The crescent moon is a growing moon,a moon of promise. With a name that comes from the Latin crescere, meaning “to grow,” it says you’re not just beginning but also continuing a process, an in medias res that will keep getting better. So it’s the perfect symbol for Diana, goddess of the hunt and the countryside, virginity, childbirth, nighttime, and of course the moon.
It’s also just right for our very own Diane, the noblewoman who never aged, who remained pure of heart, who pursued what she wanted and then gloried in it.
That little uptilted crescent on her head is still telling everybody exactly who she was. And she modified it to decorate her castles, clothes, jewels, wee gifts, and tokens she might hand out as favors. Henri adopted it for one of his own emblems, an H sitting in that upturned crescent, as if Diane were embracing him. It was consummate Renaissance branding.
In a low-literacy era, symbolic signage was everything. Inns and taverns famously used odd images to stand out in memory—you’d stay at the sign of the Tin Pot, the Crowned Bull, the Cock and Magpie. In the same way, if you were a noble, you needed to stake a visual claim wherever possible. Your shield? That emblem will be the last thing your enemy sees when you smite him. Wooden inlay in a ceiling? So pretty, and it’ll remind people who’s hosting this shindig.
Walls, jewelry, bedspreads embroidered with gold bullion? Yes and yes and yes.
As Diane’s influence grew, she tripled the message to three crescent moons interlocked in an elegant shape that echoed Borromean rings—an ancient symbol in which three complete circles are linked to show the interconnectedness of existence. That open end of Diane’s moon says to me that she was willing to entertain some new ideas once in a while … and also that if you drifted close to the moon goddess, you just might find yourself drawn into an almost-circle from which it would be hard to get free. Then again, why would you want to? Henri borrowed the Borromean crescents too.
Visuals are great, but you also have a name. Renaissance nobles put their initials everywhere they would fit, and if they were part of a couple, they entwined the letters. (So sweet, right?) So when Henri had his people design an emblem, he very properly combined his H with a pair of Cs for his wife … but, um, doesn’t it look more like an H made with two Ds instead? I, for one, have to remind myself to look for the Cs in there. And when I do see a C, I notice that it’s thin at the points and swells in the middle. Doesn’t it look remarkably like the crescent moon? If I were Catherine, I would have felt slapped, insulted, resentful … poisonous … overpowered and stifled by those outrageous Ds. The visual she chose for her emblem, as of the day Henri died, represented the source of her power and the reason she was able to kick Diane to the castle curb: It was a broken lance, with a Latin motto meaning, “From this come my tears and pain.” And from tears and pain came her power. From that day forward, also, she wore nothing but black. Like her rival, she knew a good bit of history comes down to self-marketing.
