suits, and I would wish to call attention to a point which has always seemed to me of surpassing interest in connection with them. We are all well acquainted with the features and the costume of Charles V, Francis I, Henry VIII, or Maximilian, from the admirable portraits of them that have come down to us; we know their complexion, their expression, even their favourite attitudes. But it is only by their armour that we can know their actual height, bulk, and build. No painted portrait can give us that. In the armour the man becomes palpable, and with a little imagination we can see him living inside it. We see Charles V rather slender and weakly, Francis I long of limb, exactly like the masterly word-portrait of him by Hall. "A goodlie prince, statlie of countenance, merrie of cheere, brown coloured, great eies, high nosed, big lipped, faire breasted, broad shoulders, small legs and long feet."[1] We can follow Henry VIII from a fine lusty young fellow in the beautiful armour sent to him by Maximilian in 1514, to a burly athletic man in the two suits for fighting on foot, and lastly we see him as an unwieldy fat one with a large girth, in the two suits, mounted on horseback.[2] The armour thus completes our knowledge of these remarkable personalities.
Of the Milanese armourers known to have been settled in France in the XVth century, ten were at Tours, eleven at Lyons, and three at Bordeaux, and besides these were some seven or eight others bearing Italian names. Several of them received letters of naturalization and founded families of armourers who can be traced for several generations. The descendants of Jean Merveilles of Milan,[3] who is found at Tours as early as 1425, were still practising the craft one hundred and sixty years later.[4] But it is not my purpose here to deal with the history of armourers, only with the making of armour. Under Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I the court armourers generally resided at Tours. The names of nearly two hundred armourers living there in the XVth and XVIth centuries are known, so great quantities of armour must have been made by them. Much of it must have been of very fine quality, and although none of it has yet been identified, I think that a careful comparative study of existing armour in France might enable one to determine its characteristics and to differentiate it from that made in Italy, with which, however, it must have had a certain affinity.[5] A manufactory of armour, also conducted by two Milanese armourers, brothers, was started at Arbois in Burgundy under the auspices of the Emperor Maximilian. These armourers, known to have been working at Milan in 1492, contracted in 1494 to make in the town
- ↑ Especially before his suit of armour in Paris was hoisted on a horse with a bard that has no connection with it.
- ↑ All in the Tower.
- ↑ At Milan we find a Giovanni Meraviglia in 1395 and a Jo. Marcus Mirabilio (Latin form), in 1492.
- ↑ Dr. E. Giraudet, Les Artistes Tourangeaux (Tours, 1885).
- ↑ I much suspect that a very fine suit for man and horse, attributed to Gaillot de Genouillac, Grand Master of the Artillery to Francis I, and lent to the Exhibition in Paris in 1889 by the Duchesse d'Uzès, would prove to be an example of the work of the armourers of Tours (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York).
