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 Blasons (Coats of arms) are known as heraldic symbols that characterize a family, a city or an organization, but they are also poems that emerged in the mid-16th century in France. Around Clément Marot, a group of court poets collectively committed themselves to emblazoning parts of the female body, that is, observing, describing and praising them. These blasons – dedicated to the throat, the lips, the eyebrow, the foot or the nipple – later gave rise to the counter-blasons, their satirical and critical counterparts.
These literary blasons– contemporaneous with advances in anatomical dissection – offer an unprecedented and unsettling pact between perception, objectification and aestheticization. The body of the other – the body of the emblazoned one – becomes a field of observation – divisible and appropriable; the Blason puts him on a pedestal as much as it empties him of his humanity. Historically, the literary Blason is therefore the expression of the privilege of those who discover and regard the world and others as their possession, from a superior point of view.