Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/272

the present day each invention in ordnance or explosives causes a corresponding development in the construction of our armour-clad ships, and as each improvement in the armouring of those vessels stimulates the artillerist to fresh efforts towards obtaining greater penetrating power for his projectiles, so in past times the improvements in the offensive power of arms and the improvements in the defensive power of armour are inseparably linked and mutually explain one another. This of course is a constant factor in the question of armaments; but in mediaeval times there came into play a unique and charming factor which unfortunately enters not in the remotest degree into the military and naval problems of to-day. We refer to the exquisite artistic instinct of the armour-artists, who, without impairing the strength of the piece, its practical utility, or its confession of material, lavished all the treasures of their taste and imagination on the richest armour and weapons produced at the time. This holds good of the work of the best armourers of every country, and we have only singled out Italy first because the earliest suits with which we are acquainted came from that country, and because Italian armourers were the first whose work we can identify by their marks and of whose family and lives we know something. The identification of the Missaglia is in the first place due to the researches of the late Herr Wendelin Boeheim, formerly keeper of the Imperial Armoury, Vienna, who tells his own story of this discovery. In former years Herr Boeheim served in Lombardo-Venetia as an Austrian officer, and was consequently acquainted with Milan and the Italian language. Knowing that the Viennese armoury was rich in the works of the Milanese armourers, he decided to make a careful investigation in Milan, and to try to see whether he could not discover in the Milanese archives something about their undertakings. At Milan, as in many Italian towns, there is Via degli Armorari or Armourer's Street, and a Via degli Spadari or Swordmaker's Street. Herr Boeheim was naturally attracted by these names, and spent some time gazing at the different houses in these streets. Peering into a curved passage in the courtyard of a house in the Via degli Spadari, he saw on the capital of a column of late XIVth century date (Fig. 239) something which resembled the marks on suits of armour, and looking more closely, he recognized on this piece of sculpture the identical marks existing on the earliest suit of armour in the Ambras Collection (page 177, Fig. 212). He at once hurried to the archives, and, addressing the Director, Signor Pagani, asked him if he knew to whom that particular house in the Via degli Spadari formerly belonged. "Yes," replied the other, "to the family of Missaglia,