Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 2).djvu/168

 rust oxidization the surfaces of the varying parts had to be placed upon the burnishing wheel in order to make them harmonize in general effect. Individual helms of the German and even of the Italian types are occasionally met with in private collections; but, though many may be interesting, the authenticity of the majority is open to suspicion.

Our next group of the great tilting helms comprises those of Italian and of Spanish make. Let the Italian examples be considered first. Looking at the illustrations the reader will at once notice a peculiarity in the almost cylindrical form of the helm and in the flatness of the skull-piece, features which are more characteristic of the group of English helms than of the essentially German group just described. As typically Italian and as early of its kind as any known to us is the helm in the Musée d'Artillerie of Paris, H 11 (Fig. 470). Its date can safely be assigned to the third quarter of the XVth century. In the official catalogue of the Musée d'Artillerie it is described as German; but there can be no doubt of its Italian origin. It is remarkably shallow, and only a careful study of that scholarly passage, in his Dictionnaire du Mobilier Français (vol. ii, page 391), in which M. Viollet-le-Duc explains how this helm was set upon the head, renders it possible to understand how it served as a defensive head-piece (Fig. 471).

Comprehensively German, about 1515. Metropolitan Museum of New York