Whilst searching online for images for a forthcoming talk I came upon an article from 2015 produced by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles about two of their fifteenth century illuminated manuscripts.
In the first the identification of the coat of arms of the family of the man who commissioned the volume helped, and the more so when his mark of cadency was recognised, and thus identify him. In this instance a seventeenth century overpainting of the original arms had impeded identification. It is interesting to see that such a manuscript was still valued and considered worth appropriation by a princely family two centuries later.
The second manuscript has a still unidentified cost of arms, but the grisaille painting of the young knight kneeling before St Anthony is both charming in itself and resonant of ideas in chivalric romances such as Tirant lo Blanc from the same period.
The article about these two manuscripts, with illustrations and a bibliography, can be seen at Heraldry Illuminated: Deciphering Coats of Arms and Other Manuscript Mysteries
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