Catalan Sigillography and Beyond: Iconic Behaviors in Medieval Breaking Seals

Abstract

The author analyzes various cases of breaking seal matrices in medieval Catalonia and other regions in this text. The manuscript notes of the Catalan sigillographer Ferran de Sagarra guide the exploration of the mechanisms of signification associated with an essential medieval political theology. Beyond the materiality of the sigillary matrix and the printed seal, one can decipher a series of iconic behaviors that allow the author to propose a method for understanding European cultural history through anachronistic narrative forms akin to those of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, or, more recently, Georges Didi-Huberman. It is possible to demonstrate the historical validity of seals in the service of a cultural history and thought that transcends political or religious narratives, opening new horizons in the understanding of the Latin West from the Carolingian period to the apex of international Gothic.

The whole problem stems from the fact that we come to the image with the idea of synthesis. The image is an act, not a thing. J. P. Sartre, Imagination 1936.

1. Introduction

This article aims to define the concept of “iconic behavior” through a study of medieval seals. My initial inspiration comes from examining the preparatory notes of the Catalan sigillographer Ferran de Sagarra. He created this series of manuscript folders after years of researching, cataloging, and reproducing Catalan seals. Some of these documents are held in the National Library of Catalonia. In contrast, many others, along with hundreds of plaster models of seals taken from archives and museums using his reproduction technique, are located in the Archive of the History of the City of Barcelona. Sagarra’s significant work is attributed to a time when sigillography, as an auxiliary science of history, was closely related to archaeology. It involved analyzing seals to support the validity and historicity of the written word in documents.

It is not surprising that the Sigil·lografia Catalana is still regarded as a masterpiece in the study of medieval seals. Very few international texts have been written about him and Catalan sigillography (Barral 2022). Sagarra received the Martorell Prize for Spanish Archaeology for this unpublished work in 1912. Once it was published, he was awarded the Prix Duseigneur de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Paris in 1935 (Puigarnau 2015). When Sagarra read Gustave Schlumberger’s Mélanges d’archéologie byzantine in 1895, he noted: “Schlumberger highlights the enormous historical significance and utility that the study of the seals from the Byzantine period would offer, from both a historical and archaeological perspective.” In his notes, he emphasized a particular interest in Byzantine urban seals, which he referred to as “topographical clues of Constantinople […] that contribute to enriching its still obscure municipal history.”

These observations regarding the interpretative potential of Byzantine sigillography, which he could not expand upon, can be extrapolated to Western sigillography, whose bibliographical treatment has become increasingly extensive since the 1990s. In fact, from the 19th century to the last third of the 20th century, sigillography was cataloged, particularly in France and the United Kingdom: many seals were reproduced, and their inscriptions transcribed, sometimes independently from the documents they validated, whether as placarded or hanging seals. A clear relationship must be established between the significance of the seal and the signum(s) as validating elements.1

In around 1910, when Sagarra was preparing the introductory volume of his sigillography, he already sensed the cross-disciplinary nature that those seals could contain, not only for the political history of Catalonia but also for the history of universal culture. He realized that his work should consist, for the moment, of cataloging the most important specimens of the Crown of Aragon. But he grasped the internal dynamism of the sigillary mechanism as a living matter of peoples’ identity. He strove to sketch the social structures implicit in how these seals were used.2

I propose that the “iconic behaviors” in some examples of medieval Catalan breaking seals work differently, based on different concepts: 1. Appearance: The seal is a covert symbol; 2. Emergence: The neutral emerges in the act of sealing; 3. Competition: The breaking of the seal implies an iconic conflict; 4. Motivation: Sealing involves intention; 5. Aura: The distance increases the presence; 6. Likeness and photographic behavior; 7. Duplicity: The physical and mystical bodies; 8. Survival: Personal identity goes beyond iconography.

The objectives of this text are diachronic and anachronic. The first consists of using historical sources from the Middle Ages in Catalonia that document certain seal-breaking ceremonies that allow a better understanding of the relationship between image and power in the medieval period. By studying the ceremonies of seal breaking, the exercise of the king’s power is better understood in terms of the use and multiplication of his sealed image, depending on his decisions. Primary sources of regional scope and others from different fields are used for the second objective. The intention is to build a methodological discourse from the present to explain the mechanisms of operation of an image of the past. Finally, this objective aims to demonstrate, from the present, that in addition to archaeology and the empirical procedures of traditional sigillography, it is possible to use the renewal of the human sciences, including diplomatic semiotics, to better understand an image of the past that should continue to illuminate the present.

Difficulties will arise in my proposal. On the one hand are the defenders of the diplomatic seal and the act of writing as pure archaeological acts. For them, the historical object is untouchable, interpretable only as a remote historical past, of which any hermeneutic anachronism is suspect. Moreover, scholars more open to the semiotic study of the sigillary reality could also object. The analysis of the mechanism of seal breaking is susceptible to a reading only in terms of a superimposed philosophy of language. This would be the case of those who do not trust that semiotics points beyond the sign and can reach ontological meanings based on the close relationship between signifier and signified. The ontological validity of the non-linguistic dimension of the act of sealing and the material destruction of the seal is proposed here. Both to the advocates of a respectable stabilism and to the courageous innovators of semiotics, I would like to suggest that the breaking of the seal, an addition to being the last diplomatic act of a given reign, is also the demonstration of the ultimate full stop in the iconic behavior of the seals. Respecting the scientific method, there can always be a beyond in historical knowledge.

2. Methodological Approaches

Studying the iconic behavior of Catalan seals, from their mechanisms of breaking and disappearance, has in some ways been unthinkable in recent times. The panorama is different between Northern European sealing practices and the use of seals in Mediterranean Europe, where notaries and their graphic signs primarily validated documents. The Crown of Aragon was constituted as a political formation through the dynastic union of the kingdom of Aragon and the Catalan counties in 1137, culminating with the subsequent incorporation of the kingdoms of Majorca, Valencia, Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, and the Greek duchies of Athens and Neopatria as a result of the Mediterranean expansion experienced between the 12th and the 15th centuries. The merger of the two founding states resulted in two different paleographic–diplomatic traditions. The most outstanding feature is that the kingdom of Aragon in its period of independent life (i.e., between 1035 and 1137) used the Visigothic script in its documentary environment. This scriptural tradition remained in use until the reign of Alfonso II (Gimeno Blay and Odena 1991, pp. 499–500).

In the Aragonese Chancellery, mainly after the Union, the subscription and the signature (or apposition of the manual sign) were incorporated in a clause, which is preceded by the word “signum”, a disposition that is fixed definitively in the 13th century after the reign of Alfonso II. This type of subscription and signature had an eminently chancellorial and impersonal character, so that it was always drawn by hands other than those of the monarch, either by notaries or by scribes of his incipient chancellery, and this norm, as well as the structure of the sign, was definitively fixed during the 13th century. The sign varies according to the scribe who draws it and the solemnity of the document where it is found, but its structure is always the same. Although different scribes and notaries drew it, there was always a personal contribution from the monarch, and now-lost rules regulated such an apposition. When making the apposition in the document, a scribe of the chancellery drew the square and the legend accompanying it, and the monarch drew the cross. This demonstrates the personal intervention of the monarch following an old Aragonese and county tradition (Trenchs Odena 1979, p. 32). Although these procedural differences are essential concerning the different diplomatic uses in Northern Europe, the iconic behavior of the seal breaking can be analyzed independently.

Since the 1990s, the medieval signum and seal have borne a semiotic meaning that interprets the seal beyond its archaeological physicality and the document beyond its linguistic literalness. In addition to semiotics, two other methodological approaches can help understand medieval documentation and culture: the Aby Warburg idea of an anachronistic visual atlas to better understand Western cultural history and the Walter Benjamin notion of “historical porosity.” The complexity of the medieval seal as a continuation of the signum and signature evidences the personal presence of kings and nobles. It deserves a complex methodology that can go beyond semiotics and a mere philosophy of language.

Semiotics can be considered a branch of science (Campbell et al. 2019) but also of philosophy, although not particularly well received in the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. However, if we consider that much semiotic research focuses on signification, reference, and representation, it seems clear that its issues are as old as reflective thought itself. Umberto Eco stated that most major philosophers have grappled with sign theory, even if only implicitly. Beginning with Augustine’s theory of the sign, the philosophy of language was an active area of inquiry during the Middle Ages. John Locke inaugurated the Modern Age with the recommendation that semiotics should be cultivated. However, the philosophers of Modernity embraced a Cartesian separation between mind and body that did not support a solid science of signs.

At the end of the 19th century, semiotics emerged as a specific field of inquiry in the writings of Charles S. Peirce and in Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology. However, it remained on the margins of philosophy. Toward the middle of the 20th century, interest in semiotics resurfaced, and an unsuccessful attempt was made to merge American pragmatism and semiotics with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. This effort failed, and semiotics was excluded from mainstream philosophy. Today, continental philosophy, freed in many fields from the dominance of analytic philosophy, is entering a new period in which the weakening of the commitment to epistemological nominalism gives way to a return to semiotic realism (Houser 2020, p. 135).

When a graphic sign is employed, it has traditionally been discussed as referring to visual signs of various kinds operating in several semiological systems, with post-Saussurian semiotics providing a common theoretical framework for its conceptualization, like, for instance, “Semiotically, a graphic sign is a physical sign on a solid surface made to establish a semiotic interaction”. (Mignolo 2003, p. 78) Any human-made mark on a solid surface can be defined as a graphic sign as long as it conveys shared meaning(s) (i.e., signifies something) to its producers and audiences. This definition of the graphic sign is akin to Charles S. Peirce’s broad notion of a sign as equivalent with any meaning, and the Peircean classical division of signs can similarly be applied to visual graphic forms (Short 2007, pp. 164–72; Sonesson 2014, pp. 39–40) and sigillography (Bedos-Rezak 2000, p. 1491). Based on a sign’s relation to the referent, Peirce distinguished three types of signs (signifiers), which are now often viewed as “universal meaning-making principles” (Stöckl 2004, p. 26), namely, icons, indices, and symbols. Iconic signs signify by resemblance/likeness; indexical signs signify by contiguity, i.e., existential or physical connection; and symbolic signs signify by convention (Garipzanov 2018, p. 9).

