Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/mjrl3ux5k9
On the Coats-of-Arms in the Prayer Books Printed in Venice in 1518 by Christopher Frankapan and His Wife Apolonia Lang and in Padova in 1560 by Katharine Frankapan, the wife of Nicholas IV of Zrin (the Hero of Szigetvár)
Ivan Jurković
orcid.org/0000-0001-6864-6658
; Department of Humanities, University of Juraj Dobrila in Pula, Pula, Croatia
Abstract
During his captivity in Venice, Count Christopher (Krsto) Frankapan, together with his wife Apolonia Lang and in cooperation with a monk, James (Jacob) Wyg, prepared and gave to print in 1518 the so-called German-Roman Breviary (Petbuch die syben Zeit van Latein zu Deutsch gemacht) containing family coats-of-arms of the Frankapani and the Langs. Christopher’s coat-of-arms is quartered, and Apolonia’s split. About forty years later, Katharine Frankapan, in cooperation with her confessor Nicholas Dešić prepared prayer book Hortulus Animae (Raj duše), in which was printed a coat-of-arms identical to the one of Count Christopher in his German-Roman Breviary. During the restoration and conservation works in the church of the Nativity of Virgin in Svetice near Ozalj in the 1990s, were uncovered frescoes painted around 1541 and containing depictions of three coats-of-arms identical to those in the aforementioned prayer books. Even though the branch of the Frankapani of Modruš and Ozalj died out with the death of Stephen III (1577), its coats-of-arms continued to be painted in German heraldic collections by anonymous authors still at the very end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth century. Scholars dealing with heraldry, history, linguistics and history of art dealing with the meaning of the lower fields of the quartered coat-of-arms of the Frankopani did not succeed in solving the problem, because they did not take into consideration heraldic genealogy of the Modruš and Ozalj branch. Creation and usage of that coat-of-arms in the sixteenth century did not represent only a new step forward in the development of the heraldry of the Frankapani of Modruš and Ozalj, but provides answers also to the questions of perception of power of the members of the family and their symbolic communication within the circles of European politics and courts, which alarms historians on the importance of visual sources for understanding Croatian history of the medieval and early modern period.
Keywords
the Frankapani of Modruš and Ozalj; heraldry; visual sources; symbolic communication; (self)promotion; the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
Hrčak ID:
195439
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2017.
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