The triquetra at the foot of the shield is older than the other two emblems by several centuries. It appears on the Funbo Runestone in Sweden, in the marginalia of the Book of Kells around 800, and in the carved stone crosses of Iona and Lindisfarne. Originally a Celtic and Norse design motif from roughly 400 to 700, it was absorbed by Insular Christian art as a symbol of the Trinity — three persons, one substance, one unbroken loop. The geometry made the argument for perseverance: an endless line, three arcs returning to themselves with no beginning or end. Renaissance emblem books captioned interlaced devices of this kind nunquam frangitur, meaning never broken. When the heraldic tradition needed a symbol for the active form of constancy, the triquetra was already waiting, eight centuries old, ready for the work.
The bridle and bit at the heart of the shield is the canonical emblem of temperance. The image came from Aristotle's metaphor of reason as charioteer governing the horse of appetite, descended through Cicero's De Officiis of 44 B.C. and adopted into Christian moral theology by Aquinas. Giotto painted Temperantia on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in 1305 with a sheathed and bound sword, her bridle implied by the binding. Cesare Ripa codified the iconography in his Iconologia of 1593, ruling that Temperance must hold a bridle in her right hand. Every educated medieval and Renaissance viewer would have read a bridle on a shield as Temperantia on sight. The vocabulary was that settled.
Why the Three Together
- Hound passant at the head — fiducia, the faithful watcher, drawn from Isidore and the bestiaries.
- Bridle and bit at the fess point — temperantia, the governing hand, codified by Ripa in 1593.
- Triquetra at the base — perseverantia, the unbroken loop, descended from Insular and Norse craft.
- The motto banners — read bottom-left to bottom-right to top, the order of moral development.
- The cape and the rearing horse — context, the unbridled power that the shield's emblem governs.
