An Early Fluted ‘Maximilian’ Three-Quarter Length Field Armour

c. 1505 – 15

Southern Germany. Steel, copper alloy and leather. Two neck lames replaced.

185 cm / 72.5 in × 78cm / 31.25 in

Provenance

Private collection, USA

One of the most arresting equestrian portraits of the German Renaissance is a woodcut by Hans Burgkmair the Elder of The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who reigned 1493-1519. Dated 1508, this portrait presents the emperor in the Italianate postgothic ‘rippled’ or fluted armour, by then the height of taste at the Habsburg court, and representative of the revival of the medieval knightly ideal. Drawn in direct profile and with an astonishing clarity of detail, the image is as much a perfect study of the new armour as it is the Emperor’s portrait.

By 1500 Maximilian’s enthusiastic patronage of the highly skilled Augsburg armourers had undoubtedly progressed the development of a new and distinctly rounded style of proto-fluted armour. This development was, in effect, a stylistic bridge between the dazzling German High Gothic style, which has reached its zenith by 1485-90, and the sculpturally perfect forms which were characteristic of the gothic armourers of Milan and Brescia. In furtherance of his passion, Maximilian established the imperial armour workshops in Innsbruck in 1504. His influence over armour design and production throughout the lands encompassed in the Holy Roman Empire was such that, for modern students, his name is synonymous with fluted armour of the early 16th century.

The present armour is a well-proportioned representation of exactly this early development of fluted South German armour; the constituent elements of its construction involve rare surviving early examples which are exceptionally well-matched together.

The breastplate, with its original continuous fauld (skirt) and tassets (the upper thigh defences), is striking in this respect: the breastplate is rounded in the Italian manner and finished with gothic-styled plain angular flanged turns across the neck and at the arm openings. The latter are notably constructed without moveable gussets, a feature retained from both the earlier German and Italian gothic styles. The main plate is decorated with three fans of fluting what radiate from the base to a point just above the middle, the shortness and spread of this fluting, without the horizontal closure of a fluted upper border, is again an early feature of transition from the German gothic. The waistplate fitted beneath the main plate carries a fauld of four articulated plates, and these in turn suspend a pair of articulated tassets. All of these plates are decorated in an identical reflection of the fluted design on the breast. The lance-rest is of the German ‘altartig’ type and decorated with inlaid bands of latten.

An interesting comparison with these plates are the near-identical corresponding elements of a fluted armour produced in Nuremberg circa 1505, today preserved in the former imperial collection in Vienna (A 192). A further example of a breastplate of this fluted type exists in Florence, while a statue of St. George in the Bavarian National Museum, Munich, illustrates the breastplate.

The backplate is a good stylistic match with both the breast and the fluted main plates of the collar, although both of these elements may originate closer to 1510-15. The waist plate carries a skirt of three articulated plates, their fans of fluting well-matched with those of the main plate.

The arm defences are constructed with elegant tubular vambraces decorated with early V-shaped groups of flutes and fitted with cowters with large flat fluted wings with V-shaped gutters. The latter compare very closely with those of an Innsbruck armour dated circa 1505-10 by Christian Schreiner the Younger in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1991.4).

In common with almost all surviving field armours of the period, the arm defences and the cuisses and poleyns (defending the thighs and the knee joints) are not an exact match; armour was damaged and replaced even in its working life. These parts, however, almost certainly belong to the same small series of armours. A quantity of vambraces of this early type are in the historic collection of the Vienna City Historical Museum (formerly the Vienna city arsenal). A conspicuously unusual, perhaps unique feature in the construction of the present vambraces is that they each incorporate two turners (rather than a single one) of rivets moving in corresponding horizontal slots. Because the lower plates of the poleyns have no provision for fitting a pair of greaves (calf defences) the armour was likely originally intended for a mounted wearer and complete.

The helmet here provides a fitting crown to this armour. Dating circa 1510, and decorated with sprays of fluting, its skull typifies the Italian influence found in the early close helmets of Innsbruck and thence disseminated throughout southern Germany.