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 CHAPTER XXXII

THE BURGONET OR OPEN CASQUE

A SHORT REVIEW OF BURGONETS OF ITALIAN ORIGIN, 1510-1600

If we use the term casque de parade as a synonym for the burgonet, we must not be supposed to suggest that in its initial stage the open helmet was not a thoroughly useful piece of personal defence. Owing to the increasing and increasingly effective use of firearms, some new kind of helmet had to be invented for the fighter which would give him a defence that had lightness and allow him unhampered vision; so to follow the fashion of the Greek and Roman form, made popular by the Renaissance, the open helmet or casque built on the lines of the classical head defence was adopted. This helmet, which was in general use throughout the XVIth century and until the final disuse of armour in the third quarter of the XVIIth century, was fashioned under the influence of antique forms; but for all that it was to a certain extent an inevitable development from the salade and the chapel-de-fer. We see it in its first stages as early as about 1510-30 among those bizarre head-pieces figuring in the splendid Italian sculpture of the Renaissance. Michael Angelo utilized such a head-piece on his world-famous statue on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence (Fig. 1210); while the helmet of the famous Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, in the Loggia de' Lanzi, Florence, cast in 1545, but not completed till 1554, is an open casque of the most elaborate type (Fig. 1211). Sir Samuel Meyrick uses the term "burgonet" to describe an entirely closed helmet which has its lower edge grooved to fit the top rim of the gorget, as can be seen in the illustrations of the helmets illustrated in Figs. 1169 and 1204. It would appear that Sir Samuel—as also Planché—adopted this nomenclature on the authority of President Fauchet's Origine des Chevaliers Armories et Heraux, Paris, 1600 and 1606; but in the opinion of the present writer the Baron de