If you have ever sent your knights into battle carrying shields emblazoned with your family’s crest or your domain’s colors, you will easily understand escutcheons. They are nothing other than stone embodiments of your shields or crests.

In some Italian towns, you can still see colorful escutcheons high on a palazzo’s stucco façade.

In New York, however, the preferred color is gray, usually in limestone or, more rarely, terracotta, and the preferred “field” is blank, more often than not. The Metropolitan Club on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 60th Street has three escutcheons on its side-street façade, and the center has a large “M.”

Many escutcheons with rather blank faces do feature curlicues, or garlands, or supportive figures. If you walk around the city’s precincts of pre-war luxury apartment buildings, you are likely to espy quite a few escutcheons, if you are willing to crane your neck. Escutcheons are merely decorative elements meant to enliven broad expanses of façades and impart a sense of courtliness. Stringcourses and bandcourses, of course, horizontally enliven façades, a pre-magic marker form of brushstroking and highlighting, but in most cases they are continuous and tend to be placed above the base of a building and near the top. They have vertical counterparts in piers and quoins, the former usually received for the middle section of façades and the latter almost always exclusively found at the corners.

The various “courses” and piers and quoins are always tucked beneath a building’s cornice at the roofline, and these elements give accents and rhythm and punctuation to the façades just as much as the pattern of windows, known as fenestration, does.

The escutcheons are usually brought in only in a desperate attempt to jazz up a bland or huge façade, or to add an appearance of noble heritage.