The reality of government in the Middle Ages was eminently documented. It was a matter of issuing documents that would be valid before the courts. Gradually, following the wake of Roman law, rulers understood the importance of organizing their archives because they grasped the significance of organizing their societies from a political, economic, and historical point of view. Therefore, once it was understood that the sign could refer to reality to modify it, a system of signifiers and meanings was gradually born, which developed the fabric of power: sales and purchases, diplomatic pacts, marriage policies, and the administration of money and people.

It would not be long before a man like the Swiss medievalist Peter Rück (1934–2004) realized that diplomatics had a semiotic dimension in the contemporary sense. “Traditionally, formal diplomatics showed a limited interest in the various signs drawn in charters. Labeled as graphic elements of the charter, they were often pushed to the margins of diplomatic studies.3 Only from the early 1990s, with the development of diplomatic semiotics in Germany, has the situation begun to change”4 (Garipzanov 2006, pp. 419–20). Rück, the leading proponent of the new approach, stated that the task of diplomatic semiotics was to study the charter as a system of written, graphic, and material signs, which were codes in the communicative process (Rück 1996, pp. 13–15). In a similar vein, Hagen Keller has recently argued that seals, together with the other graphic elements of royal charters, played an essential role in the communication between the king and the receivers of these charters; changes in communication patterns can be seen as a crucial factor shaping the appearance and form of the charter (Garipzanov 2006, p. 420).5

In his Contributions to Diplomatic Semiotics, Rück started with general considerations about the semiotic nature of corroboration signs in the diplomatic field from late Western Antiquity to the late Middle Ages. “Every written work conveys messages of the most diverse kind beyond its content; indeed, as a special written work, it can only be perceived through its additional messages. No type of medieval writing, neither inscriptions nor books, neither records nor letters, is more strongly characterized by the additional messages than the document. None represents and appeals more blatantly to the social consciousness and mentality of the contemporaries”. For him, it was all the more surprising that diplomatics had received far less attention in recent semiotic research than in inscriptions and book pages (Rück 1996, p. 13). Interestingly, Rück quotes Umberto Eco and other recent sources but does not refer to texts by the fathers of semiotics, like Peirce or Saussure: “The term ‘sign’ encompasses everything that can serve as a code in a communication process” (Eco and Memmert 1977). “The documentary graphic symbols are therefore not purely arbitrary conventions, but meaningful”, according to Eco’s expression (Eco 1982, p. 202), and “motivated signs allow us to infer more or less clearly what is meant” (Rück 1996, p. 15).

Owing to Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s critical work, interpreting the historical–symbolic functions of seals has benefited precisely from semiotic hermeneutics (Agamben 2007; Bedos-Rezak 2022; Urban 1989, pp. 4, 27–51; Bedos-Rezak 2011) and other even more recent spheres of knowledge (Bedos-Rezak 1980, 1982, 1988, 1993a, 1993b, 2000). Those North American approaches (Parmentier 1997, p. 14; Bedos-Rezak 2000, p. 1516) rely on the potentiality of contemporary thought to better understand, in a synchronic and diachronic way, the motivations and practices of sigillography: a tool at the service of a power that straddled the sacred and the profane, especially in the medieval period within our scope, but also more recently.6

Aby Warburg may seem quite different from diplomatic and sigillographic studies and the philosophy of language and semiotics. However, he created a methodology that approaches the world of images with relationships similar to weaving meanings in a medieval chancellery. His library looks like a labyrinth of signs and meanings, and his visual atlas, Mnemosyne, establishes a web of meaning in each panel capable of accommodating many images that, like letters in a word, point to the concept they represent. The world of chancelleries is similar to the library he founded in Hamburg and later moved to London: like a treasure map to be explored until one finds a truth that explains everything. According to Warburg, we can understand Western history through our documents and use them to explain some gaps in others that were lost, disappeared, or destroyed. It is possible to find a book in his library owing to the remarkable capacity of the significance of the whole, and the fact that each element (each book) refers to the whole through many others (books) that give it its meaning. An isolated document signed and sealed by a king may not mean much, but it gains significance in the labyrinth of relationships of his chancellery and many others. This way of knowing and relating is richer than mere semiotics because it is intelligent. The reader of the library and the observer of the visual atlas establish new meanings as they go along. Semiotics understands signs, but iconology establishes unthinkable combinations, all true, between image and text, generating new explanations for the “iconic behavior” of images.

Erwin Panofsky’s perspective (as Warburg’s follower) allows us to see the sigillary image from an iconographic and symbolic viewpoint, and classical art historiography can still be carried out, now freed from certain nineteenth-century positivism. Additionally, sources closer to anachronistic art history, such as Warburg’s, help to understand the sense of making leaps in space and time without ceasing to make true artistic genesis (Warburg and Warnke 2000). Therefore, the seal’s function and the seal matrices’ breaking can be viewed simultaneously as synchronistic and diachronic. The reader will see that the seal image can function dialectically. It is possible to move between a material approach to the past and the present and a mental approach to the artistic and historical object, derived from its analysis with the eyes of today and now, before and yesterday. The Panofskyan method is based on mimesis (the seal image reproduces, like a mirror, history; and, at the same time, it is capable of revealing its cultural context); the semiotic method derived from post-structuralism, initiated by Peter Rück, is represented in the sigillographic analyses of Bedos-Rezak; and, finally and propositionally, the work of Walter Benjamin raises its voice in the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben.

Allegory-inspired texts cropped up in art theory and criticism when translating Benjamin’s 1928 book Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel into English in 1977 (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In the Trauerspiel book, in which Benjamin analyzed the particular form of German dramatic literature in the Baroque era, the 20^th century witnessed the first critical treatment of allegory to see it in a redemptive light (Wong 2015, p. 44). The broken medieval seal is an example of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel or tragical drama, something very different from the symbol. “The critical recovery of the Trauerspiel is possible only through a ‘philosophical understanding’ and appreciation of the richness of allegory as a mode of expression” (p. 80). “Whereas the meaning of allegory depends upon an oscillation between two discrete terms, the power of a symbol resides in the unity and immediacy with which it expresses an idea”. The symbol “is like the sudden appearance of a ghost, or a flash of lightning which illuminates the dark night. It is a force which seizes hold of our entire being”. The symbol presents the eternal in the lightning flash of the mystical instant, the Nu. Allegory portrays the transient and ephemeral in the duration of sorrowful contemplation. For Benjamin, allegory presents life subject to time: natural history as decay and ruination (Gilloch 2013, p. 82). In this way, it is possible to land on the track of a dynamic analysis of breaking seals as iconic behaviors that, in a novel way, help to go beyond the typical catalog approach to the works of Louis Douêt d’Arcq, Walter de Gray, Otto Posse, and Ferran de Sagarra.

The antinomies between Benjaminian anthropology and Panofskyan iconology, between Benjaminian allegory and Panofskyan symbol, and between their respective readings of Plato and Kant are insoluble and cover a territory in which it is difficult for both to coexist. For the history–deduction of Panofsky’s epistemological model, the cognitive model of the disruptive constellation of the present and the past (uncertain, unassailable, overwhelming) postulated by Benjamin is intolerable. For him, the idea of spatial and temporal porosity attributed, in Benjamin’s book on the German Baroque, to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque (Benjamin 1928) cannot be accepted. Although Warburg had sustained this appreciation, it is evident that Panofsky was becoming closer and closer to discouraging it and distancing himself from its uncontrollable dislocations and risks.

From the semiotic point of view, iconic behavior arises from the relationship established between the sign as a graphic representation and the meaning as logical content. In the present connection, this relationship oscillates between the linguistic (letters, usually) and the iconographic (images), which generally coexist, although one predominates. When the seal is destroyed, this relationship is dissolved: the sign is gone, and nothing remains of the meaning except its memory in the past. Symbolically, the diplomatic realities that the seal attests to and that are preceded by other signs are stable. The symbol has a stronger ontological connection with the symbolized than the mere sign. From the material point of view, it is more sophisticated and challenging to construct but, at the same time, more fragile. The sign is more personal, with a closer connection between what is written and the person who writes it. Consequently, the symbol is more straightforward to forge than the sign. Unlike the symbol, the allegory is dialectical between its birth and disappearance: it has more to do with a theatrical representation than a sculpture or a static image. Breaking the seal matrix revisits this dramatic–allegorical behavior, bringing the tragic spirit of the Baroque era to the present moment.

3. Appearance: Covert Symbolism

Panofsky introduced the concept of “disguised symbolism” in 1934 in his article on Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. He noted that the symbolic content of the painting is hidden by the “realistic” elements of the composition and figures. Still, the viewer may be “inclined to suspect a hidden significance in all and every object” (Panofsky 1934, p. 126). In this way, the images of the Netherlandish paintings were understandable only to the “informed viewer”. For him, there was a “concealed or disguised symbolism as opposed to open or obvious symbolism” (Panofsky 1953, p. 141). This idea can help explain the iconic behavior of sealing documents when the signers established a chain of unnoticed symbolic relationships. The symbolic meaning of every signum or seal is not always apparent to everybody, and this hidden nature of their meaning is also essential for their charismatic efficiency.

Since ancient times, the seal has been nothing more than a rare stone (due to its color, texture, and shine) inscribed on which an image or a sign is to be printed. Ferran de Sagarra emphasized this concept, commenting on the signet ring of Ermesinda of Carcassonne (Figure 1), wife of Ramon Borrell III (972–1017). Specifically, this seal was donated by her and destined to be set in the gold frontal of the high altar of the cathedral of Girona, or tabula aurea. It is an oval chalcedony with two lines written in Latin and Arabic, where the abbreviated name of Ermesinda can be read (Figure 2) (De Sanjosé Llongueras 2018; Graells i Fabregat 2011, pp. 118–19). Sources from the royal chancellery of Jaume II (el Just) reveal this presence of cameos and intaglios in their environment (Henig 2008; D’Ottone et al. 2018). In 1312, for example, the king gave his daughter Constança a gold ring with an inlaid cameo, described as unum anulum auri in quo incastatus est unus capmaseu (a golden ring with an inset cameo) (ACAb, fol. 43; De Dalmases 1992, vol. I, p. 32).

