Fig. 173.—Plate prepared for Champlevé Enamel.
The design, must, from the nature of the work, be kept very simple without too much subtlety of line that might be lost in the cutting, and the laying of the enamel will be facilitated if the angles of small spaces are not made too pointed. The principal qualities of form will consist in good distribution and well-balanced masses rather than in expression of detail. The outlines of charges which are in colour on metal, or vice versa, are formed by the edges of the sunk spaces and such further definition that maybe required, such as the marking of the junction of the further legs with a lion’s body, is effected with a line of the ground colour laid in a groove cut for the purpose. This perfectly natural method of drawing with the materials that are immediately concerned has resulted in some singularly inept modern examples of heraldry, where the limbs are deliberately represented as detached from the bodies, as though there were something mysteriously mediaeval in such an unreasoning travesty of a perfectly simple expedient.
Where one colour approaches another, as in the de Valence shield (Fig. 174), it will be necessary to leave a narrow rim of metal as an outline, and where the work is sufficiently large other details of form will be shown in a similar way. Diaper also may be thus drawn in lines of metal among colour, as is shown here in the running ornament, or by lines of colour in metal, as the case may be.
The gilt outlines of the de Valence Champlevé shield somewhat suggest the effect of Cloisonné work, the way in which the Byzantine enamels were executed; but this method has been little, if at all, employed heraldically. In it the spaces to be filled are made of flat wires that are bent to the requisite form and soldered into their places on a metal plate, and the work then proceeds as in Champlevé.
Fig. 174.—Shield on Champlevé Enamel from the Monument to William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, in Westminster Abbey.
In the fifteenth century, when Renaissance art was beginning to look at things in a new way and was discovering new methods by which to express itself, a new kind of enamel work took the place of the more formal Champlevé, just as a freer kind of heraldry was about to supersede the decadent Gothic. This became known in time as “Limoges Enamel,” though, as we know, that place had been celebrated for enamel in another form for hundreds of years. This painted enamel did not, however, take the place of Champlevé on monuments, rather the use of enamel in that way died out. Probably the painted plaques were too tender for the purpose, and in any case the treatment would have had to be much modified to bring them into harmony with monumental conditions. Although the method was new the treatment of the subjects was largely that of the missal paintings, and figure compositions, both sacred and secular, were accompanied by decorative borders into which heraldry naturally entered. Fig. 175 is an heraldic example of this method as it was practised by the celebrated Nardon Penicaud.
Fig. 175.—Arms in Limoges Enamel. Part of a Triptych by Nardon Penicaud.