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Fig. 1451. Additional pieces belonging to the suit of armour illustrated in Fig. 1450

G 124, Musée d'Artillerie, Paris

century in form; but if we could disregard the general scheme of decoration, the graceful outline and splendid quality of workmanship might well lead us to the belief that the horse body armour was a production of the XVth or of the early XVIth century. There is just the possibility that the body barding of the horse is fashioned from some earlier plate which the armourer, whoever he was, had by him at the time, or that it may have been taken from the Royal Arsenal of the Louvre, expressly for the purpose of adapting it for an armour for the King. The author is very much inclined to take this view, substantiated as it is by the fact that upon the poitrel of this otherwise unmarked suit there appears an armourer's mark of an unmistakably North Italian late XVth century type, consisting of "ROM ROM" in gothic letters, and an orb with a cross,^[1] which we have already remarked on the pauldrons of the suit illustrated in Fig. 240, Vol. i. In all, there are nineteen plates in the body armour of the horse harness of this Louis XIII suit, irrespective of the full crinet of the chanfron and its armoured straps and reins. The surface of the whole panoply is of bright steel, decorated with narrow borders and double vertical bands, tooled with a very simple ornamentation and gilded. The interchangeable head-piece on the suit is a heavy form of burgonet or open casque, applied

1. Cf. the chanfron of Henri II, dated 1539 (De Cosson, Le Cabinet d'Armes de Duc de Dino, p. 47), illustrated, Fig. 1014e in Volume iii of this work, and the suit, second half of XVth century (ibid., p. 10, Plate I).