A covert or disguised symbolism, whether in glyptics or sigillography, is part of its charismatic power. This symbolism is set up with a mark on wax, lead, or gold as a mirror image that is finally known to establish relationships with objects, properties, or persons. As long as the stone or the metal of the seal matrix is not imprinted on a malleable material, the identity and nature of the power of the image will remain hidden. Roman signet rings were the predecessors of our seals and form part of this covert symbolism. They may be considered intriguing objects, as they were employed precisely like the later seal matrices to sign letters and authenticate legal documents (Henig 1997, pp. 88–106). The fashion for displaying jewels in general, including ancient gems, was continuous throughout the Middle Ages (Haskins 1927). Still, gem-seal usage reached its height of popularity during the second half of the 12th century. Gem seals were often employed as additional “secret” seals (secreta) by their owners or as counter-seals (contrasigilla) by others called to witness the official seals of officials, ecclesiastic or lay, and were, of course, far more intimate and personal than these (Jenkinson 1968, item n. 8). They were initially cut in Roman times precisely for use in such situations, to witness all types of documents or to authenticate the signature on a letter. On the Continent, the ancient and even contemporary use of the seal as a symbol of Romanitas may not have been wholly lost (Bruce-Mitford 1974, pp. 123–24 and 126; Filmer-Sankey and Pestell 2001, pp. 195–98; Henig 2008, p. 25). A certain lack of knowledge of Roman iconography gives them their character of enigmatic symbols. The prestige of these semi-precious stones, their brilliance, their color, and their legitimacy as amulets explain their great juridical utility and, at the same time, their symbolism, which is difficult to decipher. When used in medieval times, Roman seals’ iconic behavior was a covert symbolism accentuated by their rarity, antiquity, and mythological originality.

The seal of Ermesinda and the seal matrix of Wulfric, in ivory, shortly before the invasion of William the Conqueror, are not immediately decipherable until the moment after their use by this concealed symbolism. The concealment of symbols as ordinary objects in that image impresses the observer with a mystery. The Saxon character is shown wielding a sword with one hand, and with the other pointing to the inscription surrounding the image: SIGILLVM WULFRICI (Wulfric’s seal), an expression indicating that “Beyond this seal, Wulfric leaves no trace” (Hastings 1977) (Figure 3).

This can be explained further by comparing it with art. We are aware that the very transparency of a stained-glass window where an Annunciation is represented can serve as a symbol for the most resistant of theological mysteries (the hymen of the Virgin, pierced by the divine seed, remains intact like a crystal pierced by a ray of light) (Didi-Huberman 2005). Something similar happens with the act of sealing: two opposing forces confront each other in the sigillographic mechanism: the stiff and cold (metallic, rigid) matter of the matrix as a fixed image, melted and carved by the sculptor, and the hot, amorphous magma, pure power that receives the imprint and, somehow, is fertilized without any rupture, organically. The matrix is nothing from the juridical point of view without the wax that melts, and the wax, plastic, and malleable matter are given a face by the seal. Both, as matter and form, make the history of kingdoms, power relations, and the transmission of property or inheritance.

By analogy, the iconic behavior of light passing through the Annunciation stained-glass window without breaking it and iconographically fecundating it (the Holy Spirit does not break Mary’s body) is comparable to that of the wax receiving the image of the seal matrix, molding itself to it, and giving it meaning. In both cases, a hidden symbolism activates mysteriously: the stained glass helps explain the incarnation of the Son of God, and the seal allows it to materially crystallize a charisma that otherwise would have remained invisible. The hidden symbolism is revealed in an aesthetic act that an informed audience must decipher.

Covert symbolism as an iconic sealing behavior means that images are not objects but acts. Faced with the seal-printing mechanism, nineteenth-century art historiography liked to save appearances, idealize the instant, or place pictures “in the shelter of perishable things”. Positivism sees images as fossilized objects and not living facts. But these images have an inevitable becoming that endlessly makes and unmakes them. Seals are like ephemeral, iconic acts of power. Their very disappearance—or their temporary being out of sight—transforms them into the object of memory, survival, and an “eternal reiteration”(Blanchot 1983; Didi-Huberman 2012, p. 298). The sigillographic act remains hidden in its meaning until someone can unveil it, explain it, and set its history in motion. If parchment receives the signum and waxes the seal, they capture time and power. “Only beings that perceive time remember, and they do so with that same faculty with which [one] notices time” (Agamben 2013) with the imagination. The link between these notions makes it explicit that memory is possible only through the image (phantasmata, or mental image), for it is “an affection, a pathos of sensation or thought” (Agamben 2013; Taccetta 2012, p. 17).

4. Emergence: The Act of Sealing Neutrality

In the Middle Ages, sealing involved the uncertainty of the moment when the positive of a mold dissociated with difficulty from its negative matrix, at the risk of destroying everything. The impression on the wax could be wrong and have to be repeated. The process of sealing documents involved a material execution during which the world of ideas (intellect and will, politics and religion) and the material world (parchment, ink, metal of the matrix, and wax of the seal) met. The document was written, signed, and sealed: there was a theoretical reality (intentions, pacts, power relations, personal identities, institutions) and a practical one (the physical and legal consequences that the document triggers).

It is the same with human knowledge, which starts from the five senses, “fabricates” a mental image, and presents it to knowledge, which makes it its own and “knows”. Concerning the process of understanding, for Aristotle, “Without an image (φαντάσματος, phantasmatos), there is no understanding (νοεῖν, noein)”. (De Memoria 1, 449b31–32) There is decisive evidence that, for him, exercising understanding requires employing φαντάσματα. Many interpreters appeal to this connection in dismissing or downplaying Aristotle’s claims in De Anima III 4–5 about the separability of the intellect, but phantasmata (“images” or “representations”) are themselves produced by a bodily organ. This suggests that understanding may require the body, so even the intellectual soul would be inseparable from the body (Cohoe 2014, pp. 594–95). Precisely within the hiatus between the image and its understanding, medieval sealing offers the iconographic behavior of neutrality. However, in this iconic behavior, the matrix (i.e., the intellect) and the wax (i.e., the body) cannot be separable in sealing. If we think about the act of signature (signum), the ink and the parchment would be the body, and the signer the intellect.

The document is written, the parchment is spread out on the desk, the wax is hot, and the matrix has arrived. When the seal is affixed, there is a moment of suspension, already embedded in the wax and about to separate: it is an interstice of neutrality in which everything and nothing are about to occur. It is as if, in human knowledge, the five senses had already grasped the sensible; it had been presented to the intellect but had not yet been understood. It seems, in both cases, that there is a thin slice of instantaneity that must be resolved between the past and the future to become truly real. There is the hiatus of neutrality as iconic behavior is triggered: the matrix is sunk on the wax but the image, which is not yet empty of it, struggles to become visible, waiting for the external oxygen that dries it forever.

Following the Aristotelian mechanism of human knowledge, for Giorgio Agamben, the phantasmata (Agamben 1993, p. 76) appears associated with a sudden interruption between two moments, a pause that virtually contains the memory—of the past, the present, and the future—of the whole gesture and that “condenses in an abrupt stop the energy of movement and memory” (Agamben 2013, p. 11). The image hesitates; it does not know where it is, shudders, and disassembles. Between the two—the matrix and the wax—the neutral emerges: in the act of sealing, “the image trembles, vibrates, shudders, oscillates and wavers: it constantly goes out of itself, without any place where it is itself, being always outside itself and always within that outside. […] [Such is] the image where the neutral emerges” (Blanchot 1969).

A case in point: probably after the death of Samuel Halevi Abulafia (c. 1320–1360), his son Todros Halevi made in Toledo his quadrilobed seal in memory of his father, a wealthy courtier and chief treasurer of Peter I of Castile. “In the center of the Todros Halevi seal is a three-towered castle with battlements, the coat of arms of Castile, whose name is derived from the fact that that area of Spain was filled with castles. Around this device is a square, and, starting at a six-point star, the Hebrew inscription follows the lines of the square to the left, creating a box of letters. In the cusps or spaces beyond the square are fleurs-de-lys, a standard heraldic device” (Friedenberg 2018). Cantera Burgos and Millas Vallicrosa suggested an “Esteemed Master Rabbi Todros ha-Levi ben Al-Levi”, of Toledo, who died in 1341, as the possible seal owner (Cantera Millas 1956, n. 252) (Figure 4).

From the semantic point of view, it is still the mirror image of a “signifier” waiting to evacuate its meaning on the red wax. The matrix invites it to be touched, smelled, and kept, not to be seen: it does not have, as it is, a meaning of its own; it waits for the raw material to finish explaining it. The image, when printed, will be complete: it is the one that was thought to be seen, used, and made effective from the legal point of view. It would have often served to close operations, and its owner wanted it to recall the memory of his father: “Todros Halevi, son of Samuel Halevi, may he rest in Eden, of the Levi”.7

The bronze matrix unfolds the other face, the different times of the image, and what event will become a memory. The seal made its fragile appearance in the time that lasts an instant, its imprint, and it will continue to exist, not only as an apparition (nothing disappears faster than an apparition) but also as fascination.8 In this way, the image keeps us for a long time, even indefinitely, under its spellbinding power (Didi-Huberman 2012).

In short, the seal-printing mechanism is the transcription of an inert imprint into living matter, which takes its image and inserts it into history, pushing it into action insofar as it brings a new juridical act into being. Its fascination consists of revealing a covert and neutral symbolism which, coupled with the text it certifies, makes known the identity of the holder of the charisma. This mechanism involves an iconographic–textual behavior and, at the same time, has a specific ontological power to modify the historical reality of the past, the present, and the future. It is now appropriate to study what happens when the time comes to destroy this seal-printing mechanism, opening the way to the new eventuality of its iconographic dynamism.

The notion of neutrality helps explain the sealing mechanism’s iconic behavior. Every act of sealing is part of a kind of “revelation” of the image that is constituted, not only in an object but in an action whose power, before sealing, remained hidden in the potentiality of the matrix and the wax as separate elements. This neutrality is very brief insofar as it supposes an instantaneous interstice. At the same time, the matrix is sunk in the wax and waits to be detached to reveal the efficacy of a juridical act here and now. Although the document is written, the matrix has been set in motion as long as this does not occur. The wax is hot (ready), “history” as a relation between space and time is at a standstill and is “neutralized” until the image of the seal appears and becomes historically, politically, and iconographically efficient.

