Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/390

 have said, in large shapeless knee-cops; the demi-jambs terminate at the ankle and have never possessed sollerets. The gauntlets are short in the cuffs but long in the metacarpal plates; indeed, the actual shape of the suit does not remind us of any Italian harness that we can recall. This suit was originally in the Bibliothèque Royale, from where it was removed to the Musée des Souverains, and in 1872 it was finally deposited in the Musée d'Artillerie of Paris; but we can find no record whether it was previously in the ''Ancien collection du Louvre'', or derived from some private source early in the XIXth century. The facts that it is a harness made for the field, that it is enriched to please the purely personal taste of the wearer, and that no other additional pieces either for the tilt or for the armament of the horse are known to exist render this armour almost unique among the most famous of recorded suits.

One of the most graceful suits of mid-XVIth century armour extant, certainly as regards its wealth of refined surface ornament, is that unfinished harness in the Louvre known as the armour of Henri II (Fig. 1092). We shall allude to it again when we examine in some detail other examples of this same craftsmanship, giving it as our opinion that it was produced by some unknown French armourer who worked directly under the influence of the French art of the third quarter of the XVIth century. But as we keep a fairly open mind on the subject we give the views of that eminent writer and armour connoisseur M. Maurice Maindron, who, in his description of the suit in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1891, states at some length his theories as to its school of decoration and its probable maker and provenance. He describes it as a masterpiece of the art of a goldsmith working in iron. He admits that he uses the term "goldsmith" advisedly; for in his opinion the panoply of Henri II was certainly constructed by goldsmiths. He goes on to state that the most illustrious armourers of Lombardy and Bavaria never produced anything to equal it either in fineness, or perfection of workmanship; but he allows that the Negroli, the most illustrious of their craft, produced suits finer in style and of nobler proportions. The armourers of Munich, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Innsbruck, too, he admits, made harnesses and suits for man and horse, of the most skilful design and of the most conscientious workmanship. But [he adds] none of these masters, in the plenitude of their talent and of their glory, ever succeeded in producing such fine surface embossing or armour chiselling such as can be seen upon this suit. Whatever reproaches may be made against this royal panoply from a technical and constructional point of view, the conception and execution of its decoration must, he holds, be reckoned quite astounding.