Silver - Argent

Silver is a heraldic tincture belonging to the metals.

In early letters patent, real silver was used in the miniature painting of coats of arms. Over time, depending on storage conditions, it could blacken. From such misinterpretations later incorrect colour renderings may have arisen, such as wrongly reconstructed Hungarian historical flags with red–black stripes. For this reason, it must be taken into account that on some armorial letters where silver was originally used, black may be visible today. Furthermore, in modern depictions of coats of arms produced using inappropriate printing techniques, silver often appears too dark, so a layperson may easily mistake it for grey.

According to Péter Püspöki Nagy, sixteenth-century sources attest that in (Hungarian?) heraldry silver was indicated by a crescent, which was also its alchemical symbol.

The Etymology of Silver

In Hungarian, ezüst also appears in the forms üst and öst, which are probably the result of a false morphological analysis. It is likely an ancient Permic loanword, whose -is suffix is related to the words vas (“iron”) and érc (“ore”).

The English term argent derives from the Latin argentum, which in turn comes from the Greek ἄργυρος (argyros), meaning silver or white metal. This word was used in Old French blazons and from there entered English heraldry.

The Symbolism of Silver

Silver was applied by rubbing it with a white paint that opaquely covered the underlying colour. If a very glossy surface was desired, the metal powder had to be applied pure and then burnished with bone. Until the early nineteenth century, the only widely used white pigment was lead white.

Instead of relying on naturally occurring hydrocerussite (a substance that forms secondarily on the surface of lead), it was more commonly produced by a simple reaction of lead with vinegar and carbon dioxide, a process already known in the 4th century BC. Lead plates were placed in a clay vessel, vinegar was poured into the bottom, and the vessel was then set into horse manure. Under the influence of heat, the vinegar evaporated and reacted with oxygen in the air to form lead acetate; subsequently, carbon dioxide caused a white “lead bloom” (PbCO₃) to deposit on the surface of the plates. The process took 6–12 weeks, after which the material was scraped off, settled, dried, sieved, and used in the manufacture of lead white.

In simple drawings, paint was used instead of metal for the depiction of metals. From the earliest times, various forms of calcium carbonate were also used in art. It occurs naturally in rocks (chalk, limestone, marble) and is the principal component of the calcareous shells of molluscs. In fifteenth-century Europe, it was also produced artificially.

It was known as Saint John’s white. Cennino Cennini ( Il libro dell’arte, early 15th century) describes its preparation as follows:

“Take unslaked lime (Ca(OH)₂), fine and white; put the powder into a tub for eight days, changing the water daily and mixing the lime and the water well so that it acquires a certain greasiness. Then make small loaves from it and place them on the roof in the sun (where, under the action of carbon dioxide, calcium carbonate is formed). And the older these loaves are, the better the whiteness will be…”

Source: Wikipedia