March 12, 2020 21
The Art of Combat
James Fenton
The Last Knight: The Art, Armor,
and Ambition of Maximilian I
an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
October 7, 2019–January 5, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Pierre Terjanian.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
340 pp., $65.00
(distributed by Yale University Press)
The Renaissance of Etching
an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020;
and the Albertina Museum, Vienna,
February 12–May 10, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition
by Catherine Jenkins, Nadine M.
Orenstein, Freyda Spira, and others.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
308 pp., $65.00
(distributed by Yale University Press)
For the German artists of the Renais-
sance, armor and weaponry held an
extraordinary allure. One thinks of
the great care lavished on armor in
Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Knight,
Death, and the Devil, which Dürer
noted was based on the equipment of
the German light cavalry of the day. He
also made designs for the ornamenta-
tion of armor, three of which survive.
And he made an etching featuring
an elaborate piece of artillery in a
landscape.
One thinks of Lucas Cranach the El-
der’s panel painting of Saint Maurice
in the collection of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, which was included
in its recent exhibition “The Last
Knight.” The black saint wears a silver
armor (one refers to “an armor” or “a
silver armor,” rather than to a “suit of
armor”), which appears to have been
commissioned by Maximilian I, Holy
Roman Emperor from 1508 until his
death in 1519. It is magnificently gilded
and encrusted with jewels, and it passed
from imperial possession into a collec-
tion of reliquaries, where it was fitted
out with an African head to represent
the Roman legionary and Christian
martyr—a life-size relic, illuminated in
its sanctuary, the catalog of the exhibi-
tion tells us, by “thirteen main lamps
and seven subsidiary ones.” This was in
Magdeburg, where Saint Maurice was
revered. But the silver armor was too
valuable to survive very long; in 1541
it was melted down and its gems repur-
posed. Cranach’s depiction of it is sug-
gestively correct in technical details,
indicating that the painter had studied
the armor close up.
One had to get such things right.
Working for patrons and an audience
who shared this armor obsession, the
artist had to depict an object that made
sense, just as the armorer had to create
an armor that made sense. It had to fit
the patron or the intended recipient
(armor was often commissioned as a
magnificent gift). And it had to work.
Everything depended on the smoothly
functioning design. But quite how
the measurements and patterns for
such armors were taken and transmit-
ted from city to city seems not to be
known.
If today you come across, say, a hel-
met that, because of some structural
flaw, could never have functioned as
a helmet, it is probably a relic of the
nineteenth-century medieval armor
revival—a helmet designed for display
in some mock-baronial hall. A genuine
piece of armor is an expression first
and foremost of function, and only sec-
ondly of style. It should function like a
space suit.
People get the idea that armor was
never practical. It was far too heavy.
You had to be raised onto your horseby a winch, and so forth. But this seems
to be a popular misunderstanding, de-
riving from the declining years of per-
sonal armor. According to Walter J.
Karcheski:While a complete armor from
the second half of the fifteenth
century averaged some fifty to
sixty pounds, this weight was well
distributed over the body of the
wearer, and posed little problem
for a man who had been trained in
the wearing and use of armor from
an early age. Armorers recog-
nized and took steps to deal with
the problem of providing sufficient
protection for the soldier while
maintaining adequate ventilation
and freedom of movement. It was
only much later, in the second half
of the sixteenth and throughout
the seventeenth century, that the
need for bulletproof armor causedthe load to become virtually
unbearable.^1This overlap between the development
of firearms and the not yet declining
use of armor made necessary a system
of testing the strength of new pieces.
You took, for example, a breastplate
and fired a bullet at it, at close range.
If the bullet ricocheted, leaving a dent
(but not a hole) in the armor, that was
good. Such a dent was called a “mark
of proof.”Just as a breastplate that had been
dinged in this way was a good, reli-
able breastplate, so a lance that had
been broken was a sign of a good day’s
jousting. For a knight to have broken
seven lances in a day would count as a
memorable achievement, because the
breaking of the lance was proof of the
accuracy and effectiveness of the hit.
Cranach, in a group of vivid woodcuts
from the 1500s, shows us what one of
these tournaments was like. The town
square was packed with horses, riders,
and lances, not to mention spectators,
and the contestants fought, we are told,
until one side had no rider capable
of fighting left in the saddle. At this
point, the participants regrouped, re-
mounted, and fought each other again
with swords, among the debris of bro-
ken lances.
