Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/386

 suit, like the Dino casque described and illustrated in Fig. 1264, Vol. iv, was taken by Louis XIV from the Royal Collection of France and presented to the King's Minister, Comte Colbert. The suit looks Italian in ornamentation; but it is not entirely Italian in construction. We are inclined to think that it was made in France, but that it was perhaps embossed by some Italian artist, who, like so many of his compatriot armourers, had settled in that country. It bears a remarkable likeness to certain pieces of embossed armour, now in a private collection in Paris, which though they are of slightly later date, we know for certain have true French provenance. In the case of this suit, however, we fail to see even the style of the Louvre-Fontainebleau school to which the so-called Henri II suit in the Louvre, of which we shall speak later, most certainly belongs. We would suggest that, with perhaps the exception of the very fine close helmet it possesses, the Astor suit is of somewhat clumsy form (Fig. 1090). The breast- and backplate have been inspired by some Negroli model. The long and full tassets attached to the very shapeless knee-cops, each composed of six deep lames, encircle the legs; while the pauldrons, with which are associated demi-rerebraces, are somewhat flat. The most attractive feature of the suit is the size and boldness of the elbow-cops. Although, then, this is a suit of armour of the first historical importance, as an example of high-class armour it proves on critical examination to be but poor work as compared with a harness of the same type and period which we can recognize as purely Milanese. An inspection of the detail of the ornamentation also reveals the fact that in the rendering of the masks and of the tendril scrolls, which in a somewhat wearisome duplicated manner occupy nearly the whole surface of the suit, there is that tameness and lumpiness of treatment which we have had occasion to notice as the chief defect of the famous Morosini casque (see Vol. iv, Fig. 1236, a, b, c). In Asselinau's ''Les Armes et Armures, Meubles et autres objets du Moyen âge et de la Renaissance'', a work undated, but published some years before the Soltikoff Collection was sold in 1861, the helmet of the Astor suit, together with the Dino casque (see Vol. iv, Fig. 1264), are both illustrated and described as ''appartenant à M. le Cte. Colbert''. A long period elapsed before the suit became the property of the Paris dealer, M. Stein, at whose establishment the present writer saw it. M. Stein disposed of it to M. Sigismund Bardac, the amateur, who exhibited it in the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where it was much admired. It was then that the author had the opportunity of making a thorough examination of it, but failed, however, to discover any individuality by which it could be