A rider, drawn in ink and gouache, fully armored, a jousting lance firmly couched under his right arm, charges across folio 9r of the Thun-Hohenstein album on a horse that is also encased in ornate steel (fig. 62). This image is one of sixteen full-length figures in the album armed for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tournament events. It visualizes the kinetic dynamism, military spectacle, and material splendor of the Rennen, a dangerous form of joust using relatively sharp-pointed lances. Consideration of this drawing and related images of tournament armor in the Thun album alongside other sixteenth-century images and texts that represented knightly sport demonstrates the deep resonance between the Thun drawings and chivalric archetypes pertaining to tournaments in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Further, locating the drawings among contemporaneous, mid-sixteenth-century depictions of knightly sport that emerged from the same contexts and workshops reveals how tournaments and the material culture that surrounded them offered perennial subjects of commemoration during the early modern period.

On folio 9r, Artist A, a draftsman likely working in the circle of Jörg Breu the Younger during the 1540s, envisioned a rider armored for one of many types of the Rennen. The depicted equipment evokes either the Schweif- or Scharffrennen, named for the sharp points of the lances used in it but distinguished by shields that flew into the air on impact, or the Geschiftrennen, a variant in which a specialized shield, or Renntartsche, was engineered to dramatically break into pieces when struck directly. In English-language sources, the Rennen is frequently known as the joust of war due, in part, to its inherent danger and bellicose associations, which called to mind the often-lethal clashes that occurred on the battlefield. Its participants wore armor that derived from that worn on the battlefield by German cavalry during the fifteenth century, and the fictive armor of the rider on folio 9r emulates actual tournament armor so closely that it can be stylistically dated to between 1480 and 1485. His helmet, a specialized sallet known as a Rennhut, is fitted with a scalloped brow reinforcement that formally recalls the ornamental edges of the plates that cover his body. Similar brow reinforces survive on jousting sallets associated with Lorenz Helmschmid and his contemporaries and are sometimes also loosely affixed to the helmet so that they would fly away on impact, further amplifying the theatricality of the Rennen.