assigned with certainty to any particular school. After leaving the Bardac Collection the suit passed through the hands of two dealers, and eventually found its present home in Hever Castle.
We have remarked that Henri II wore as his colours black and white, and such appears to have been the original colour scheme of the suit just described. But in the next harness we shall look at we shall see these colours still existent, in their metal equivalents of black iron and of silver, in almost pristine freshness (G 118, Musée d'Artillerie, Paris) (Fig. 1091). Of the harnesses that have been ascribed to the ownership of this monarch, this suit and one other[1] bear those emblems ever associated with him and la belle veuve, his beloved Diane de Poitiers. The monogram of Henri and Diane interlaced, her symbol as huntress, the triple intertwined crescents, her quivers and arrows, are all plentifully replicated on the narrow blackened bands, which, alternating with the wider bands of delicate interlaced tendril ornaments, constitute the decoration of the whole of the exposed surface. But if we are asked who was the armourer who produced this most tasteful suit and what was his nationality we should be at a loss for an answer, for the harness is without an armourer's mark of any kind. In general form it is not unlike the Astor Henri II armour, particularly in the flatness of the pauldrons, in the formation of the elbow-cops, and in the manner in which the long laminated tassets, finishing in robust though clumsily fashioned knee-cops, cover the thighs of the wearer. We may be looking at the work of some famous French or even Parisian armourer of the Court of Henri II. There is nothing, however, that affords the vaguest clue as to the maker; nor does the particular decoration employed serve to convey any suggestion. We note, however, a North Italian influence in one part of the ornamentation, and that is in the designs of the tendrils upon the broader bands, which might almost be from the hands of Lucio Picinino at his best period: so similar to his is the method of incrustation employed. We may therefore surmise that the embellishment of the harness, if not actually the work of an Italian artist working in France, comes from the hand of some one who had studied in Milan, and was acquainted with the best damascened work of the Picinino school. The helmet is a close one with the falling mezail as face defence, above which is the deep umbril, the upper portion of which is embossed with a laurel wreath gilt. The breastplate is in the fashion of about 1545-50, and a freer movement has been lent to it by the addition of four laminated plates at the base. There are two tace plates and the tassets have twelve lames, finishing, as we
- ↑ A suit in the Armoury of the Wartburg (A. Diener-Schönberg, Die Waffen der Wartburg, Berlin, 1912, p. 36).
