ring turned white, and that after he had left, it slowly regained its proper colour. At first he had attributed this to a spell thrown on him by some evil spirit, but, on reflection, he had come to the conclusion that it was due to the vapour of the quantities of quicksilver used in gilding the armour.
Almost contemporary with the Negrolis, a formidable rival arose at Augsburg in Germany in the person of Desiderius Colman of a family of armourers already celebrated in the XVth century, and the finest of his works were also made for Charles V. The Colmans were already working for the Court of Mantua as early as 1511, and it is probable that the young Desiderius had been able to see and appreciate the works of the Negrolis in journeying to and from Italy. Still, his taste in design never approaches that of the Milanese masters. By the middle of the century many other armour-making centres in Germany, as Landshut, Nuremberg, Innsbruck, and rather later Dresden, produced admirable armour, both embossed and engraved and gilt, this last being often of the highest merit. In Italy, isolated artists at various ducal courts, such as Mantua and Urbino, were also making very remarkable pieces.
Another school of embossers and inlayers of whose technically perfect work many examples still exist, appears to have arisen in France, its head-quarters being probably in the Louvre, and its productions being largely inspired, as regards their design, by the school of Fontainebleau. So remarkable are the finest of these pieces that they used generally to be attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, until some years ago I claimed a French origin for them,[1] a claim now generally admitted. In England, in the days of Elizabeth, we meet with an excellent school of armourers, apparently established at Greenwich, and many works emanating from it have now been identified. Its productions, which derive more from the German than from the Italian school, have a very distinctive character of their own, but they have been so ably studied by Viscount Dillon[2] and Mr. Charles ffoulkes[3] that I only refer to them in passing. During the last quarter of the century a rapid decline in the armourer's art is apparent, and that produced in the XVIIth century is altogether debased. Even at Milan richly ornamented armour became simply an article of manufacture and lost all artistic merit.
The statutes of the University of the armourers of Milan in 1587 have been preserved and are rather instructive. In these it is ordained that no armourer may open a shop unless he has practised his art for eight years without intermission, that he must present a trial piece to prove his ability, and that on admission he must register his punch mark or his granatura, so that it may be known by whom the pieces were made and Milanese work be known from Brescian. Granatura is a goldsmith's term for a grained, pearled, or milled edge. What this particular form of signature was, has yet to be
