Plate armour fell into discredit during the seventeenth century and gradually disappeared, the pikeman being the last of the foot soldiers to use it. The cuirass was the last piece generally worn, and this in time gave place, except in the case of the cuirassiers, to the buff coat and jerkin.
Fig. 30.—Late Suit at Brancepeth Castle.
Among the great armour-smiths who worked from 1540 to the end of the century may be mentioned Kunz Lochner of Nuremberg, who was perhaps the greatest artist in steel of the German “renaissance.” A suit made for Duke Johann Wilhelm of Weimar about 1560–65, at Dresden, is very typical of his time. The comb of the burgonet is high, the neck-piece consists of three lames; the breastplate is short and “peascod”; while the cuisses exhibit an early instance of coming to the knees. This suit is referred to under the heading “Enriched Armour.” Anton Peffenhauser of Augsburg began somewhat later, and worked up to the end of the century. A notable example of this master may be seen at Madrid, in an enriched harness made for Don Sebastian of Portugal in 1576 ([Fig. 39]); and there are others at Dresden. Sigmund Rockenberger of Wittenberg; the von Speyers of Annaberg in Saxony, and the two Wilhelms von Worms, and Heinrich Knopf of Nuremberg; Giovanni Battista Serabagio, and Lucio Piccinino of Milan, were all great artists of their time; and examples of their work may be seen at Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin. Mention of the work of Jakob Topf of Innsbruck first appears about 1575, and an attempt has been made to identify this armour-smith with the “Jacobe” of the South Kensington Album, but with very slender foundation in point of evidence, as it seems to us. Some further sifting of the matter would be interesting.
PART XIV.
ENRICHED ARMOUR.
This class of armour was more for parade purposes than for actual service in the field, and it was much used in the lists. Most suits of the kind were provided with a set of reinforcing pieces for jousts and tourneying. These pieces have already been fully described under “The Tournament” heading, and illustrated in Figs. 10 and 11. The amount of artistic skill of the very highest order that was lavished on the ornamentation of armour in the later “middle ages,” and especially during the “renaissance,” was a remarkable feature of the times, and artists of the greatest repute found constant and lucrative employment in designing for this purpose. Suits were finely and delicately chased, engraved, russeted, and enriched with gold, embossed, damascened, appliqued, and decorated with repoussé work.
Fig. 31.—Suits by Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck.
Italy and Germany were the workshops for the finest specimens, and Milan, Brescia, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Venice, Florence, besides other places, vied with one another in the production of specimens of consummate skill and elegance. French examples were coarser and less artistic in every way, while there was but little of knightly armour made in England, and that little, excepting for a very brief period, was of a vastly inferior description. The number of artists and craftsmen, in widely different branches of art and manufacture, who were employed to design, turn out, and finish a suit of armour, or a weapon for war or for the chase, was simply legion; and, of course, in the case of enriched suits, or arms, still more were brought into requisition. There is the designer, modeller, steel, silver and gold smiths, carvers, enamellers, inlayers, engravers, repoussé or workers in hammered work, damasceners, polishers, and hosts of other craftsmen, each contributing his quota of industry and skill to one complete whole. Artists of the very highest celebrity, such as Donatello,[33] Michael Angelo, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, and Hans Holbein, had no higher ideal than in designing for this kind of work, and some of them were engaged in engraving also. It is well known that many armour-smiths employed other artists for designing and ornamentation, while others, like Kunz Lochner of Nuremberg, did their own embellishing as well as the smith’s work. An illustration is given in [Fig. 31] of two very fine suits by Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck. They are both tastefully engraved, and appear to be of a somewhat earlier make than the archducal suit by the same master, referred to in a previous chapter, and differ from it, as well as from each other, in some rather important features, especially in the form of the cuirasses and tassets. Only one of the three has pikeguards. These suits were made about 1540.