Sorry! I Lied. (Sort of)

Okay, I know that last time, I said we'd start looking at some real heraldry from Antwerp, Belgium. Apparently, I lied. Or was incorrect. Or I was acting on incomplete or inaccurate information. Or, to quote from the movie The Blues Brothers, "Honest... I ran out of gas. I... I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! IT WASN'T MY FAULT!"

Well, okay, maybe it was my fault. Sorry about that!

So today we're going to look at a couple more shields, one which has a "coat of arms" and one which is a very heraldry-like logo.

The coat of arms was found on the Onze-Lieve-VrouweCollege Lagere School, or in English, Our Dear Lady College Primary School. Here is the full sign over the door.

And in the lower left-hand corner, you can see the coat of arms:

I am not going to attempt a blazon here; it's very complex and I'm not sure what the thing in the middle just below the ring of the pendent chain is supposed to be. Frankly, placed as it is between the two dogs statant respectant, it reminds me of nothing quite so much as a dog food dish. But I'm feel confident that a dog food dish is not what they had in mind when designing this shield.

The other almost heraldry, or heraldry-like logo, was found in front of a jewelers called De Gouden Ram, or The Golden Ram.

Doing business, at it quite unmistakenly proclaims, "Since 1962", they do some beautiful gem and gemstone carving and mounting, at least from what I've seen of their work on Google and Facebook. (Yes, they even have their own Facebook page!)

But, of course, it was the heraldic logo -- in two places! A carved shield over the door and a painted one on a hanging sign -- that caught my heraldically-inclined eye.

These are both blazoned the same way, because we are looking at the reverse side of the sign here; the ram is not contourny, it's just the back side of the shield; it faces the other way (towards the building) on the other, front, side. The blazon for these shields would be: Sable a ram couchant or. Nice, simple, easy to identify; all the things, in fact, that a good coat of arms ought to be.