5. Competition: The Iconic Conflict

The history of image representation contains elements of conflict from the most ancient religions. The act of faith in an invisible God is always complemented but confronted by the worship of a visible image. From this paradox the temptation of the destruction of the image is born because an irremediable clash takes place in the interpretation of each faith. Possessing the image of God entails the opportunity and the additional danger of holding political power, which can be challenged. Moreover, the invisibility of God is often confronted with the visibility of the sacrifice until, frequently, it is the very image of God that is sacrificed, as in the Christian religion where the image of God is substituted, in a sacramental way, by his real presence in the Eucharist. The breaking of seal matrices in the Middle Ages brings together some of the formal ingredients of violence against images. The practice of destroying seals was widespread and was not an uncommon event in medieval political theology.

The cult of the sacred image dynamics necessarily leads to distinguishing between iconoclasm and iconoclash.9 The latter refers to a confrontation between and over (the use of) images, and not only to the artistic status of iconic language, but it encompasses the whole spectrum of physical and mental imagination. On the other hand, the notion of iconoclasm has a more technical meaning, the destruction of and suspicion against physical representations of the divine, the sacred, or the transcendent. The breaking of the seal matrices implies an iconic conflict or clash and not technical violence against the image, whose cult can be interpreted as idolatry. To enhance the effect of this typology (Latour and Weibel 2002), it is helpful to focus primarily on the theological context in which these concepts come to life. It is a matter of distinguishing between the background and function of mental and material images (discerning the representation of God and human beings in the visual arts).

Iconoclasm can be directed against mental representations of God and men since they can be locked into theological or philosophical thought models.10 On the other hand, iconic conflict explicitly concerns whether the divine can be thought of with the help of secular rationality (philosophy) and, if so, how to legitimize this rational approach. It is a confrontation between divergent models of thought. Iconoclasm destroys images because they are understood as attacking the physical representation of God. In contrast, the iconic clash destroys specific images because they are mentally opposed to others that should be maintained or promoted. By breaking the seal matrix, we face a case of iconic clash. Let us see what this consists of and analyze some examples.

In the grant document of Roger, son of Wian (Figure 5), its physical elements are the matrix (probably bronze), the parchment supporting the ink of the text, and the red wax of the three seals present. Semantically, three images present the signatories: Roger, Kenewrec, and Morgan. A lily, a man on horseback, and a gloved hand with a scepter topped by a cross, and their respective inscriptions are depicted. The semantics are part of the conceptual elements; lands are granted to the Abbey of Margam (Wales). Three grantors are participating, therefore, in the iconic behavior of the sealing, with all its constituent elements, physical and conceptual.

This distinction between physical elements (sealing instruments, metallic image that shapes the soft wax) and conceptual elements (the message, the semantic meaning of the document, and the image that validates it) should help to understand what happens when the breaking of the seal occurs. When one of the physical elements (the seal matrix) is destroyed, the semantic potential disappears because of an iconic conflict between the signifier and the signified. This is typical behavior of the image when the seal is broken: the link between the image as signifier and the text, as signified, disappears, provoking a conflict.

It is not always necessary to discuss this in semantic terms. Borrowing from classical terminology, the action of printing seals always needs a robust ontology through the unity of the transcendentals: logos, ethos, and pathos (Braet 1992). Printing must be actual, sound, and beautiful to avoid the iconic conflict. If there are errors in the document’s content, if a seal of the intervening parties is missing, or if the matrix is false, the sealing goes into crisis, and everything must disappear.

This explains the origin of an archival organization in Catalonia. After a long process of accumulation of documentary funds, finally James II ordered, in 1318, that some chambers of the Royal Palace of Barcelona, which had been left free by the extension of the Palatine Chapel, were destined to his archive such that els registres, els privilegis e els altres scrits de la sua cancelleria e dels altres fets de la sua cort (the registers, privileges and other writings and other acts of his court) were placed there (López Rodríguez 2014, p. 148). However, seal breaking is an event that destroys the matrix as an object and the relations it generates between truth, good, and empathy. A conflict arises between the beauty of the image, the ethics of legal action (which is paralyzed), and the content of political, economic, and social action.

In one of his handwritten notes (Figure 6), Sagarra copied text taken from an article by the great Spanish paleographer José María Escudero de la Peña, which may exemplify the iconic clash between the presence of the Duke of Girona and the seals of the deceased king. It may be the breaking of the seals of Pere el Cerimoniós (1319–1387) in the presence of Prince Joan d’Aragó, at that time Duke of Girona and shortly afterward King Joan el Caçador (1350–1396), consecrated in Saragossa on 25 April 1388.

It reads as follows: “Concerning the Kingdom of Aragon, the formula of the diligence of breaking seals used by the firstborn of that Crown, the Duke of Girona (equivalent to the Prince of Asturias in Castile and the Prince of Viana in Navarre), at the time when he ascended the throne, is known to us”.

On the one hand, the contrasting reality is the physical presence of the Duke of Girona as an aspirant to the crown, and on the other, the semantic presence of Pere el Cerimoniós in the form of his seals. There is a spatial–temporal conflict, which the breaking of the seals will resolve. It is all about seeing the iconic clash of conflicting signifying images: the simultaneous presence of a king who is no longer king, although his seals are intact, and that of a prince who, to be king, must destroy the seals of his deceased predecessor. The public breaking of the seals will eliminate the symbolic fiction of the power of Pere el Cerimoniós, now deceased, and will allow the forging of the new seals of Joan el Caçador, once consecrated.

The text says: “The Honorable James Cabestany, secretary to the King’s Lord by order, as in fact he was said by the Lord King, and in the presence of the Honorable John of Ffinnis (?) the Doctor in-laws, Advisor and Vice-chancellor of the said King, broke with some of the blacksmith’s instruments the seals of the said Lord’s royal Scribany, which he used while the same Lord held the honor of the Principality of Girona. First, the common seal was sawn into pieces, then the audience’s minor seal, and a lead seal. These seals were broken and presented to the witnesses Bernardo de Freixanet and Berengario de Tresserra, writers of the King” (BE).11

The fact that this text emphasizes “which he used while the same lord held the honor of the Principality of Girona” means that two elements affecting the iconic clash (iconoclash) should be highlighted. First is the cum aliquibus arteleriis ferreris sigilla regia scribanie quibus utebatur dum, “the blacksmith’s instruments the seals of the said Lord’s royal Scribany), “which he used while”. This “while” or “at the same time” signifies a simultaneity that the chronicler emphasizes: while Prince Joan was Duke of Girona, Pere el Cerimoniós used his seals. This means that there were never two kings and that if there were, the seal of one of the two would have to be broken. Second, until he was anointed king, the aspirant idem dominus principatus gerundensis fungebatur, he held (“enjoyed”, it is said) his Principality of Girona, but he was not yet king.

The iconic nature of the seal’s impression mechanism differs from that of the production of other images because sealing has consequences that alter the course of history (or, more frequently, micro-history). When a conventional artist (painter or sculptor) makes an image, it can symbolize power and be a masterpiece. However, the traditional image cannot multiply itself in the form of repeated impressions, and that has political and social repercussions each time it is used. The iconic conflict of the printing seal mechanism (often accompanied by the signum, used without a seal in the Mediterranean area until a late chronology) appears when the meaning endures beyond the signifier. The breaking of the seal helps to eliminate this conflict insofar as once the person who holds the power is dead, his legal capacity must also disappear. Because the printed seal is a reproduction of its matrix, it is subject to the unoriginality of mechanical reproducibility (Benjamin 2002b). As an artistic object, it lacks “aura”, but its semiotic capacity consists not in being an object but a visual act typical of the medieval language of power.

6. Motivations for the Breaking

Another of the singularities of the iconic behavior of the printed seal is that it is not a simple object symbolically impregnated with power (a key, a staff, a dress, or a striking image). The seal changes reality if authentic, which explains why it can often be forged (McEwan 2018, p. 3/14; Heslop 1988). Sagarra, in one of his notes, quotes that “John Egidius, resident of Játiva, captive accused of making false seals, is condemned to pay a fine of two thousand maravedíes of gold” to the administration of Peter III of Aragon.12 Forging a seal can have a series of motivations, as can breaking one. Power tends to be used by forging the truth, just as it can be extinguished to demonstrate who is telling it.

In the faculties of arts and theology in Paris, there were masters who, as ecclesiastical dignitaries, could attach their seals to procuratorial mandates and other documents when conflicts were with the chancellor or the bishop. In Martenne’s Amplissima collectio, we read that in 1225, the University of Paris had a seal made. Still, the canons of Notre Dame had the papal legate break it, interpreting this as a violation of their rights (Martene and Durand 1724–1733, pp. I, 356; Douêt d’Arcq 1863–1868, pp. I, XXXIV). In 1221, the seals of three members of the faculty of theology authenticated a deed of ownership of the university to the Dominicans. It seems likely that a similar means was adopted to authenticate the mandates of procurators carrying petitions to Rome in 1210–1213 and 1219.

In any case, these were conflicting petitions that forced the appointment of judges delegated by the pope as mediators between the masters and the canons of Notre Dame. But in 1219–1221, when the bishop and the chancellor began to evacuate sentences of excommunication, the masters found it more challenging to use their seals and decided to make a corporate one. Against this, the bishop, alleging that the use of the seal was abused and that the masters arrogated to themselves the jurisdiction of the bishop and the chancellor, pushed the papal legates to order the destruction of the new matrix, which was made in 1225. During its existence, it was used for procuration and to borrow money to pay the expenses of four procurators in 1222 (Post 1964, pp. 55–56).

In this case, the motivation for the breaking is in the political dimension of seal printing behavior, i.e., a problem of capabilities. There is a conflict between images. The University of Paris violated the customs of the canons, which is not surprising at this time, considering that the mendicant orders would be gaining prominence. The image printed on the seal may not contradict those rights, but its juridical use did. There is an iconic clash (iconoclash) between two institutions; it is not a material problem of the physical seal but a political problem of attributions. However, the solution is to destroy the material support that endorses the mental idea, which will be entrusted to the papal legate.

