideal Self-Representation of the Town,” Heraldica Nova, October 12, 2016, https://doi.org/10.58079/phzg. [↩]
9. Massimo Ghirardi, ed., “Introduzione all’Araldica Civica,” Araldica Civica, n.d., pp. 6–7. [↩]
10. Brown University, “Historical Overview,” The Tratte of Office Holders 1282–1532, Florentine Renaissance Resources. [↩]
11. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, 2017, pp. 49–54. [↩]

Tunahan Karaduman

Tunahan Karaduman, M.A. student in Italian Studies at Istanbul University.

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