A concise but comprehensive introduction in Italian and English helps the reader to collocate the Armorial in its correct historical context; special attention is given to the history of heraldic decorative arts and manuscript and bibliographical sources. An index of over 1200 coats of arms is included.

Attributed to Bernardo Benvenuti, prior of Santa Felicita in Florence and an antique dealer of the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II de’ Medici who methodically and competently collated ancient Armorials and prioristi, this important Florentine Armorial numbered among its manuscript sources (many of which have long been lost) a certain Libro Antiquo dell’Arme del 1302, the year in which Dante was exiled. This in itself is sufficient to render the importance of this codex. Within its pages the reader will find the coats of arms of all the families of Florence and from the surrounding countryside from whom the priori of the local government were drawn in the period from 1282 and 1531; inked and painted, they number over 1200 and can be consulted here through their alphabetic index.

This Armorial, which is currently conserved in a private collection in Paris, was probably purchased from the Museo privato della Casa Fiorentina Antica created by Elia Volpi in Florence in the historic Davanzati palazzo, the furnishings of which were dispersed at an auction in New York in 1916.

Apart from its significant aesthetic value, this Armorial is important because it documents the source of each coat of arms: in many cases these are gravestones or artistic monuments which have long since disappeared and faded from living memory, but the documentation in the Armorial makes it possible to assign the coat of arms to its family.

The reader can admire the coat of arms of Dante’s maestro, Ser Brunetto Latini, who penned the Livre du TrEsor in France, as well as those of other well-known names from the fields of Literature, the Arts, Science and world history, ranging from Amerigo Vespucci to Cavalcanti and Boccaccio, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Taddeo Gaddi and Galileo Galilei.

Side by side with the coats of arms of the historic nobility and of lesser known families the reader will find the crests of the various Arts, the government offices and the magistrates, and of the sestieri and quartieri of Florence and their standards