Post Your Granted, Assumed or Desired Arms

[SlackerDrummer]

The idea that colours are allegorical and imbued with symbolic meaning reaches back well before heraldry became common across Europe (or the Russian film maker Eisenstein wrote extensively on colour in the 1940s). The concept popped up from time to time, and most students of heraldry and armoury are aware of Richard Robinson, who in 1583, came up with the following attributes of tinctures woven into a poem based on the Arthurian romance Le Devise des Armes de Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, which was written about 1546; here's a sample:

OR signifies the four virtues of nobleness, good will,vigour, and magnanimity;
ARGENT signifies the five virtues of humility, beauty, putiry, clarity, and innocence;
GULES signifies valiance;
AZURE signifies renown and beauty;
SABLE signifies mourning and sorrow;
VERT (sinople in the poem) signifies honour, love, and courtesy;
PURPURE signifies moderation and the virtues of liberality, abundance, and richness;

Precious stones were also used to denote tinctures for blazon in the 15th and 16th centuries; as far as I am aware it was last used by the College of Arms (quite appropriately in my opinion) to blazon a grant of arms to the Gemmological Association of Great Britain in 1967.

MOR suggested reading, in one of my threads, The symbolisms of heraldry: or, A treatise on the meanings and derivations of armorial bearings by W. CECIL WADE, which I founnd over at Internet Archive.

Which, not coincidentally, gives completely different symbolism to the colors than MoR himself gave just one post earlier.