Azure

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Azure

This article is about the heraldic tincture
Tincture (heraldry)

In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to blazon a coat of arms....
. For other meanings, see azure (disambiguation)
Azure (disambiguation)

Azure is a blue tincture.Azure may also refer to* Azure , between blue and cyan* Azure, Montana* Azure , a residential tower in Dallas, Texas, USA...
.

In heraldry

Heraldry

Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of devising, granting, and blazoning Coat of arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms....
, azure is the tincture

Tincture (heraldry)

In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to blazon a coat of arms....
with the colour blue

Azure (color)

Azure is a blue color on the HSL color space at 210 degrees. Azure is the hue that is halfway between blue and cyan. Its complementary color is orange ....
, and belongs to the class of tinctures called "colours". In engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass engraving are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustra...
, it is sometimes depicted as a region of horizontal lines or else marked with either az. or b. as an abbreviation.

The term azure derives from the Persian

Persian language

name=Persian|nativename=|pronunciation=[f??r'si]|image=|caption=Farsi in Perso-Arabic script |states= Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain....
?????? lazhward, which was the name of a place known for its deposits of the deep blue stone now called lapis lazuli

Lapis lazuli

Lapis lazuli is a semi-precious stone prized since antiquity for its intense blue color.Lapis lazuli has been mined in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan for 6,500 years, and trade in the stone is ancient enough for lapis jewelry to have been found at Predynastic Egyptian sites, and lapis beads at neolithic burials in Mehrgarh, the C...
(stone of lazhward).

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In heraldry

Heraldry

Tincture (heraldry)

In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to blazon a coat of arms....
with the colour blue

Azure (color)

Engraving

Persian language

Lapis lazuli

Old French

Old French was the Romance languages dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300....
by the twelfth century, from which the word passed into use in the blazon

Blazon

In heraldry and heraldic vexillology, a blazon is a formal description of, most often, a coat of arms or flag, which enables a person to construct or reconstruct the appropriate image....
of coats of arms

Coat of arms

A coat of arms, more properly called an armorial achievement, armorial bearings or often just arms for short, in European tradition, is a design belonging to a particular person and used by them in a wide variety of ways....
.

As an heraldic colour, the word azure simply means "blue

Blue

Blue is a colour, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 440?490 Nanometre....
". It is one of many concepts with both a French and German word in English, the former being used by the French-speaking nobles following the Norman Conquest of England

Norman conquest of England

The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 AD with the invasion of the Kingdom of England by the troops of William I of England, Duke of Normandy , and his victory at the Battle of Hastings....
in 1066 and the latter being used by the commoners of Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxons is the term usually used to describe the invading tribes in the south and east of Great Britain starting from the early 5th century AD, and their creation of the English nation, lasting until the Norman conquest of England of 1066....
stock. So while French-speaking heralds described banners as azure, commoners simply called them blue. Because it comes from a French word that simply means "blue", a wide range of colour values is used in the depiction of azure in armory and flags.

In addition to the standard blue tincture called azure, there is a lighter blue sometimes found that is called bleu celeste

Bleu celeste

Bleu celeste is a rarely-occurring tincture in heraldry . This tincture is sometimes also called ciel or simply celeste. It is depicted in a lighter shade than the range of shades of the more traditional tincture azure, which is the standard blue used in heraldry....
or "sky blue". Neither azure nor bleu celeste is precisely defined as a particular shade of blue, but azure is consistently depicted in a much darker shade.

Azure is said to represent the following:

Of jewels, the sapphire
Sapphire

Sapphire refers to gem varieties of the mineral corundum, an aluminium oxide , when it is a color other than red, in which case the gem would instead be a ruby....
Of heavenly bodies, Jupiter
Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the Solar system by size planet within the Solar System. It is two and a half times as massive as all of the other planets in our Solar System combined....
(The planet Jupiter is further associated with the metal tin in traditional alchemical/occultistic lore
Classical planets in western alchemy

Alchemy in the Western World and other locations where it was widely practiced was allied and intertwined with traditional Babylonian-Greek style astrology; in numerous ways they were built to complement each other in the search for occult ....
)

Azure

See also