This project investigates how the study of the humanities intersected with the visual language that is today called heraldry. It focuses on the milieu around the Italian peninsula's longest-surviving dynasty, the Estensi. It follows the construction and evolution of their coat of arms between legal documents, scholarly conversations, family genealogies, and literary experiments, including epic poetry, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Intertwined with this story is the story of how so-called medieval heraldry itself came to be understood as a feudal language, a technical visualization of kinship and power relations, a sign of feudalism's opposition to humanism, and a prototype for anthropologies of images separate from the history of art. My wager is that heraldry's fortunes and misfortunes in early modernity shed light on some of the challenges that the humanist tradition still poses: the power of grammar to both preserve and ossify language; the problem of the dividing lines between fiction and history; the status of the family as a historical subject.