Types: Stemmi
In Europe, coats of arms have long served as decorative and highly recognizable symbols of patrician families. They appear most frequently in Venice as stone carvings on the external walls of structures owned by wealthy and powerful Venetian nobles. Families like the Contarini, Barbarigo, Cappello, Foscari, Giustinian, Loredan, Marcello, Morosini, and Pisani owned properties all over Venice (their names are still attached to many famous palazzi today), and at least one family crest would be required for each structure; hence, the significant amount of these types of public art objects.
Coats of arms, or stemmi, were not thought of as lasting artistic legacies, and details were often erased if a new family was to take ownership of a building. As such, a number of them are now blank, illegible, or missing entirely. Coats of arms in Venice span the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods, and almost all use the shield as their basic design. Gothic stemmi feature geometric elements like circles, rectangles, and simple shields. Renaissance stemmi became more elaborate, featuring leaf-like decorations, scrolls, and additional flourishes. In keeping with architectural styles, baroque stemmi were even more ornate and complex.
One particular category of stemmi is special because of the way it communicates information about its owner: known as "talking" coats of arms, these stemmi use symbols with a pictorial or phonetic reference to the name of the family being represented. Some of the more obvious examples include the Dolfin family (a dolphin), the Da Ponte family (a bridge), and the Dalle Rose family (roses). The Barbarigo family used a beard on their stemmi, because "barba" is Italian for beard. Even more creatively, the Erizzo family used the letter “E” and a porcupine as their family symbol, as "riccio" is an Italian word for porcupine, or "rizzo" in the Venetian dialect.
Venice contains 1064 stemmi, and the lagoon islands contain 99, together far outnumbering any other category of external sculpture in the Venetian lagoon. Sixteen stemmi have been reported missing in Venice since 2000.
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