Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/266

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being worn by an unknown knight in a portrait attributed to Marco Basaiti (Fig. 229). In this case it is the extension over the shoulder-blades that is so marked. The harness represented must have been one of great beauty, for, as we have said, its whole surface is brilliantly blued and bordered with gilded bands. By coincidence we are able to give views of it from either side; for it is identically the same suit of armour in which the handsome youth is painted who is accompanied by his attendant Nubian servant in that famous picture in the Uffizi, attributed to Francesco Torbido, and formerly said to represent a youthful portrait of General Gattamelata (Fig. 230), an attribution, we understand, which is now discredited. It is not sufficient to say that the suits in these two portraits resemble one another; they are the identical harness, plate for plate, and must have been painted from one and the same model—a curious fact, since the portraits are ascribed to different artists.

Fig. 227. Equestrian portrait of Frederico da Montefeltro

Royal Library, Munich

In three other pictures Missaglia suits are clearly represented, in the "Tobias with Three Archangels" of Sandro Botticelli in the Accademia, Florence (Fig. 231), where the full beauty of the youthful Saint Michael is displayed in a suit of wondrous elegance and proportions, in Vittore Carpaccio's series of pictures of St. George in the church of St. Giorgio de