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Fig. 1433. Half suit of armour
North Italian workmanship, about 1620. Rutherford Stuyvesant Collection, New York
suit may be seen in the Wallace Collection, No. 1122 (Fig. 1430). This suit is not only obviously poor in actual make, but it also proves that once the decadent armourers of the XVIIth century arrived at some popular surface enrichment, they unblushingly turned out countless suits of the same pattern, as in the case of the Pompeo della Cesa suits of a generation earlier, only altering details of decoration to suit the fancy of the particular wearer. It was the late Sir Samuel Meyrick, in whose collection the Wallace suit once figured, who construed certain details of the decorations, the three palm leaves crowned, into the cognizance of the house of Monaco; he also pointed out the device of conjoined hands.[1] These emblems, together with trophies of armour, entirely occupy the panels formed by what we may term Savoyard knots, issuing from square-shaped ornaments. Now, this same ornamentation, differing only in the emblem contained within the knotted panels, is to be seen on very many harnesses which are all apparently from the same hand, and can, as a rule, with some degree of certainty, be attributed to the ownership of some one of note. For instance, there is a suit of this pattern in the Royal Armoury of Madrid, which is said to have been made for Prince Philip Emmanuel of Savoy, early in the XVIIth century, A 360 (Fig. 1431). In the same collection is a boy's suit in this style, stated to have belonged to the Infantado Fernando, son of Philip III, B 18 (Fig. 1432). Other similar suits and half suits exist at Vienna, Paris, Turin, in the Poldi Pezzoli Collection, Milan, and at New York in the Rutherford Stuyvesant Collection (Fig. 1433); all appear to be attributed to the ownership of princes or nobles, who strangely enough are as a rule not unconnected with the house of Savoy. There is, too, in the Dulwich Gallery, in what is known as the Salon Carré, the portrait of an unknown Genoese nobleman wearing half armour of the same decoration (Fig. 1434), a piece of evidence which shows that whoever were the armourers who produced this type of armour
- ↑ As to this device, cf. "The Wilton Suits," by Mr. G. D. Hobson, pp. 20, 25.
