Recompiling my family-name coat of arms

I had always vaguely known that my family name has Tuscan roots. There was a Mario Guiducci, for instance, a friend and pupil of Galileo who in 1619 put his name to a Discourse on Comets, a treatise that, as it happens, was largely written by Galileo himself. One evening I found myself thinking about this again, and doing some idle research online I stumbled into the various coats of arms attached to the name. I was fascinated by them, not because I believe in noble blood or want to claim any, but because the idea of having an image tied to my name, a logo, somehow made my own lineage feel concrete.

It turns out my family name has gone through several rebrandings. The one I felt most connected to belongs to the Guiducci da Mana del Lion Nero, of Florence: a shield split down the middle, vair of silver and blue on one side, a red and gold checkerboard on the other, and in the center a small white escutcheon with the Florentine lily. I have no evidence whatsoever that it’s my branch. I might descend from this family, from the Guiducci of Empoli who carry completely different arms, or from neither. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that someone claimed a lineage that wasn’t theirs, and at least I’m saying so up front.

What I found online, though, was a tiny, blurry image on a heraldry site that might not exist in ten years. So I decided to redraw it as a clean vector file. It felt like a small act of digital preservation: a 120-pixel scan rots, an SVG doesn’t, and anyone who wants it can take it, modify it, recolor it.

The blazon, the formal description of the arms, is essentially source code. “Partito: nel primo, vaiato di argento e di azzurro; nel secondo, scaccato di rosso e di oro” is not a poetic phrase: it’s drawing instructions. Two heralds in two different centuries, starting from the same text, will draw the same recognizable shield. There was something surprisingly fitting, then, about taking this twelfth-century source code and recompiling it into the source code of the twenty-first: an SVG, the Latin of vector graphics. And then putting the result under version control, which is just our way of doing what the heralds were already doing, keeping a description precise enough that anyone can redraw it.

If you happen to be called Guiducci and ended up here searching your own surname: hello. We’re probably related, in the loose way that anyone sharing a name is. I put everything in a repository under a free license. If you’re interested in the technical details, I wrote up how I reconstructed it in the README: github.com/gosub/guiducci-coat-of-arms

P.S. If you ever find yourself in Fiesole, go look at Palazzo Pretorio and search among the carved stones on the facade.