Modern research on medieval seals has always stressed the power of an image to act as a sign of authenticity. Thus iconographical patterns have been assessed according to their ability to persuade others to believe the sealed message and to accept the seal image as a representation of its holder. But sealing in the Middle Ages was not only about creating a representative image. It was also about the visual and material portrayal of the seal holder’s identity and the ability of the medium to reproduce faithfully that same identity.1 Since early Scholasticism, Christ’s Incarnation following the Annunciation was considered as an act of sealing and man was thought to be an impression from God’s matrix.2 The shaping of a three-dimensional image by impressing a stamp into a soft material like wax was a key aspect of a cultural technique, which was considered to be quasi-sacred. But how could corporations, which started using seals for validating their charters from the eleventh century onwards, reproduce ‘incarnate-like’ their abstract identity in a three-dimensional medium? The large number of corporate seals surviving from the later Medieval Ages in the Latin West bears witness to an enormous variety and heterogeneity of artistic solutions.3