Another case for the motivations surrounding breaking a seal is when, in 1289, the chapter of Reims declared that, thirteen years earlier, the archbishop of Reims had broken the gold or ivory seal of the chapter on the curbstone of a well and had ordered another one to be made. This case gives every impression of contempt or clumsiness in government on the part of the chapter of Rheims. In 1276, the seal was broken, and the second seal of the abbey of Saint-Remi was produced, showing the saint enthroned on a folding stool and an image on the left under his hand blessing: Clovis immersed in his baptismal font (Martene and Durand 1724–1733, pp. I, 356; Douêt d’Arcq 1863–1868, pp. I, XXXIV).13

Douêt d’Arcq states that fragmenting seal matrices was widespread in monasteries and cites the example of Saint Alban in the county of Hertfordshire (England). At the abbot’s death, the matrix of his great seal was kept and sealed until the day of the funeral. “After the abbot’s death, according to the custom of our monastery, his greater seal is to be placed in a box with his lesser seals and sealed with a common seal to be kept until the day of his burial”. Logically, the abbot was soon to be buried. Meanwhile, the image of the seal was hidden and locked. It seems that the abbot had died, but his political image had also died, and, with it, his political power was placed in a box with his other seals, which had also been sealed. The people must be summoned to a special mass where the seals will be displayed and destroyed. “On that day, in the presence of all the people, after the high mass, it must be brought before the altar and broken with a hammer”. The seal will be broken before Christ, symbolized on the altar, before the Church, before the monastic community, and before the world. And yet his other seals will continue to function for the ordinary government: “But it is disposed, in the great disposition of the Prior, what is to be done with his other seals, that even so, he has the power to establish obedience, or to remove the disposition of the monks, and to examine the plenary in the monastery, and the cells, as it seems best to him” (Dugdale 1817–1830, p. II 236; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, pp. I 92–93).

The seals forger John Egidius, the masters of the University of Paris, the archbishop of Reims, and the monks of Saint Alban in Hertfordshire managed the power of the seals with different intentions. Nobody considered the seal merely a piece of art or a valuable device. They all acted based on various motivations because they understood the seal was not just an image but a catalyst for action in the sphere of power.

7. Aura: Eye Contact

7.1. Visuality

Another interesting aspect of the image’s behavior during the medieval seal-breaking processes is the part eye contact plays. In the ordinary iconic experience, the ocular experience appears directly linked to a close tactile experience. The eye explores the objects around it in an experiential, retinal way. It is unnecessary for the eye to “touch” every object to process its image. Even in the everyday sphere, there is a geometric distance between the apparatus of vision and what it captures as ordinary experience.

However, some examples of medieval seals’ breaking and public presentation may demonstrate that this eye contact undergoes variations. Insofar as the seal is about to be destroyed or has never been publicly seen before, there is a kind of visual remoteness that Walter Benjamin calls “aura”. The aura presupposes an authenticity underlined by an exceptional distance in the experience of visual contact. In this framework, we offer new examples below.

First, the king’s seal is not just material but also “the mystical body of the king our lord”. Ferran de Sagarra quotes Salazar de Mendoza (1549–1629), the prestigious penitentiary canon of the Cathedral of Toledo from 1609, who comments that “Don Juan Tello de Sandoval, president of Valladolid, later of the Council of the Indies and bishop of Osma, upon seeing a royal seal fall to the ground detached from a document, picked it up, raised it with utmost reverence, kissed it and placed it on his head saying: ’It is the mystical and figurative body of the king our lord.’” (De Mendoza 1794, p. 110; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, p. I 92). Logically, these are phrases affected by the formal dramatism typical of the Spanish language of 17th-century Castile.

It seems forced to cite this deliberately anachronistic episode concerning the mechanism of the medieval seal’s functioning. The documentation does not allow us to prove that the seal that Salazar de Mendoza saw fall to the ground was medieval. However, his reaction is inserted into a broader tradition regarding the seal’s sacredness, specifically considering the seal as the continuation of the king’s person. However, as an episode of modern times, it perfectly reflects an archaic element of medieval theology: the king possesses a physical body and, represented by the seal, a mystical body.

That phrase that Salazar de Mendoza attributes to Juan Tello de Sandoval, when he says that the seal “is the mystical and figurative body of the king our lord”, has resonances in the doctrine of the king’s two bodies that Ernst Kantorowicz (Eka) adopted from Edmund Plowden, in whose Reports we find the first clear elaboration of that mystique of discourse, with which the jurists of the English crown wrapped and embellished their definitions of kingship and their sovereign powers (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 7).

7.2. Political Theology

Kantorowicz’s thesis on the king’s two bodies has been questioned for at least twenty years. There are some reasons for this. First of all, when Marie Axton revisited the topic, she demonstrated that Eka relied too heavily on Plowden’s reports, ignoring other sources like Anthony Brown, a justice who simplified material from Plowden’s manuscript, or John Leslie, a prominent figure in the Tudor court. Ultimately, Axton’s study has only served to confirm Eka’s view that Plowden’s Reports contain “the pith of the doctrine” that 16th- and 17th-century English absolutism is grounded in the idea that the king has two bodies (Axton 1977, p. 16; Rolls 2005, p. 87).

Other factors overshadow Eka’s work, like the influence in his writings of Ezra Pound (anglophone propagandist for fascist Italy) (Feldman 2018), the prestige of his monography of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II among the Nazi leaders (Göring was an admirer of Kantorowicz’s book) (Landauer 1994), or his proximity to the George Circle (Liebeschütz 1964). The successful work of Carl Schmitt and his hidden dialogue with Eka is a factor that obscures the theories of the medieval political theology of the latter (Herrero 2015).

When in 2009 Bernard Hussen revisited the validity of The King’s Two Bodies, he made four claims on it: (1) The book’s thematic concern is still on the agenda. (2) Of no less intense interest is the book’s methodological endeavor in, as Kantorowicz once phrased it, “what may perhaps be termed constitutional semantics”. (3) Germanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone medieval scholars may face different difficulties in working with this book, since the academic nomenclature of its central subject—constitutional semantics predating the “State”—poses major linguistic problems. (4) Eka’s methodological interest in constitutional semantics clashed with his academic training and skills as a historian of ideas, and this clash may have caused the somewhat peculiar and often unacceptable empirical strategy of the book and the puzzlement of many of the book’s critics (Jussen 2009, pp. 102–3).

Kantorowicz provides numerous examples of the royal function of mediation between the king and the divine while also focusing on the slow transformation or relocation of the role of kingship from essentially liturgical, as Christ’s representative, to a more secular, law-formative role of the supreme dispenser of justice. The king’s communion with the Holy Spirit and access to Truth made him “the animate Law on earth”. They transferred its divine sanction or sovereignty to the institution of the secular state and its legal system in particular. The political consequences of formulating royal power as absolute, on the grounds of its divine sanction or sovereignty, seem apparent, as total or unconditional obedience to it is demanded within the Judeo-Christian tradition (Golczewski 2006, p. 3).

What follows is a manifesto of medieval political theology, which directly affects the seal-printing mechanism of factual power and its iconographic representation: “The King has two Capacities, because he has two Bodies, one of which is a natural Body, (…); the other is a political Body (…); and this Body is not subject to the Passions as is the other, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law (…), the Death of the King, but the Disappearance of the King, not signifying by the Word (Disappearance) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that there is a Separation of the two Bodies (…)” (Plowden 1816, p. 233a; Kantorowicz 1957, p. 13).

We know the document of cession to the bishop of Lincoln of six marks out of an annual payment of nine marks, which the bishop was accustomed to make to the house of Clatercote, granted to them by Robert Cheney, former bishop of Lincoln, for the maintenance of the sick. On the wax seal appear William, Master of the Order of Sempringham, and Richard [Gravesend], Bishop of Lincoln. On one side is a tonsured man dressed in vestments holding a book in his left hand and a staff in his right. He is standing on a step or plinth. The inscription reads + SIGILLVM: MAGISTRI: ORDINIS: DE: SEMPINGHAM (Seal: of the Masters: of Order: of Sempingham): On the other side appears a human head in profile, facing the right rim. Above is a star. Below is a horizontal crescent moon. It is the effigy of Richard, Bishop of Lincoln. The legend reads + CAPVT. NOSTRVVM. EST. CRISTVS (Our head is Christ) (Figure 7). There is an association here between the two bodies of the bishop of Lincoln: the depiction of his head in profile and the realization that this head is the same, institutionally “our”, as that of Christ. The bishop is the visible head of the Lincoln community, its physical body. Still, Christ is, in reality, its political body, who governs mysteriously or charismatically.

In the cited episode of Salazar de Mendoza, the falling to the ground of “a real seal detached from a document” provokes a semantic chain related to seal-printing behavior, one of those “existential moments” that led Sartre to affirm that “the whole problem stems from the fact that we have arrived at the image with the idea of synthesis (…). An image is an act and not a thing” (Sartre 1936). It is not that a simple object representing the king goes on the ground but that “an act”, that is to say, the royal power itself, is dragged in the dust. A Christology (“the mystical body of the king our Lord”) and a likeness (“the figurative body”) fall to the ground, a photograph that makes the person of the king present. The scene has something of contemporary horror: “Seeing a royal seal fall to the ground, detached from a document, he picked it up, lifted it with great reverence, kissed it and put it on his head”. The formula “he lifted it (…) and put it on his head” also underlines the importance of distance in eye contact. It is essential to see him in public and not to be close.

7.3. Publicity

A second example of the work of visual contact in describing the iconic behavior of the broken seals is the formula mostra a uyll en publich los segells (literally, “show to the public eye the seals”), vocatis aliquibus notabilibus personis (“calling notable people”). This happened at the burial of Queen Violant de Bar, the wife of Juan I, in 1431 (vid. Infra). In this case, there is a spectacularization of the sacredness of the queen’s seals. The documentation uses the expression “eye contact” as if this had never occurred before. A physical instrument of government is displayed in public. However, it is part of its iconic behavior to present it at eye level while maintaining a distance to preserve its sacred and auratic significance. Power must be exercised through distance, with tactile objects and images, if not through the nebula created by visual distance.

