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 the goldsmith as decorator, were all called into requisition. It was at Milan that this artistic movement began and was carried to its highest perfection, and before long all the Courts of Italy and those of several other countries vied in obtaining the works of the great master armourers of that city. It is towards the close of the XVth century, in pieces coming from the workshops of the Missaglias and their kinsmen the Negrolis, that we first meet with the artistic decoration of armour. By this I mean decoration executed on the actual steel of which the pieces are made, for in the XIVth and earlier part of the XVth centuries richly ornamented armour is recorded and is met with on effigies etc., but this armour seems always to have been enriched by the use of super-*imposed ornament in other metals or in precious stones. It is true that on the wings of the knee-pieces of the statue of Gattamelata at Padua, by Donatello, finished in 1453, there is an ornament which, if the armour were of steel, could only be embossed decoration. Most curiously too, this ornament is such that if one met with the actual knee-piece in steel, one would certainly attribute it to nearly a century later. But there is absolutely no proof that any such embossed armour existed in reality at that date, and this enrichment, easy to execute in bronze, was probably only due to the artistic and strongly decorative sense of the great sculptor. Ornament apparently repoussé, so delicate and beautiful in design that it might have been wrought by a Negroli half a century later, is also found on the armour of the kneeling statue of the General Vittorio Cappello, by Antonio Rizzo, set up in 1480 over the porch of St. Aponal at Venice. If armour thus embossed really existed at that date, not a single scrap of it has come down to us. The Milanese decoration of steel armour, and it is also found on sword blades of the same epoch, at first consisted of delicate and sobre etching and gilding, foliated scrolls decorating the rectilinear or spiral flutings and ridges, which in the XVth century had been designed, partly perhaps as ornament, but also to render the pieces stiffer without increasing their weight, and above all to deflect the point of a hostile weapon and guide it as it glanced off the piece. On the flat surfaces are also found occasionally figures of the Madonna, of Saints, or, but more rarely, of personages in the costume of the time, but all this used sparingly and with great sobriety. It has sometimes been supposed that Albert Dürer was the inventor of etching on steel, but it was certainly practised by armourers before Dürer began to take impressions from etched plates, and it was in taking these impressions that he showed his inventive genius. There exist two helmets which I should be tempted to regard as the earliest very richly decorated pieces of armour in existence, and, in contradistinction to those I have been speaking of, their whole surface is covered with ornament. These are two sallads at Madrid, one of Italian form, the other of German fashion, and both bearing the mark of the XVth century Negrolis of Milan. Owing to the Oriental character of the very rich design with which they are covered, they used to be attributed to Boabdil, the last king of Grenada. But it is now known that in the album repre