Heraldic decor as a research problem: The Sala dos Brasões of the Sintra Palace and Heraldry in Medieval and Early Modern State Rooms

The present collection of papers owes its existence to a conundrum: the sala dos brasões of the Sintra Palace. Added to the palace in the first quarter of the 16th century, the meaning and use of this large hall in the palace, which only can be accessed via several narrow corridors, is still in the dark. The only indications are given by its architecture and the large heraldic programme it features in the ceiling and on the walls. This heraldic representation is another example of the particular use of heraldry by the Portuguese crown, which may or may not find its parallels at other European courts. A question, that has been addressed in a joint research programme, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, which set out to study the very use of heraldry in late medieval Portugal as a means of political communication and to place it in its European context. The present collection of papers is the first part of this contextualisation. It addresses the use of heraldry in medieval and early modern staterooms, a subject which hasn’t been studied so far. It is therefore up to this collection, to provide a first synopsis of the different uses of heraldry in this kind of representative halls and comparable rooms across different social and institutional contexts and geographical regions in Europe.