salient; but it is, above all, the visor of the helmet, simulating a human face even to the teeth, and strangely accentuating such features as a hooked nose and curled moustaches which gives to this suit, as a whole, that fantastic character which must have made so irresistible an appeal to the imagination of the time.
As we have said, armour with puffs and slashes is rare, and was probably only worn by great personages on parade and at Gala Tournaments. This suit shows on the sides of the visor the insignia of the house of Burgundy, which emblem at this period had reverted to the house of Austria. Could it have belonged to Maximilian I or to Philippe le Beau? The latter seems unlikely, as Philippe died in 1506 at the age of twenty-eight, and the armour appears to us to belong to a later date. We also feel that the insignia is insufficiently prominent to have belonged to the head of the house of Burgundy. If it had been Philippe's it would have been engraved with the collar of the Golden Fleece, as in the case of a harness at Vienna to which we shall next refer, and which Boeheim suggested might be the work of Franz Scroo of Brussels. The accounts of the armourer Franz Scroo, preserved at Brussels in the royal archives, prove that Maximilian was in the habit of giving armour to the nobles of his Court, and the insignia so inconspicuously represented on the helmet would merely indicate that the owner wearing it belonged to the household of the Emperor or that the armour was the gift of that monarch.
The close helmet is of fine outline and admirably forged. It has a serrated crest and is ornamented with twisted recessements which are alternately etched and fully gilded with designs of vases and foliage on a hatched ground. They are represented with a graining reminiscent of the brocades of the period. The vigorously embossed mezail of the helmet represents the face of a man with moustaches and an aquiline nose; the billy-goat beard is indicated on the chin-piece; the half-open mouth shows a grated slit representing teeth. The breastplate is of accentuated globose form; the full pauldrons are furnished with upright neck-guards. Several of the pieces, such as a portion of the pauldrons, the wings of the elbow-cops, and the posterior part of the tonnlet, could be removed according to the use to which the armour was to be put. The sollerets have large square toes. The etching betrays a strong Italian influence, if indeed it is not the work of an Italian engraver, which is quite possible, for beside the design of vases and foliage we have alluded to as decorating the grooves and slashes, that which especially decides the origin of the etching is a little fringe of mail, imitated by the engraver on the last plate of each knee-cop. The fashion of wearing this
