The Quartered Spanish Standard

About

Three charts in this collection — Paris 1837, New York c. 1864, and the American sheet of c. 1899 — print a “Spanish Standard” that is not a field bearing arms but a whole flag made of arms: a sheet of royal quarterings spread edge to edge, repeated among the three nearly stroke for stroke. The design is a fixture of the chart tradition, yet it is scarcely documented outside it — standard modern references, including the usual encyclopaedic accounts of Spanish flags, pass over it. This page collects the depictions, describes the composition, and states the open question.

Status: Preliminary. The identifications of individual quarterings below are observational and tentative; the search for the design's documentary source is the point of the page.

Documented Comparison

The documented royal flags of Spain in the charts' own period were of a different kind: the royal arms borne on a plain field, as the c. 1720 Homann panel in this collection correctly shows — the crowned arms within the collar of the Golden Fleece on white, the form of the Bourbon marine standard. Nothing in the ordinary nineteenth-century record prescribes a standard quartered across the whole sheet.

Where the composition does find parallels is much earlier. Royal standards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries commonly displayed the sovereign's greater arms across the entire cloth, and the greater arms of the Habsburg kings of Spain contained precisely the elements the charts draw: Castile and León, the pales of Aragon, the Aragon-Sicily saltires, the bendy of Burgundy, the black quarter with the golden lion of Brabant, the small lion of Flanders — and, between 1580 and 1640, the escutcheon of Portugal.

The Composition

As drawn on the 1837 sheet and copied by the two American charts, the flag reads approximately: a canton quartering Castile and León (castles and lions); the pales of Aragon; saltire-quarters bearing eagles, matching the arms of Aragon-Sicily; a band row; the bendy of Burgundy; a black quarter with a golden lion, matching Brabant; a yellow quarter with small beasts suggesting Flanders and Tyrol; and at the centre hoist an escutcheon that in the 1837 drawing carries a pattern of five discs — strongly suggesting the quinas of Portugal — with a small blue fleur-de-lis shield (Anjou/Bourbon) beneath it. The 1864 and 1899 charts copy the disc-escutcheon without evidently understanding it, and the 1864 chart adds a row of crowns.

If the Portugal reading is right, the model behind the chart-tradition standard would date, at least in part, to the union of the crowns — a flag design of c. 1580–1640 still being copied in 1899. That is stated here as a hypothesis to be tested, not a conclusion: engravers garble, and a dotted shield admits other readings.

Collected Depictions

Note: the c. 1720 Depiction

The Homann sheet shows the other, documented type: the crowned royal arms within the collar of the Golden Fleece on a white field. It stands on this page as the control — what a royal Spanish flag of the period actually looked like in respectable contemporary record — and as evidence that the quartered-sheet form of the later charts is not simply “what charts always drew.”

Note: the 1837 Depiction

The earliest and finest quartered-sheet rendering in the collection, and the presumptive model — direct or shared — for the two American charts. The drawing is precise enough to read individual quarterings, including the disc-escutcheon discussed above. Notably, the sheet advertises itself as drawn from official documents, and its Spanish war and merchant ensigns are impeccable; whatever source supplied this Pavillon Royal, the compiler treated it as authoritative.

Note: the c. 1864 Depiction

Johnson's chart repeats the composition quarter for quarter — Castile/León canton, disc-escutcheon, Aragon pales, eagle saltires, Burgundy bendy, the Brabant lion on black — adding a row of crowns and losing heraldic precision in the colour work. The correspondence with the 1837 sheet is close enough to establish a copying relationship, direct or through a common intermediary.

Note: the c. 1899 Depiction

The chain's terminal sighting, printed on the eve of the Spanish–American War: the same quarters again, cruder still, on a mass-market sheet whose Spanish war and merchant flags are otherwise conventional. Sixty years separate this panel from the 1837 model with no sign the design was ever checked against Spanish practice in between.

The Open Question

What document, chart, or actual flag stands at the head of this chain? Candidates to test: an early modern royal standard (the Portugal-bearing greater arms point to c. 1580–1640); an eighteenth-century chart tradition not yet represented in this collection; or a genuine but poorly recorded ceremonial standard of later date. The next steps are to search earlier chart traditions for the same composition and to compare the quarterings, once imaged at higher magnification, against dated versions of the Spanish greater arms.

References

• Flaggen aller seefahrenden Potenzen und Nationen, panel Königl: Spanische, in the present collection.
• Pavillons et Cocardes des Principales Puissances du Globe, panel Espagne — Pavillon Royal, in the present collection.
• Johnson's New Chart of National Emblems, panel Spanish Standard., in the present collection.
• Flags of All Nations, panel Spain (Standard), in the present collection.
• Dated versions of the Spanish royal greater arms for comparison of quarterings. Full citations pending.