7.4. Ceremony

A third case is the fracture of the seal matrix of the Chapter of the Cathedral of Vic of 19 June 1309. During a meeting led by Bishop Berenguer de Guardia, it was decided that official documents would be sealed with a newly created round seal. This indicates that the previous seal was recently broken in front of everyone in the chapter hall. In 1404, the seal of the Cathedral Chapter was ceremoniously broken in the presence of Bishop Diego de Heredia (ACVb, fol. 84v; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, p. I 93). The seal matrix, on the verge of disappearing, “can be seen but not touched”. The object must preserve its aura.

7.5. Ostentation

In a fourth example, a similar ceremony is described at the death of King Joan II of Catalunya-Aragó (the Faithless) in January 1479. This is the testimony of Pere Miquel Carbonell, in chapter LI of his treatise De Exequiis, sepultura et infirmitate Regis Joannis secundi: first, a procession carrying the body of the king on a platform to take it to his grave. Once the procession has stopped, and in the presence of the great royal catafalque, on the right side of the litter, the senior camerlengo, taking the secret seal of King Don Juan and raising his right arm before the feet of the lord king and addressing the crowd, shows them the matrices of the secret seal. This ostentation implies a revelation: the people are shown a hidden, unknown image of their king. This is, then, an iconographic version of the image of the king. The camerlengo says: “O knights and gentlemen, this is the secret seal of the king”. And beginning to weep, he goes on to say: “’The king our lord is dead, our lord the king is dead! Let us mourn his death and let his seals be broken, for he will never use them again.’ Then he breaks the matrices of the secret seal with a hammer and taking the common seals of Aragon and the seal of Sicily in his left hand, he breaks them, using the hammer with his right hand” (Carbonell 1864, XXVII fol. 217; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, pp. I 94–95). In this ceremony, visual contact is replaced by auditory contact. The hammer breaking the seals, the lamentations of those present, and the loud voice announcing the event dominate forcefully. Increasing the distance to the object and eliminating visual contact heightens the impact.

7.6. Aura

The aura is what makes each work of art unique. “The aura—Walter Benjamin points out—is tied to its here and now”. Each work of art has a determined time and space and follows a trajectory from its creation. The work of art has “its uniqueness, that is, its aura” (Benjamin 2002b, pp. 3, 104). Each creation is exclusive, and although there may be forgeries or reproductions of it, there cannot be another that follows its spatial–temporal trajectory. This distancing from the work of art expresses its sacred character. Benjamin himself suggests it in this note, in which it is enough to substitute “distant” for “separate” to find a description of the process of sacralization, of symbolic (magical) separation. By defining aura as “the unique appearance of the distant, however close it may be”, we have merely transposed the categories of space and time into the formula that designates the cultic value of the work of art. The distant is opposed to the nearby. What is essentially distant is unapproachable.

The leading quality of an image used in worship is that it is unapproachable. By its very nature, it is always “distant, however close it may be”. It can approach its material reality without detracting from its distant character (Heinich 1983). Contemplation and distance (and non-tactility, by the idea of touch as profanation) are contrasted with technologically facilitated modes of interaction with things, which grasp them and bring them closer. To recall one example, Benjamin distinguishes the distanced and auratic practice of the magician healer from that of the surgeon, whose instruments necessarily penetrate the body of the sick (Benjamin 1968, p. 194).

8. Likeness and Photographic Behavior

The seal’s iconic behavior pushes for a photographic understanding of the representation of the king. As we understand it, the photographic process can illuminate the iconic behavior of seals. On the one hand, when photographing, light acts as a sigillary matrix on the typically photosensitive support. Through the shutter, chiaroscuros are projected from a sensitized surface. Similarly, the seal matrix prints its image on an amorphous material akin to photographic paper.

A similarity influences the relationship between space and time. Like in photography, everything happens quickly: before the wax sets, one must hurry to avoid spoiling the sealed document or being forced to repeat the process. This instantaneous condition in iconic behavior is shared between photographic techniques and the sealing process. Consequently, both in sealing and photography, there is a positive and a negative; reality and the matrix are the negatives, and photography and wax sealing are the positives.

We know that “Images pierce. Images anesthetize. An event known through photography certainly becomes more real […]. But, after repeated exposure to images, it becomes less real” (Sontag 2003). The seal matrix is kept hidden, surrounded by mystery. Some of those present could attend the ceremonial breaking of Queen Violante’s seal without even having seen her seal before. Ferran de Sagarra, in his preparatory notes for the Introduction to Sigil·lografia transcribed it directly from the Llibre de les Solemnitats de Barcelona (Figure 8).

Following this photographic understanding of the real as an instant of reality printed on a surface, we can understand the August 1431 historical fact from a contemporary perspective. On the one hand, the breaking of the seal allows the “collective portrait”. Those present are recorded almost retina-like: the knight Galceran de Sentmanat, the Queen’s camarlengue, the so-called “king of Navarre” (Carlos de Viana, from 1441 Carlos IV of Navarre), the archbishop, bishops, prelates, barons, nobles, knights, honorable citizens, and the rest of the crowd. In addition, the noblewoman Alienor de Cervelló and the Queen’s domestics and servants. Furthermore, it could also be a cinematographic scene: “Before the copious multitude the seals of the lady mentioned above are shown in public (…) the pertinent promises are made that provoke tears (…) the seals are broken and crushed with hammer blows, great screams, weeping, lamentations, and spasms are spread”—a whole scenography of great photographic and acoustic expressionism (AMB, I fol. 30; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, p. 94).

In addition, a 13th century bronze matrix helps to understand this new iconic behavior. Its owner found it in a Surrey field and visited the British Library to show it to experts. The library held a sulfur cast made in the 19th century from a seal of the Augustinian Priory of Stone in Staffordshire (BLD, LXXII, 3). The two objects were placed side by side and were found to be a perfect match. It is a rare coincidence where the matrix and the seal are put together to obtain the idea of the photographic effect as iconic behavior: on the left, the positive of the image; on the right, the negative (Figure 9).

In summary, the photographic behavior of the seal image introduces several novel dimensions. First, the seal functions as a reproductive mechanism of an original and unrepeatable reality: a matrix created by a goldsmith commissioned by the king, serving as a tool of power that is authentic and represents an extension of his identity. Second, using the matrix for sealing imbues the instantaneity of the photographic process; it reproduces a here-and-now reality that is iconographically rooted and connected, much like photography, to the object and subject of representation. Third, similar to the photographic process, sealing involves both a positive and a negative of the image, mirroring reality and its specular representation. In this section, we refer to this phenomenon as the iconic photographic behavior of the sigillographic image.

9. The Sense of Duplicity

The photographic understanding of the iconic behavior of the sigillographic image leads necessarily to a reflection on its duplicity, i.e., a study of the relationship between original and reproduction. Everything suggests that several iconic behaviors associated with the functioning of the breaking seal point to the problem that the seal printing’s reality is always double. The “relationship” category is always between the artist who created the seal matrix and the public servant who reproduces the masterpiece to transmit a political power. The copyist need not be incapable of independent creation. The artist in question may be more gifted than the one who produced the archetype. The decisive point is, however, that the servitude and duty of the copyist’s task seal his performance with the character of subordination and lack of freedom; that his mental attitude, whoever he may be, is essentially different from that of the creative artist (Friedländer 1941, p. 144). This is the paradox of duplicity: while the artist who creates the seal matrix fades into the act of creation, the multiplication of the image using the seal persists in the anonymity of artistic creation. This illustrates the duplicity in the iconic behavior of seals. Although the original artistic authenticity of the matrix remains in the background, the copy on the wax prevails and holds significance in its ontological duplicity.

The iconic conflict explains the need to break the seal because there are two competing realities: a physical one (the king is dead) and a mystical one (his sigillographic symbol remains until it is broken). We have already seen that the motivations for breaking a seal constitute another iconic behavior with two parts: the person who holds the matrix would wish to keep the power (even when its legitimate holder is dead), and the one who intends to defend the legal system knows that it must be broken when it is no longer legitimate to use it. On the other hand, we have also seen that visual contact is a retinal relationship with the seal, which requests distance to avoid losing the aura. The photographic dimension of the seal serves to make the relationship between the positive (seal) and the negative (matrix) an explicit one. Therefore, it is necessary to explain the duplicity at its root and finish understanding these mechanisms and iconic behaviors in breaking our medieval seals.

Ferran de Sagarra had taken out a double-sided token of another characteristic seal breaking, that of Violant (or Yolande) de Bar (or of Aragon), which can help us now to comment on the concept of duplicity from its origin (Figure 10). There are striking expressions in this document from the point of view of the nature of the seal-breaking mechanism. Specifically, it is a mixture of realism and theatricality that never ceases to surprise. Violant, princess of Bar and queen consort of Aragon as the second wife of Joan I (1387–1396), died on 3 July 1431 and was buried in the cathedral of Barcelona, her remains being transferred in 1460 to the monastery of Poblet, where her husband was buried. Her silver seal fits with the luxurious life of the court, which in 1383 and 1388 the Cortes of Monzón had denounced (Rodríguez Lajusticia 2018).

This duplicity has an ontological character that, in reality, disappears with the breaking of the seal. The ontological character of duplicity is intrinsic to the very ontology of relationality as shaped by the work of Aristotle, which was received and assimilated in the medieval tradition (Martin 2016). Relation, understood as life subsistent in medieval thought, constitutes the unity of substance (Brower 2016). This relation, which in duplicity exists between an original and its reproduction, is nullified by the breaking of the seal of Violant de Bar. When, according to medieval metaphysics, this relation occurs between cause and effect, the breaking of the seal causes this causality to vanish; the seal does not possess the ontological duplicity of the relation as long as its matrix exists. At the precise moment when the seal is destroyed, this ontological duplicity vanishes, just as the substantial unity between the body and the soul of the person dissolves and ceases to exist from an iconographic and political perspective. Let us see the ceremony.

