The shields that were intended for ceremonial or decorative purposes were very carefully made of layers of various materials, such as canvas and leather, which were stretched over and glued down to the wooden understructure in order to afford a key to the material that formed a surface for the subsequent work, in much the same way that panels were prepared for other kinds of painting at that time. The charges were then modelled in gesso, afterwards gilt and painted, or else were fashioned in modelled leather and pinned down to the surface. The spaces were often diversified with diapered patterns in raised lines of gesso or by means of punches, and when the gold and colour were added the whole effect was extremely rich and beautiful. Of such pageant shields excellent specimens were in the great Bardini collection, now dispersed. [Illustration: FIG. 18.--Italian Decoration Shield. Fourteenth Century.] Fig. 18, a kite-shaped shield of the fourteenth century, bears bendwise the word Libertas, the motto of the republic of the town of Luroques, in beautiful letters, whose treatment is perfectly appropriate to the gesso in which they are executed. The shape of the shield follows closely one of the early Norman forms, and is somewhat of the same proportion, being 44 inches high by 21 inches broad. The square pavoise (Fig. 19) of wood covered with vellum is painted with the arms of the Buonamici, and over them as crest is the portrait of the head of that family, Bienheureux Buonamici. [Illustration: FIG. 19.--Florentine Decoration Shield. Fourteenth Century.] At the time that the use of shields in actual combat was becoming less and less frequent, the invention of engraving on metal plates, the improvement in wood-engraving, and finally the production of printed books, opened a fresh field for heraldic art in the making of the plates of arms which marked the patronage of a literary work, or in the more familiar bookplate which signified the ownership of the book. Then began that long series of beautiful little works by Martin Schongauer, Israel van Meckenen, and by Dürer and their successors. In the large number of designs thus produced the shields, in many instances, became much less simple, ceasing to be a representation of the real defence, though some of them were developments from it. The cusped forms such as Figs. 20 and 21, which came into use in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and became still more frequent in the Tudor period, perhaps have some affinity with the elaborate fluted armour of the time, but others were frank adaptations of the contemporary decorative scrolls and were really cartouches more or less in place of a shield. [Illustration: FIG. 20.--Fifteenth Century.] [Illustration: FIG. 21.--Sixteenth Century.]