15thc perception on swallowtail merlons?

[Pierre Dumont Himself]

This is hands down my favorite thread, PDH.

Mine, too
It's a shame Peter & the others aren't working on it anymore. I managed to find one of his frescoes:

Kirche St. Daniel am Kiechelberg, Auer, commissioned in 1444.

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See the first example in the second row on both pages.

 
Which pages?
Unfortunately, I can't read the cursive in your manuscript. I've just started leafing through the crests in Friuli (see, for instance, D'Artegna on page 6):
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The hard part is finding them painted or carved somewhere before 1450, to make sure the merlons are original. The crest of Venzone had swallowtail merlons in the 14th, 15th and 17th centuries and Guelph merlons in the thirteenth and sixteenth. 

Ghibelline merlons show up in heraldry in several ways: on buildings, on walls, as embattled lines.

Indeed. Regarding the Ascoli crest, there are as many opinions on what the building represents as there are researchers. For our purposes, it doesn't really matter, since we cannot be sure there were swallowtail merlons in the city in the early fifteenth century. The researcher who claimd it showed the castle admitted it couldn't have been the contemporary building, which was rebuilt in 1349 and depicted with Guelph merlons in 1484:

By 1595, all the towers in the city had acquired roofs, but now we can see that none of them had swallowtail merlons before then:


The same can be said about Venzone: there is no evidence that any bridge had them. I have also discussed delisting Castell'Arquato with Koen and Marco. The building depicted is most likely a heraldic symbol belonging to an immigrant family, rather than a depiction of the castle. I will post my full comments sometime in the near future.