Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/302

 are most skilfully embossed to represent material, and like the decoration of the whole suit, are etched and gilt with slightly recessed ornaments simulating slashing and puffing. The suit is completed with a gorget, with a close helmet with visor and mezail, and below with a brayette; the knee-cops are many lamed. Interchangeable and belonging to this suit is a pair of pauldrons of the more usual type, attached to which are circular palettes. To these must have originally been fitted the ordinary arm defences; since these pauldrons cannot be adapted to the lower parts of the existing arm-pieces. This suit has been considered the work of Koloman Kolman of Augsburg, its date being about 1520.

Since we desire to reproduce in every possible case a contemporary picture in which the type of armour we are describing figures, we give an illustration of Pontormo's splendid portrait of Ippolito de' Medici in the Pitti Palace, Florence (Fig. 1041). Here that great nobleman is seen arrayed in a half suit of ribbed and slashed armour, the surface blackened and decorated with gilded enrichments. The actual ornamentation of the armour is very similar to that of the suit just described. We note, however, an unusual construction in the top espalier plates, which would indicate from their extreme simplicity that, when the harness was worn in its entirety, they made way for pauldrons of more protective quality.

Next we turn to the Wallace Collection to look at a three-quarter suit of armour, lacking its original helmet, which, after the Rogendorf suit at Vienna, more closely resembles the puffed and slashed costume of the day than any other with which we are acquainted; for the arm defences are of that large girth which was far more civil than military in style. The suit is No. 380 (Fig. 1042). The opinion expressed by Sir Samuel Meyrick, when this harness was in his possession, namely, that the fashion of cutting and slashing the costume was meant to represent cuts and slashes received in battle, is in this case fully borne out. The whole surface of the suit is divided into horizontal bands of embossed ridges alternating with plain etched surfaces. These embossed bands are again indented with a series of slashed ornaments; these have been etched and gilt. The parts of the suit which belong together are as follows: the breastplate of globose form with laminated roped gussets, the backplate to match, to which is attached the culette, the taces of five plates, the tassets of five plates closely fitting the legs and coming well round the thigh, the espaliers of seven plates, the rere- and vambraces, the elbow-cops, and the seventeen laminated plates that protect the inside bend of the arm. Although it lacks an armourer's