Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 2).djvu/79

 and the bull, seen in the auxiliary shields, figure in the arms of Barbara Torelli, to whom Ercole Bentivoglio was married, while the helmet seems to answer well enough to Ercole's period. There is one puzzling motif for which we cannot satisfactorily account, the word (signifying the fruit medlar), repeated four times in the grooves of the forehead-piece. It has been suggested that might be a battle cry, abbreviated from ''dare nespole''—to give a beating; but if that were the case the spelling should certainly be and not. At the back of the skull-piece is an armourer's mark (much rubbed), which we must confess resembles but little that employed by the Missaglia family, to whom we should have otherwise unhesitatingly ascribed this most beautiful head-piece. The mark is most probably of Milanese origin, but unlike any of which we have a record.

Milanese, second half of the XVth century, said to have been made for Ercole Bentivoglio (b. 1459, d. 1507). Collection: Tsarskoe Selo, Petrograd

Contemporary illustrations of salades of this type are numerous; and among the best-known pictures in which an example figures is the fine painting of a youthful warrior by Francesco Torbido in the Uffizi, Florence, formerly described as the portrait of the General Gattamelata (see vol. i, page 194, Fig. 230). In this picture a head-piece of grand proportions