Flag Finials

[-JKP-]

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I meant to find out how broad is the region where they appear in 15th century. Are they found in Spain or Itally or is it more of a Northern thing in the 15th century.

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Ellie, I was interested in that question too and collected a lot of pictures of old "maps" (drawings of cities) from around that time period and, as far as I can tell so far, other than the few examples in the Greek islands and a very few east of Venice, they tend to disappear once you cross into what was central Lombardy at the time.

So the saddlebacks with flag finials were generally a French, Swiss, German convention and the Ghibelline merlons (which were political at the time) were a southern German/Lombardy/west Bohemian architectural political statement.



These days, swallowtail merlons are an architectural decoration that can be found almost anywhere, but in the 15th century, they were significant localized landmarks and, on a map, could have been used to represent Lombardic/Ghibelline (now northern Italy) possessions, just as the saddelback roofs with flag-finials might be used to represent the Frankish/Gallic/Germanic lands. Since the Holy Roman Empire and Lombardy used to stretch along the coast into the Catalan region, there were a few there, as well, but not as many, just as there were not as many east of Venice (just a few).


The Powder Tower in Prague has the characteristic saddleback and the gateway portal below (a detail that can be seen in some of the VMS rosette-page towers as well), but the finials do not have the flags. When you travel west of Prague into Bavaria, however, the flags become more numerous and extend past the Alsatian area into France, then they peter out again as one goes south.


My research was far from complete and I'm sure there's more that can be discovered and it might be important because...

...it's possible that the saddlebacks on the rosettes page are specific gateways to certain cities that might have been recognizable to a medieval traveler (just as the "tower in the hole" may have been a real place, known to people at the time), but many 15th-century landmarks were destroyed in wars or remodeled into different styles, so finding these exact buildings may not be possible.

It occurred to me that maybe the "tower in the hole" was a symbolic way of representing the leaning tower of Pisa, which was built in the 12th century and was already sinking into the ground soon after they started building it. If someone made a trip to Rome, Naples, or Salerno from the northern areas, they would probably pass through Florence or Pisa. If it is the tower of Pisa, then the eye-shaped mountain could be the Colliseum in Rome (or symbolic of the hills of Rome) or... if the journey was a longer one (to Naples or Salerno medical schools), the eye-shaped mountain could be the volcanic areas around Naples.


I'm still not 100% sure the rosettes page is a map, but it has always felt like a map to me, and the little details like the merlons and saddlebacks have always seemed like landmarks. Whether they can be specifically identified, I don't know, but it's a pretty interesting line of inquiry.