escutcheon

For a modern apartment in a Nashville high-rise, however, he chose a streamlined lever with a flat profile and square escutcheon from Nanz: “It’s a modern lever, done in a clean and simple way.”

Many single-handle bathroom faucets include an “escutcheon,” or deck plate, for this very reason.

And though the sign out front, with its lion-flanked escutcheon and Gothic lettering, gives off a whiff of high society, the club’s membership spans classes, embracing socialites and police officers, lawyers and factory workers.

In the right-hand panel, a crimson escutcheon hovers, like a danger signal, against a vortex of tangled, scribbled lines.

The 16th-century escutcheon of Potosí, a city on the high Andean plain in southern Bolivia, declared it the “treasure of the world, king of all mountains and envy of kings”.