Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/300

 little fringe of real mail was very common in Northern Italy during the XVth century and in the beginning of the XVIth. It can be seen in numerous Italian paintings and on monuments of the period, and it is not met with in other countries.

In many respects this harness resembles one now in the Imperial Armoury of Vienna, which was until the early years of the XIXth century preserved in the Castle of Ambras, where the authorities assigned it to the ownership of Philippe le Beau. This suit is made to fit a boy of fourteen or fifteen years of age. Now, as Philippe was fifteen years of age in 1493, and as the suit appears to have been made between 1510 and 1515, it is more probable that it belonged to Charles V, who was born in 1500 and therefore was in 1515 of the age corresponding to the size of the harness. The shape of the pleated tonnlet is the same, the braces and cuisses are decorated with the same puffs and slashes, and the cuirass belongs doubtless to the same epoch and must have been made in the same workshop. It has no armourer's mark save on the breastplate; but the late Herr Wendelin Boeheim believed that it was made in Brussels by Franz Scroo, to whom we have already alluded.

Referring to another suit in the Imperial Armoury of Vienna, we are inclined to regard the one made for Wilhelm von Rogendorf towards the close of the first quarter of the XVIth century as possibly a more shapely war apparel than those just mentioned (Fig. 1040). It has a normally fashioned globose breast- and backplate of the Maximilian order, with taces and close fitting tassets. But the pauldrons are unusual; for these, with the arm defences, are of the most abnormal type, faithfully representing in steel the gigantic puffed and slashed sleeves of the time. The construction of the pauldrons, if we may so term these shoulder defences, is similar to that of those seen in a modified form on the small harness of Charles V in the same collection, to which we have just referred, and similar, too, to those on a suit dated 1515 and with an element of truth attributed to Giuliano de' Medici, which is in the Musée d'Artillerie of Paris (Fig. 1045). The pauldrons of the Rogendorf suit are composed of seven double lames entirely encircling the shoulders, extending from the gussets of the breastplate to a distance well down the arm, corresponding to the turners on an ordinary arm-piece. These lames are very large in circumference, all being turned under, finishing in an overlap, as though to represent the great puffed sleeves of the day. These and four other great plates constitute the remainder of the arm defence graduating in size to the last almost cylindrical wrist plate. These plates