armourer of the XVIth century, but assigns the helmets made by him to the days of Hannibal the Carthaginian. Boeheim might just as well have made a Venetian armourer of Repa, the son of Numa the Babylonian.
We can go a step further and state that even the authority quoted by Antonio Petrini, the "Felitiano Macedonio," who is said to have mentioned this mysterious Piripe, is as apocryphal as Piripe himself; for, despite the quest undertaken by Mr. Hill in the British Museum for a writer of that name, and the researches made by the Baron de Cosson in the National Library of Florence, absolutely no record of the name can be found. In the author's opinion there is no evidence to support the statement that an armourer named Piripe ever existed.
There can be little doubt that it was Antonio Petrini, described as a nephew of a grand-ducal armourer, who, in the year 1644, showed the famous John Evelyn round the armoury of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the Uffizi, and made him admire "Hannibal's head-piece" (the Petrograd helmet, Fig. 1220) and the sword of Charlemagne.[1] It is an amazing thing, however, when we come to consider it, that little more than a century after the helmet was actually made and worn it should have come to be attributed to classical times. There is not a particle of evidence that any great armourer or school of armourers ever existed at Florence. The archives of that town have been thoroughly searched for everything concerning her artists, and no name of a celebrated armourer in Renaissance times has yet come to light.
But now let us attempt to throw some light on the actual maker of the fine casque at Petrograd, over which so much controversy has arisen. We know that the famous suit of Roman fashion, now in the Royal Armoury of Madrid, was given by Guidobaldo II to Charles V in 1546, and as it is signed and dated we know that it was made by the goldsmith of Pesaro, Bartolommeo Campi (Vol. iii, page 276, Fig. 1051). We are also aware of the fact that this same Campi made many rich suits for Guidobaldo from about 1543 to 1546, suits which up to the present have not been identified. Thanks to the most recent researches of the Baron de Cosson certain other pieces from the same hand have now been recognized. Foremost among these is the beautiful breastplate of Roman fashion, in the Bargello, Florence (Vol. iii, page 288, Fig. 1054), which, with the figured mail at the neck, bears such a remarkable similarity to the classical Charles V suit at Madrid,
- ↑ When John Ray, F.R.S., visited the armoury in 1663 he recorded in his Travels: "In the armoury we saw several remarkables. . . . Hannibal's head-piece (as they called it) had engraven on it many ancient Moresco characters" (vol. i, p. 286, ed. 1738).
