GONFALON. - It derives from the ancient German Gundfano, which is equivalent to Kriegsfalme, that is, war banner. In current usage it has the same meaning as standard. Used in the Middle Ages as a religious emblem and as a military banner, it was carried at the head of processions and raised by military companies. Villani relates that in Florence the captain of the people in 1257 consigned 20 gonfalons to the corporals of the companies.
In the second half of the 13th century, very numerous companies of penitents gathered under the emblem of a gonfalon. In Rome, as early as the 14th century, there was the Confraternity of the Gonfalon. In the Veneto it was the custom to place in the squares, as ornament, a standard or gonfalon. Numerous are the ancient gonfalons, painted or embroidered, that have come down to us, some executed on the occasion of particular events or to implore singular graces. There are many of them in Umbria. In Perugia, for example, there is one by Berto di Giovanni in the Cathedral, another by Perugino in the Pinacoteca, and yet another by Bonfigli at S. Maria Nuova and S. Bernardino. In such gonfalons there is represented at the center the Virgin sheltering under her broad mantle the inhabitants of the city from the arrows of the plague hurled by Christ; at the sides the patron saints. Novel is the iconography of the gonfalon by Niccolò Alunno for the city of Assisi (Priesterhaus of Kevelaer): the Virgin is represented on one side as intercessor, and for the first time, in place of the kneeling devotees, there appears the vision of the entire city. Also interesting is the gonfalon of the Pinacoteca of Città di Castello, painted by Timoteo Vite and Raphael. Numerous are the 16th-century gonfalons, of the Baroque age, and also modern ones, still used as banners of confraternities or religious associations, some embroidered with exceptional richness. - See pl. LXIII.
Bibliography4 works
Serena Madonna Setti