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Fig. 1072. Suit of armour
Made for Philip, when Infante, by Desiderius Kolman of Augsburg, assisted by Jörg Sigman, between 1549 and 1552. A 239-242, Royal Armoury, Madrid
Iluminado of Charles V—it is next to impossible to connect that which exists to-day with the written description alone. Even the late Count de Valencia, whose knowledge of the possessions of the Madrid Armoury was most remarkable, had some hesitation about crediting this suit to the ownership of King Philip II until he discovered, in Sir William Stirling Maxwell's great work on "Don John of Austria," the woodcut of a portrait of that Prince painted by Alonzo Sanchez Coello, and owned by Sir William, in which Philip can be seen wearing this very same armour. The woodcut fails to represent the armour accurately; but a photograph of the actual picture enables one to see immediately that Philip is painted wearing this same Kolman parade suit. Though some difficulty was experienced at first in recognizing the identity of the original owner of this superb suit, the evidence of identification of the armourer has always been overwhelming. Not only are the name of Desiderius Kolman and the date 1550 engraved in full on the open casque and on the buckler, which we shall describe in vol. v, but various MS. records made by Philip at Augsburg in 1550, where he was then stopping, are preserved in the archives of Simancas relating to the suit. We select the following extract from the accounts of the wardrobe of Don Phillipe of Austria, Prince of Spain: "To Kolman . . . 2,000 crowns of gold, on account of 3,000 the which he has to receive on account of certain
