Armor, Memory, Commemoration, and Collection

Plate armors – and their representations in images and texts – carried rich mnemonic potential for late medieval and early modern viewers. Luxury armors were fitted exactly to their wearers’ measurements, and were, therefore, perfect impressions of a particular person's body at a specific moment in his life. In this way, armor echoes Plato's ancient conceptualization of memory. In his dialogues, well-known to late medieval and early modern scholars, the Athenian philosopher visualized the human mind as a wax tablet upon which thoughts or images could be inscribed or impressed, as a signet ring marks a seal, their forms and details retained for posterity. Complete sets of empty armors approximated their wearer's physical presence, and, when they were disassembled, could function as metonyms for his identity. Individual gauntlets evoke the size of a hand and the stoutness or delicacy of a wrist, the knobby ulna bone often accommodated by an embossed flourish. Enclosed greaves trace the muscular curve of a calf and the taper of an ankle. The nipped-in waist of a cuirass, whose hourglass shape helped to distribute the weight of the armor upon the hips like a modern hiker's pack, echoes the silhouette of a torso: perhaps svelte or athletic, perhaps imposingly broad, perhaps grown paunchy with illness, rich diet, or age. More than nearly any other medium, armor offers a persistent, three-dimensional index of a long-dead person who may have experienced – and shaped – historically momentous events.

Armor had the potential to prompt recollection not only of the wearer's form, but of the feats of arms he accomplished, the pageantry in which he participated, or the battles in which he fought. A shallow, linear gauge in the surface of a breastplate follows the path of a jousting lance as it skittered across the steel. A square constellation of diamond-shaped holes in a helmet suggests the fateful blow of a hammer. For late medieval and early modern viewers, the broad spectrum of armors – the diverse forms of helmets, shields, cuirasses, gauntlets, and limb defenses – functioned as a visual language. Each form could evoke its context of use, whether in the many variants of tournament combat or on the battlefield. In turn, each type of knightly sport within the broad rubric of the tournament bore additional layers of meaning that specialized armors could prompt viewers to recall.