Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 4).djvu/162

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in the catalogue of 1898), as well as the Negroli helmet (Fig. 1231); but both the morriones and the other extra pieces are wanting. The Caremolo helmet remained in the possession of the Spanish Crown until the year 1838, when it and much other superb armour was secretly removed, and sent to London for sale by auction. In that sale, which took place at Christie's in January 1839, the helmet (Lot 74) was bought in, but eventually disposed of to Mr. Hollingworth Magniac, the famous mid-XIXth century collector. In 1892 Messrs. Christie's sold the famous Magniac Collection. After the collection had been removed from Colworth, the seat of the Magniac family, the sale of the ordinary household utensils was entrusted to a smaller firm of auctioneers, who found this precious helmet in a cupboard. When offered for sale among the ordinary articles of furniture it realized a sum considerably less than £5. It was purchased by a dealer who in turn passed it on to one of the foremost antiquaries of the day. This antiquary, realizing its great artistic worth, and appreciating the great bargain he had acquired, sold it for as many hundreds of pounds as was paid in pounds at the auction; but he himself was unacquainted with the great historical importance of the helmet. Its Spanish provenance was suspected; but its identity as a head-piece worn by the Emperor Charles V was only ascertained when the album of drawings of arms belonging to the Emperor was consulted, to which we have alluded, and in which it is described and illustrated. The name of the armourer who made the helmet and the other pieces of armour which formed the Duke of Mantua's gift to Charles V, and the date at which he made them, have been discovered in documents found in the archives of Mantua, and published by Bertolotti (Arti Minori alla Corte di Mantova, 1889). Caremolo di Mondrone, the armourer who constructed the casque, was born in Milan in 1489, and died at Mantua in 1548. This very fine historical casque has only recently changed hands: it is now in one of the important English collections.

To illustrate the exaggerated grotesque, carried out in the design of an open head-piece, we turn to that remarkable casque in the Tsarskoje-Selo of Petrograd, known as the helmet of Guidobaldo II, Duke of Urbino, 1514-74 (Fig. 1220), which, according to the late Herr Wendelin Boeheim, in his Meister der Waffenschmiedekunst, is the work of a Florentine armourer, one Piripe, known as Pifanio Tacito. It is now known that such an armourer never existed, and that Herr Boeheim was led astray by an allusion to such a person made by a certain Antonio Petrini, who in 1642