Everything happens ans que’l dit cors partis de la dita sala, that is, “before the body departed from the said room”. This means that the queen’s body and its seal matrix (during the presentation and successive breaking) were present simultaneously in the same room: it is a duplicity that we can understand as new iconic behavior. That is to say, at the moment of that initial presentation (“show in public the Queen’s silver seals”), the matrices and the corpse compete from the point of view of their physical presence and charisma. This is the multiplying potential of iconographic symbolism in the Middle Ages: the seal signifies the queen’s power, and her corpse indicates—according to medieval political theology—that the king never dies.

Kantorowicz says that, upon the king’s death, “legislators and canonists stumble upon problems that give rise to solutions such as the concept of the corpora separata” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 314). In other words, how do we govern if, on the one hand, we have the deceased body and, on the other, the seal matrix? Nothing works if they are separated by death. This duplicity alone seems like an interregnum that must be solved, if indeed Rex nunquam moritur. Chief Justice Brian, for example, in a case of the city of Norwich tried in 1482, produced the argument: “If the mayor dies, the corporation is incomplete; and until the community appoints another mayor, the corporation is incapacitated”. Who takes precedence: the body politic or the physical body of the king? Because, in reality, the seal is a kind of “intermediate body” or “third body of the king”.

When, on one occasion, a plaintiff spoke of a chapter or commonwealth “and its successors”, Judge Choke, supported by Littleton, rightly declared: “The chapter cannot have predecessor or successor, because the chapter is perpetual, and each is in being, and cannot die, any more than a convent or commonwealth; so the chapter that was, and the chapter that now exists, is the same chapter, and not different: so the same chapter cannot be the predecessor to itself, because a thing cannot be predecessor or successor to itself”. What is at stake is duplicity.

The solution to the problem comes from Kantorowicz himself: “The perpetuity of the head of the kingdom and the concept of a rex qui nunquam moritur, a king who never dies, depended primarily on the interaction of three factors: the perpetuity of the Dynasty, the corporate character of the Crown, and the immortality of the royal dignity. These factors loosely coincided with the unbroken line of natural royal bodies, with the permanence of the body politic represented by the head and the members. With the immortality of the office, that is, of the head alone” (Kantorowicz 1957, pp. 316–17). The fact that the king never dies suggests, in the present context, that breaking seals disrupts the continuity between the physical and the mystical body of the monarch. It is an exceptional moment to be restored by establishing the new monarch’s seal. In this sense, we can say that the king “almost” never dies. The duplicity is constantly interrupted by the act of breaking the seal.

As Violant was a queen consort, we cannot apply Rex nunquam moritur to her more than symbolically for our study. However, the case serves to argue the sense of duplicity as iconic behavior: the queen’s seals must be extinguished precisely to avoid the paradox of duplicity; her death does not make the survival of her seal image viable. Once her physical body is extinguished, her political body is extinguished, and “what was an event will become a memory” (Didi-Huberman 2012, p. 296).

So it happens in this case: “After promising some very pertinent words and provoking tears, he breaks the said seals and crushes them with multiple blows of the hammer, during which great cries, weeping, lamentations, and hiccups are spread by the noble lady Leonor de Cervelló, and by the domestics and servants of the queen mentioned above” (AMB as supra). The interruption of the seal-printing mechanism due to the queen’s death opens the way to a subsequent revelation in the form of something that exists only in memory. But memory is a system of duplication toward the past (memory) and toward the future (imagination) and which is annulled in the present (instant).

Duplicity plays an essential role in analyzing the iconic behavior of the medieval seal in Catalonia. In this section, we analyzed the breaking of the Violant de Bar seal in the following terms: first, the ontological relationship between the original (matrix) and its copy (wax seal). Second, from the perspective of medieval theology, this relationship is sustained in being. It does not occur here, as it did during the European Industrial Revolution, that the relation between original and accessory copy changes. And third, the sense of duplicity, interrupted in the medieval seal breaking, signifies a political and metaphysical disappearance of the category of subsistent relation as understood in the Middle Ages.

10. Survival: Personal Identity Goes Beyond Iconography

Breaking the seal of a matrix in the Middle Ages is a curious event because we are not accustomed, with a few exceptions, to the reversal of the fabulous act of producing and synthesizing a symbolic image in Western culture. Indeed, except for iconographical pathological moments such as Byzantine iconoclasm, the destruction of images during the Reformation (Palmer Wandel 1999), or, more understandably, the destruction of enemy symbolic imagery in the case of revolutions and wars (Idzerda 1954), destroying the image is alien to our ocular-centric mentality (Jay 1988).

However, in its conceptual richness, the Christian Middle Ages tended to destroy the matrix image of the seals, especially in the sphere of institutional government. Sometimes, it is fragmented in public with a hammer blow; sometimes, it is temporarily repurposed (more rarely); in other cases, it is recycled through “objectual survival”, renewing and elevating its meaning. This iconic ambiguity admits different hermeneutic positions, especially in the new historiographic order after the two world wars, where the “image of the other” has been severely questioned in practical and theoretical terms. The latest idea of “iconographic annihilation” implied by the “total war” admits new positions and anachronisms concerning iconic behaviors that already existed in the past.

Panofsky’s iconology and Benjamin’s allegory refer to mediation as a method. Both impose language as intercessor and partner in the mind/world dialogue; both focus on the common thread that allows the merging of the dualities that structure the phenomenon (the appearance of reality) and ensure the legibility of nature. Both respond to the central premise of idealist philosophy: to consider the totality of the symbol as a cognitive encapsulation of the subject/object dialogue. Of the two, Panofsky does not renounce the succession of facts in history. For Benjamin, “mathematics demonstrates that the total elimination of the problem of representation […] is the sign of genuine knowledge”, adding later that the “proper” approach to truth consists of “a total immersion and absorption in it”. This means that conceptual mediation is an obstruction to “true” knowledge. Consequently, his method of historical investigation is founded on an intentionless laying out of opposites alongside each other, since “ideas are not represented in themselves but solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the configuration of these elements”. He insists on the importance of allowing contradictions to remain unresolved, and a reason for this is his continued use of the idea of the residue (Rampley 2001, p. 137).

For him, on the other hand, the artistic image is constructed by a kind of montage. Images, for him, gain a living presence by being “thrown” out of the development history into a new continuum that simultaneously alludes to a prehistoric origin and points toward a redemptive future. However, in his work,14 the utopian future is mapped in the image as a potentiality. Benjamin compares his method of combining allegorical fragments to observing heavenly constellations, whose components, like the stars, are independent entities. What is significant for him is not the meaning underlying these images but the dialogue that produces them (the “lines” that connect the stars) (Dempsey 1998). According to his vision, the sigillographic images are not continuous elements of the same story but fragments of the same worldview. In this way, Sagarra is closer to Benjamin than to Panofsky because he is more allegorical than iconographic: he considers Catalan seals to be less fragments of an amateur historicist archaeology than relevant pieces to explain the political mentality of an entire political world like the Crown of Aragon and their neighbors.

Sagarra grasped the importance of sigillography as an auxiliary discipline of history. Still, he also saw that each seal, in its episodic condition, was like a loose ring in a chain of events that had to be connected.15 He was aware that the seal, often linked to a document and a signum, was an image here and now, but he also grasped its projection into an unknown past and an uncertain future. In a way, each seal represented an “island of significance” for the political history of the great Middle Ages. He made an iconographic account of an aulic type without considering that the matrix and its seal had also functioned in social layers below the incredible power of the chancelleries, something we know better today through the archaeology of the connoisseurs, especially in France and the United Kingdom.16 But Sagarra was close to considering each seal as a kind of photogram that, together with many others, would help to understand the forward and backward history. That is why, in a way, his sigillography (except the initial text) can be seen as if it were the result of a Google Images search or an Aby Warburg-style Atlas of Memory.

It is not repugnant to Sagarra’s mind that medieval seals acquire meaning in that arrest and the tension between movement and immobility. It is a question of analyzing the iconic behavior of the seal in which, a moment before or a moment after, there is an unrepeatable biological presence. The frequent fingerprints on seals and other organic materials have demonstrated this (Charlier et al. 2016). There are many examples, such as Margan, son of Caradoc, where the sealer has left the organic imprint of his physical presence (Figure 11).

These traces allow us to think about the immobilization of thought in a dialectical and intensive constellation, which can relate to the present and past in an instant in which meaning is constituted (Benjamin 2002a). Discovering these survivals implies identifying the link between past, present, and future to devise new ways of thinking about history, action, art, and the subject (Taccetta 2012).

This is also what the sealer’s dactillary fingerprints point to in an earlier example, in the coincidence between William, Master of the Order of Sempringham, and Robert Cheney, Bishop of Lincoln: they seal the agreement but leave their fingerprints on the spot (Figure 11). Therein is inserted the notion of survival as iconic behavior. From this perspective, the seal is not an archaeological but an anthropological element (Bedos-Rezak 2022, note 54) because it, as we see it in the present, remains the mark of multiple pasts within a historical race that is not evolutionary (a simple past that pushes us toward the present), but of a timelessness closer to anthropology.17 Some other examples may help us to understand.

It is recorded in a Durham inventory that when Bishop Richard of Bury died in 1345, the matrix of his seal was fractured, and from the fragments a silver chalice was made for the altar of St. John the Baptist (Bloom 1906, p. 111). From his biography, we also know that “The same sacristan also had two chests, a pastoral crozier, a miter, a ring and sandals, two silver candlesticks, silver and gilt censer, and an incense boat, also nine brocades of red silk cloth woven with vines (and letters), also nine silk cloths with quadrupeds with gilt feet and heads, and also a green cloth woven with white and red stripes. All these became ornaments for the great altar and other altars of the church. Also, a golden cup was made from four seals, as is evident from these verses inscribed on the foot: ’Richard, fourth of Dunham, born in Bury. Let this cup serve as a badge of the four ancient seals.’” (Coldingham et al. 1839, p. 127; Sidney Gibson 1866, pp. 393–94).

Concerning the survival of the sacred and the fingerprint, this is a good example of how these prelates died, and their seals underwent a metamorphosis. Not only were they broken, but their metal was reworked to produce a chalice for the altar of St. John the Baptist in the case of Richard of Bury and, in that of Thomas of Hatfield, an episcopal image destined to take its place in the reliquary tomb of St. Cuthbert.18 Like the seals they derive from, these objects bear the names of Bishops Richard and Thomas, whom they continue to identify. The transition from seal to ritual or votive object took place when the holders of the seals had passed on. While the destruction of matrices upon the death of their owners is not exceptional, the specific transformation of the seal, noted by contemporaries, seems quite rare.

