Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/311



,

Your letter in "The Times" of July 10th has been brought to my notice and, as you do me the honour to cite opinions which I have expressed on the subject, I wish to tell you that I entirely hold the attribution of your two very grand suits of armour to Anne de Montmorenci and Louis de Bourbon to be correct. I may add that I have also read Mr. Charles ffoulkes's article in The Burlington Magazine. I do not think that the comparison which he makes between the old false attributions of suits in the Tower and the attributions of your suits is quite a fair one. The Tower suits came there from Greenwich and other places, and the false attributions were of fairly late date. Your suits have never moved from Wilton, and the tradition concerning them has, I understand, been constant in your family; nor does it appear that there was ever a large number of suits at Wilton which might have led to confusion of attributions. You can tell me if I am right in that surmise. I do not know when these suits were first mentioned, and it would be of the greatest importance if some documentary evidence could be found in your archives establishing the antiquity of the tradition. However that may be, I think that a very strong point is that they are certainly not English. A glance at the first Earl's suit is sufficient to show the difference between the Montmorency and de Bourbon suits and those made at Greenwich in the days of your ancestor. These are portrayed in the Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and many of them yet exist in a more or less complete state. To my mind the fashion of the Constable's and Louis de Bourbon's suit is French. Not much is yet known of French armour, but a certain amount of it no doubt still exists, and I believe I could point to a certain number of pieces in the Musée d'Artillerie in Paris which were made in France. I think that I established long ago in my work on the Dino Collection, published in Paris in 1901, that a certain series of richly decorated shields and other pieces of armour, many of which were formerly ascribed to Benvenuto Cellini, were French work, and I see in the July issue of The Burlington Magazine (page 26) that Sir Guy Laking entirely adopts my view. From the reign of Louis XII downwards French art was largely inspired by that of Italy, and many Italian artists were called to France; but, inspired as it was by Italy, the art of those times acquired a peculiar flavour when executed by French hands, a flavour which can be easily recognized by comparison and study of existing specimens. We find the same thing in Germany and the Low Countries, each race adding something of its own, whilst drawing its models from Italy. Now my impression strongly is, that your two suits show something French in their forms. They may have been executed in Italy, for it can be shown that Milan made suits of Spanish fashion for Spain, German fashion for Germany, French fashion for France. Or they may have been made in France, and the decoration carried out by Italian craftsmen working there. I could not form an opinion on that point without a close examination. That a very important school of armourers working for the French kings and their great nobles existed at Tours and Paris in the 16th century will be abundantly proved when I can publish the "Dictionary of Armourers and Weapon Makers," which I am preparing. To come to the practical point in relation to your two suits, led up to by this long digression, it appears to me difficult to explain the presence at Wilton for