Armour in England, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of James the FirstGardner, John Starkie
History
Armour in England, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of James the First
Gardner, John Starkie
Armor -- England
Maximilian armour is greatly favoured by collectors. There are
cap-à-pie and barded suits in the Tower and the Wallace collections, at
Warwick, and in the collections of Mr. Panmure Gordon and Sir Wheatman
Pearson. The horse armour, which nearly entirely sheathes the head,
neck, and fore- and hind-quarters, is fluted, gracefully curved, and
except the crinière, worked in large pieces, the lower margins curving
well away from the flanks. Three-quarter and half suits are well
represented in the Tower and the Wallace collections, the one figured,
Fig. 12, being a finely typical example brought from Strawberry Hill,
and now the property of the Duke of Westminster. This armour seems
to have been at times partly gilded, and instances exist where small
badges are repeated to form bands of raised work between the flutes. It
is sometimes engraved with borders of floral design, either edging the
different pieces, or more boldly treated as in Fig. 13 from the Burges
Collection in the British Museum. Though mainly worn in Germany, fluted
armour became everywhere the fashion, the portrait by Piero di Cosimo,
Fig. 14, in the National Gallery affording an admirable representation
of a breast-plate with delicate flutes on the lower half. An actual
specimen resembling this, but engraved, is in the collection from
Rhodes at Woolwich. The corselets furnished to the Swiss pike-men by
the Milanese appear also to have been of this pattern. Besides the
bellows visor, and one puffed out to give breathing space and fluted,
the visor was at times embossed into the form of a grotesque face with
mustachios. Sometimes the helmets in which this occurs had a pair of
fan-like appendages in pierced and fluted steel, forming a dignified
and wing-like crest. The remarkable example in the Tower, Fig. 15,
once silvered, and presented by Maximilian himself to Henry VIII., has
a pair of ram's horns instead of wings. It has since been painted and
rendered more absurd by spectacles, and assigned without any reason to
the King's jester, Will Somers.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--_Helmet. Presented by Maximilian to Henry
VIII. Tower of London._]
These grotesque helmets were sometimes worn with armour puffed and
slashed to imitate civilian dress. A few pieces of this kind are in
the Tower, but the Wallace Collection possesses a three-quarter suit,
slashed, puffed, engraved, and gilt, the armet having the bellows
visor and five-roped comb. The extreme of exaggeration to which German
armourers were carried is seen in the suit in the Ambras Collection,
figured by Hefner and by Hewett, in which the cloth bases as well
as the puffed sleeves of the civilian are carefully imitated in
steel. The visor is singularly grotesque, and the whole presents a
ludicrous and ungainly appearance, as well as being quite unserviceable.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--_Cap-à-pie Suit of Henry VIII., on a Horse
barded with Embossed Burgundian Armour of the time of Henry VII. Tower
of London._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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