Dangerous it sounds, and dangerous
indeed it was, whether on the battlefield
or in those “jousts of peace” and “jousts
of war” with their carefully calibrated
levels of risk. It was enough, at the Met,
to compare the surviving lance heads
for a joust of war, terminating in single
sharpened points, with those for a joust
of peace, in which the tip of the lance
divides into a “coronel” of four blunt
arms, intended to distribute the impact
of a direct hit. One would not wish a
single sharpened point, weighing be-
tween one and three pounds, to pierce
any part of one’s personal defenses.
But the peaceful coronel (which also
weighs three pounds) would administer
a severe shock to the system, especially
as the helmet was fastened rigidly to
the breastplate and backplate (known
jointly as the cuirass) with bolts.
A matter of most exquisite calcula-
tion was the design and angle of the
long horizontal eye slot, which gave
the jousting helmet its frog-mouthed
look. This eye slot was set in a way that
obliged the rider to lean forward in the
saddle in order to see at all. At the mo-
ment of impact, however, the experi-
enced rider sat bolt upright. He could
not, for that instant of combat, actu-
ally see his opponent, but the trade-off
was that his eyes were protected. One
would not want a three-pound prong
of sharpened lance head to find its way
into one’s helmet.
This terrifying practice of fighting
blind was something the riders shared,
on occasion, with their horses. One
jousted either with or without a tilt—
the barrier that separated the two rid-
ers. Jousting without a tilt was referredto as jousting “at large.” Each conven-
tion brought its own dangers. When
jousting at large, the problem was that
one’s horse might, naturally enough,
seek to avoid the oncoming opponent.
The solution was to equip the horse
with a kind of shaffron (protective
headpiece)^2 that prevented it from see-
ing anything at all. A horse with a blind
shaffron could be pointed in the right
direction and might go at great speed.
This increased, we are told, the danger
of a head-on collision that might kill
both the animals and their riders.
Jousting at large was the old, danger-
ous, German way. But jousting across a
tilt (Italian-style) had its dangers too,
especially when the purpose was to
unseat one’s opponent. The two horse-
men rode on either side of the tilt, in
opposite directions. Their aim was
either to break a lance or score some
other palpable hit, or fully to unseat
the other man. A particularly fero-
cious woodcut by Dürer shows a joust
of peace in which both opponents have
broken their lances, but the knight in
the foreground has been unhorsed
and trapped beneath his mount (see
illustration on page 22). Obviously he
is in mortal danger. One remembers
that Maximilian’s first wife, Mary of
Burgundy, died in a hunting accident
after her horse rolled onto her and
broke her spine. The knight in the
background is Freydal, under which
name Maximilian commemorated his
own early heroic deeds. He holds his
broken lance aloft, triumphant with
his horse’s plume, his flying pennants,
and his rampant lion crest.
Armor of the kind on display in “The
Last Knight” is so splendid in concep-
tion, and so richly decorative, that it is
possible to forget that it formed only
one element of the magnificent dis-
play of the joust. There was also, for
instance, the leather horse armor, sur-
mounted by cloth of gold. Such trap-
pings, we are told, were likely to be
ruined during a contest, but that did
not deter Maximilian, who, according
to the catalog, “regularly spent more on
his ornaments than on his equipment
and horse.” Plumes were held in golden
plume-holders set with diamonds and
rubies and pearls. The laces of the bard
were made of silk, with points of solid
silver. When one considers how little
secular goldsmith’s work in general
survives from the fifteenth century, it
is hardly surprising that so little of this
specialist jewelry is left. The same is
true for textiles. The humblest of ob-
jects, the padded “coif” designed to be
worn inside the helmet during a joust
of peace, fascinates with its rarity and
with the answer it provides to the ques-
tion: What made this armor wearable?
It is a kind of inner helmet, fashionedField armor of Maximilian I; made by
Lorenz Helmschmid, circa 1480Private^ Collection/Kunsthistorisches^ Museum,^ Vienna(^1) Walter J. Karcheski Jr., Arms and
Armor in the Art Institute of Chicago
(Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), p. 25.
(^2) There is great beauty, I think, to be
found in these rare technical terms
and obsolete usages. Karcheski’s use-
ful Arms and Armor gives a full list
of the components of a bard, or horse
armor: “a shaffron for the head, a
crinet for the neck, a peytral for the
breast, flanchards for the area below
the saddle, and a crupper for the hind-
quarters.” The catalog of “The Last
Knight” offers an even more compre-
hensive glossary.