Coat of arms of Argentina

Description

The designer of the coat of arms is unknown. Three men are often mentioned as possible creators—Alvear, Monteagudo, and Vieytes—but no evidence confirms this. Years earlier, President Bernardino Rivadavia had commissioned a Peruvian, Antonio Isidoro Castro, to design an Argentine coat of arms, but neither that design nor the earlier one has ever been found. The coat of arms features at its top the gold-yellow Sun of May, which also appears on the flag of Argentina.

This rising sun symbolizes the emergence of Argentina, as referenced in the first version of the national anthem with the phrase "a new and glorious nation rises to the surface of the Earth." In the central ellipse, two shaking hands represent the unity of the Argentine provinces. The hands together hold a pike, which signifies power and the willingness to defend freedom, topped by a Phrygian cap. The hands stand for friendship, peace, unity, and brotherhood.

The pike is brown, representing wood, and the Phrygian cap is red, like the traditional liberty cap of the French Revolution era. The combination of hands, pike, and cap illustrates the national motto "en unión y libertad" (in unity and freedom), conveying that in unity there is power, and in power there is freedom. The Phrygian cap was worn by inhabitants of Phrygia in Anatolia and is often confused with the Pileus, a hat that in ancient Rome symbolized freed slaves, who were touched by their owners with a wooden pike upon liberation.