Arms and Armor

This paper focuses on a small group of armorers who worked for Henry VIII of England either in their homeland, the former Low Countries, or at his court, and it argues that the author of the king's spectacular horse bard of engraved and silvered steel was made by a previously unidentified master called Guillem Margot, one of the Hapsburg's favorite armorers in Brussels.

As the ruler of the Burgundian Low Countries Philip I the Fair, king of Castile, was an important patron of armorers in Flanders and above all in Brabant.  This paper introduces some of the armorers who worked for him, and the contents and fate of his armory.

This article discusses a landmark in the history of armor design.  One of only a handful of complete, or near complete, homogeneous European field armors dating from the period of transition from the late Gothic to Renaissance styles, the so-called "Barfus" armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is described in detail for the first time and its significance examined in light of the momentous stylistic developments that took place around 1500 in Germany and Nuremberg in particular, and of the private collections that successively ensured its exceptional preservation, from Rhenish Prussia, through Great Britain, to the United States.

This study ascribes a distinctive group of late Gothic German helmets to the helmet makers--or helmsmiths--of Frankfurt am Main, a middle-sized center of armor manufacture in medieval and Renaissance Germany that had hitherto largely escaped scholarly notice.

This article focuses on a German half-armor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and examines its construction and decoration in light of stylistic developments that took place across Europe from the late sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century.  Summary information is provided about the life and accomplishments of its maker, the Nuremberg armorer Martin Schneider the Younger.

This is the first of two articles about two albums of armor drawings once kept in the Fideikomiss-Bibliothek of the Counts Thun-Hohenstein, which are now preserved in the collection of the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum v Praze (Decorative Arts Museum of Prague).

This is the second of two articles about two albums of armor drawings once kept in the Fideikomiss-Bibliothek of the Counts Thun-Hohenstein, which are now preserved in the collection of the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum v Praze (Decorative Arts Museum of Prague).

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans were introduced to manmade and natural curiosities through their explorations of the new world. These wonders, coupled with cultural exchanges, facilitated a sensation of collecting and classifying within what they already defined as the world. But while it seems that only Europe benefitted from their explorations, so too did the peoples of these once unreachable lands. India at the time, for example, was also enjoying the fruits of these connections, not just with the western world, but also with their equally exotic neighbours. The third Mughal emperor, Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and his son Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) were intrigued by the physical and conceptual imports entering their royal courts, and used the relationship between text and image to convey this reception of materials and their collections as a whole. This paper will examine the collections and collecting practices of both Akbar and Jahangir. In addition, particular attention will be paid to the influence of cultural exchange on the emperors' collecting practices. This paper will provide a unique perspective of examining these Mughal emperors by placing them on a global platform of collecting. Most importantly, it will demonstrate the importance of collecting in the non-western world, which has been overshadowed by the European Age of Exploration and the rise of western early modern collecting.