In this case, the idea is that the already consecrated matters (the seal matrix, the chalice, the arms of the kings) do not disappear. That, at most, they change accidentally (in their appearance) but not substantially (in their physical and sacred materiality). The materials survive, but the accidents do not have to endure (Walsh 1962). That is to say, the consecrated matter—silver and gold—survives in an accidental form, so the material nucleus survives independently of its formal aspect.

In the book The Surviving Image, “survivaling” (survivantes) is Didi-Huberman’s most resonating term, pointing to the Warburgian Nachleben (i.e., the afterlife) and how images of a certain emotional and expressive character survive and re-appear throughout history. He devises the concept of survivals as Warburg’s main “problem” and traces it as a phenomenon as analyzed by or with other thinkers (Aas 2021). It makes sense to consider the survival of the image or imprint representing the stealthy act of reviving the past. Mysteriously, the seal is posited as a continuation, even biological, of the sealer, who is made physically and politically present in the document. Aby Warburg’s concept of the afterlife or survival, related to Antiquity and its reappearance in the Renaissance, refers to a new iconic seal behavior. The act of sealing signifies the survival of the sealer’s physical and metaphysical body within the semantic context of the Middle Ages.

Another example of the survival of the sacred also comes from Sagarra, when, “already close to death (ideo nos mune gravi infirmitate detente), King James II, on 2 November 1327, ordered his notary and depositary of the matrices of his seals, Bernat d’Aversó, to call notable people (vocatis aliquibus notabilibus personis), to proceed to the breaking of the seals (frangi faciatis per frustra taliter….dicta sigilla nostra, videlicet bulla, tabularum seu majestatis et commune) and to deliver the three seals already broken (ipsa tria sigilla sic confracta tradatis personaliter) to the person of the prince Alfonso, our beloved first-born and universal heir”.19 For his part, King Alfonso III will declare to the notary that his father’s will has been fulfilled, referring to the breaking of the seals in the presence of people of the court (frangeretur coram notabilibus personis) (Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, p. I 153 and Annex XXII).

In some cases where the matrices are not broken, they are buried in the same tomb where the deceased lies. This burial of the royal seal without breaking it constitutes a form of iconographic death parallel to the fracture of the seal. It consists of erasing, literally, the image of the king, incorporating it into its tomb so that it will never again represent the one who has disappeared from among the living. There are examples of sepulchers whose interiors are buried, accompanying the deceased, and this sigillographic image of the hierarch. Ferran de Sagarra says that sometimes the matrices were deposited in the tomb of the personage to whom they belonged. The violation of the royal tombs of St. Denis led to the discovery in the tomb of Constance of Castile, second wife of Louis VII of France, of the silver matrix of her seal, dating from the 12th century (Nolan 2009, p. 88; Sagarra i de Siscar 1915–1932, p. I 95). In her study, Kathleen Nolan explores some of the finer points in the use of seals: the matrices buried with their owners, an effective way to make them unusable by others; those without handles, which must have served a function other than royal sealing; and the seal that she believes was made for Constance of Castile by her husband at the time of her death (Holladay 2010).

Seal deposits are sporadically documented and raise questions about the seals’ iconic behavior regarding the survival of the sacred. What does it mean to be buried with the deceased as untouched matrix seals? It prompts us to consider a different extinction of power beyond the physical act of breaking the seal. The seal’s disappearance from the public sphere seems equivalent to the objectual breaking of the seal before society. In the 12th century, several French sovereigns were buried with their seals. When the tomb of King Louis VII (c. 1180) was opened in the 18th century, the silver matrices of his seals were found (Erlande-Brandenburg 1975, p. 42; Bedos-Rezak 2006, p. 347). Likewise, the silver matrix of the seal of his second wife, Constance d’Arles (†1160), was discovered in her tomb.20 Finally, Louis VII’s daughter-in-law, Isabelle de Hainault (†1190), was also buried with her silver matrix, which was unearthed by Viollet-Le-Duc in 1858 during the excavation of the choir at Notre Dame of Paris.21 Many of these dispositions are testamentary. The testators know that their bodies will disintegrate but that their political–symbolic memory can endure if they are buried with their seal matrices. It is another form of survival, as a portrait that will pass to posterity or as an impersonation of power beyond death.

A final example that helps to explain survival as iconic behavior is the defamatory painting by an anonymous artist from 1465 (Figure 12) (Lentz 2004). Men undeserving of fame are hanged from the gallows along with their seals. They hang their physical corpses, but also their juridical persons in the form of their seal matrices: a way of ensuring their non-survival. But there are exceptions to this impersonation: in 1255, Marguerite de Sargines, abbess of Montivilliers, having died, the prioress wrote to the king, asking for permission to choose the new abbess and sealed the letter with the seal of the deceased, before it was broken (Douêt d’Arcq 1863–1868, pp. I, XXXIV).

11. Conclusions

I have used eleven examples of broken seals between the 12th and 15th centuries, mainly from the Crown of Aragon and cited by Ferran de Sagarra in his manuscript notes. In support of this material, nine other seals and nine different manuscripts have been used to cite different ceremonies or juridical acts. Some of the evidence used here was already known through printed sources, inventories, and catalogs but had yet to be analyzed beyond mere citation or description. In addition, some works of art have also been of help in contrasting the hypotheses put forward.

These primary and secondary sources, visual and textual, have made it possible to arrive here with particular security in proposing existing iconic behaviors of the breaking of the medieval seal. These materials’ visual and literary language is homogeneous, offering historical–evolutionary coherence. Formulas and bureaucratic practices are indeed repeated. Still, the narrative chromaticism and the variety of solutions used in the cases presented are striking, allowing original conclusions to be drawn.

The West’s iconographic representation mechanism, prepared by a robust metaphysics originating in the Greek world and enriched by vibrant rhetoric in the Roman world, served as a foundational principle for interpreting reality. The incarnations’ proposal of the Greek logos, characteristic of Christianity, emphasized a distinctly iconic approach to reality. Articulated in medieval terms, the Western Christian Middle Ages further reinforced these traditions.

In the Mediterranean world, despite the chronological extension of the manual subject before the advent of sigillography, the seal emerged as a necessary complement to the transmission of political power. The seal is indisputable proof of the connection between image and political authority. However, this text examines the notion that the medieval seal is more than a mere artistic or legal object; instead, it acts iconically. When analyzing an image transcending mere archaeology, the hypothesis of iconic behaviors associated with using and destroying sigillary matrices is plausible. The use and destruction of the seal raise new questions for medieval image theory.

An iconic behavior suggests that the image serves not just as a static object but adheres to rules that bring it to life beyond its physical materiality. This hypothesis, explored throughout this text, facilitates the enumeration and explanation of various iconic behaviors of the seal, which have been linked to and visualized during its physical and symbolic destruction.

To enrich this discourse, it has been necessary to turn to various authors who, in contemporary times, have comprehensively understood the processes of secularizing the sacred image before modernity. Alongside this understanding of the medieval image, perceived as both a physical and metaphysical act, including these authors enables a departure from a classical symbolic interpretation of the iconographic fact and allows for exploration into new dimensions of the image as an active subject. By considering the image not merely as an object, but rather as a subject independent of its historical and archaeological context, it has become easier to analyze the aspects of medieval seal breaking.

This documentary context has helped to describe different iconic behaviors of seal breaking: the why and how of the destruction of this type of image. The matrices are fragmented because what they represent (the body politic of the king) has disappeared by death (of his physical body) or a functional mutation (a bishop changing diocese, for example). The seal is destroyed by 1. physical violence; 2. concealment or “visual death” (those found inside sepulchers); or 3. a material metamorphosis (metallic) in which the sacred-essential survives, but not the iconographic-accidental (construction of liturgical vessels from fragments of matrices). This analysis has made it possible to define the notion of an iconic behavior generating legal rights and obligations in the institutional and personal framework of the Middle Ages. From here, I have proposed a series of characteristics of such behaviors, which will help to understand the dynamism of the sigillographic image.

This dynamism makes it possible to conceive the matrix and its seal beyond its static objectuality here and now. This image has been considered a synthesis, an act, rather than “a thing”. As a simple object, it was enough to use an iconographic–iconological method to understand it in its context. Semiotics performs its function as a symbol or metaphor by analyzing the signifier and the signified in a pre-existing cultural structure: the seal is a sign carrying some contents that it communicates in a feudo-vasallatic context or power structure. In this sense, it is based on a linguistic–structuralist rhetoric. However, from the hermeneutic point of view, it has been possible to go a little further.

In the face of the broken seal, a certain existentialism is awakened that helps to understand the meaning of the act. The description of the breaking mechanism can be made from a methodology that is not based on mimesis (iconology, symbolism) and, at the same time, is not linguistic (semiotics). I used the concept of a visual atlas (Aby Warburg), the theory of allegory (Walter Benjamin), and the notion of the primitive (Carl Einstein), which helped Georges Didi-Huberman to explain the possibility of making the history of images in an anachronistic way. On this basis, I presented the meaning behind breaking a seal.

Understood in this way, the history of medieval culture can be constructed through a montage of combinatory elements that help explain a totality. Owing to the understanding of breaking as iconic behavior, such a sigillographic image obtains a living presence by being “thrown” out of evolutionary development. Following Benjamin, each seal can be a symbolic fragment incorporated into an astral constellation, whose components, like the stars, are independent entities. What is significant is not the meaning underlying the seal (a star) but the dialogue between the various seals (the “lines” connecting the stars). According to this view, I have assumed that the seal images are not continuous elements of the same story but fragments of the same worldview.

Finally, when returning to the large-format pages of Ferran de Sagarra’s Sigil·lografia catalana, one can understand that today they constitute a significant archaeology of the main Catalan seals, typologies, and formal characteristics. However, viewed dynamically through the breakdown of the seal matrix and its behaviors, it is now possible to conceive them as a visual map that, as if it were a marvelous astral route, leads us to a deeper understanding of the history of the culture of the Crown of Aragon.