This class of armour was more for parade purposes than for actual service in the field, and it was much used in the lists. Most suits of the kind were provided with a set of reinforcing pieces for jousts and tourneying. These pieces have already been fully described under “The Tournament” heading, and illustrated in Figs. 10 and 11. The amount of artistic skill of the very highest order that was lavished on the ornamentation of armour in the later “middle ages,” and especially during the “renaissance,” was a remarkable feature of the times, and artists of the greatest repute found constant and lucrative employment in designing for this purpose. Suits were finely and delicately chased, engraved, russeted, and enriched with gold, embossed, damascened, appliqued, and decorated with repoussé work. [Illustration: Fig. 31.--Suits by Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck.] Italy and Germany were the workshops for the finest specimens, and Milan, Brescia, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Venice, Florence, besides other places, vied with one another in the production of specimens of consummate skill and elegance. French examples were coarser and less artistic in every way, while there was but little of knightly armour made in England, and that little, excepting for a very brief period, was of a vastly inferior description. The number of artists and craftsmen, in widely different branches of art and manufacture, who were employed to design, turn out, and finish a suit of armour, or a weapon for war or for the chase, was simply legion; and, of course, in the case of enriched suits, or arms, still more were brought into requisition. There is the designer, modeller, steel, silver and gold smiths, carvers, enamellers, inlayers, engravers, repoussé or workers in hammered work, damasceners, polishers, and hosts of other craftsmen, each contributing his quota of industry and skill to one complete whole. Artists of the very highest celebrity, such as Donatello,[33] Michael Angelo, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, and Hans Holbein, had no higher ideal than in designing for this kind of work, and some of them were engaged in engraving also. It is well known that many armour-smiths employed other artists for designing and ornamentation, while others, like Kunz Lochner of Nuremberg, did their own embellishing as well as the smith’s work. An illustration is given in Fig. 31 of two very fine suits by Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck. They are both tastefully engraved, and appear to be of a somewhat earlier make than the archducal suit by the same master, referred to in a previous chapter, and differ from it, as well as from each other, in some rather important features, especially in the form of the cuirasses and tassets. Only one of the three has pikeguards. These suits were made about 1540. [Illustration: Fig. 32.--Cuirass and Tassets, at Dresden.]