Masterclass Arms and Armour with Dr Tobias Capwell

[Music] thanks everybody for coming this morning welcome to the Wallace Collection I'm Toby Capp well I'm the curator of arms and armor here responsible for what is essentially probably in numeric terms about 44% of the entire contents of the building what we're going to be seeing today is without question one of the greatest collections of arms and armor in the world I've been here for 12 years and I still see new things every day we think that works of art and tools are two different things that works of art should just sit on the wall and function only for the expressive message and intent of the artist this is a modern way of thinking but to really understand these objects in the medieval period and the Renaissance it doesn't exist these are of course decorative works of art but they also have huge expressive power this collection is also really remarkable from a collecting point of view because it's essentially the accomplishment of one man Sir Richard Wallace so isn't it extraordinary that one of the greatest collections of arms and armor in the world right up there with the big museums is actually the achievement of one collector it's very easy in 500 or more years for the individual elements of an original armor as worn to get separated and the vast majority of the armors that you will see on the market and indeed in museums are what you might call composite they were put together in the 19th century usually but often it still happens in the 20th or 21st century they are put together from different parts that don't belong together and it's extraordinary because being early in the 16th century it's still relatively undecorated the 16th century was the great age of armour decoration but this one is hugely important because it's a very fine quality made for a member of a royal court and yet apart from some subtle etching entirely undecorated but it's artistic power and presence still comes through it is essentially a hollow sculpture that is designed to contain an augment and protect the body of the artists patron in a way armor is a process profound process through which the artist transforms the patron himself into a living artwork if you look at how armors the great courtly armors of the Renaissance self-identified they thought of themselves as artists first and engineers second and often you see functional sacrifices made on an armor for the sake of it looking even more splendid even more yes that's a good question I mean armors could take hugely varying amounts of time to produce sometimes it's six months or more for a nice armor and armors are notoriously difficult to keep to schedules but but it's clear also that they could be made very quickly in the 15th century there are contracts signed by armors in Milan undertaking to make a complete armor every day one one complete armor per day now that's a consortium of craftsmen working very effectively together but but when when the emperor maximilian needs an armor it gets one in so many ways armor it's its place in the society it's very much analogous to cars now and we can see how cars stylistically evolved decade by decade and they evolved for technological reasons because air flow is more efficient this way or that way or because of the function of the particular car or just because if technology is advancing but there is also an artistic sculptural level to the design of automobiles we express ourselves through the inanimate objects around us we project our identity onto inanimate objects around us what were they trying to express with Norma I guess you were saying that the body aesthetics claim changed quite yes well this is a great example of that this is an armor made at the court of Elizabeth the first made in Elizabeth's Court armory at Greenwich just across the river and this is a war armor it was probably originally made in preparation for the Armada invasion in 1588 it's probably in in the the armors workshop the previous year when there was a lot of preparation for the invasion and this was made for Sir Thomas Sackville Lord Buck Hurst who was a very close supporter and coarser diplomat and author in Elizabeth's Court but he was also a military commander and he was responsible for commanding cavalry defending the south coast and this is a war armor that was probably made for him to serve in that role but beyond the fact that this is bullet a bulletproof armor designed for fighting on foot and a horseback and everything else this is also a wonderful expression of what the Elizabethans thought the ideal male body should look like and it's the exact same silhouette that you will see in any full-length Elizabethan portrait and their body aesthetic also summarizes their attitude to masculinity in general in that it has a very powerfully build muscular upper body and thin little graceful legs and that sums up the duality of being a nobleman in the 16th century you need to be a knight you need to be a warrior you are a trained killer who has been a martial artist since they were 5 years old probably but you're also an aesthete you also are a dancer you also have an elegance and a fineness in your intellectual and spiritual life well this armor cost around 500 pounds and then he had to spend another 250 pounds on the Royal license that would allow him to go to the raw workshop and have an armor made in the first place so 750 pounds to an Elizabethan nobleman is still probably several times his annual income and typically one armor would last a lifetime I'm guessing oh no no no the armors like this are usually the high high-end ones were worn once they were made for a specific event a specific tournament a parade or a military campaign and armor is evolving so fast you can't you can't wear an armor that's five years old because the style is different and you will very rapidly look like you're wearing your grandfather's clothes and you can't have that just quickly before we move on also this armor is very interesting just technically because it looks like a German armor in the Maximilian style a style developed in the early 16th century at the court of the Emperor Maximilian hence the name but this is not actually a real maximilian armor at all this was actually made in the 17th century and i think is an interesting armor because it shows that armors like artists working in other media were aware of their history they were aware of the artists the the work of artists of previous generations and they were inspired by and referring back to them that is a real one and if you compare the two you can start to see how although they superficially look similar in the fine detail the way the flutes are created the way the metal has been sculpted they are actually quite different this is a later imitation of this style as well as a great collection of arms and armor the Wallis works very hard to maintain one of the world's great study archives for the subject of arms and armor for many years we've collected the books and papers and written evidence for our subject and because the early connoisseur collectors of arms and armor were often authors themselves laying down the foundation literature there's a fascinating relationship between you know what's upstairs and what's down here and one thing I thought would be really interesting to look at is the three-volume history of armor that was written by Sir Samuel rush Marik in the early 19th century this is the first scholarly work on the history of armor this is the first time there's a chronology that tells you there is a stylistic development in armor from the 10th century to the 18th century and if you go through the plates as we go around you can see in the the charming illustrations how armor generation by generation decade by decade evolves and you'll notice here on this one the very armor that you just looked at in the previous room this is the same Mannerist armor used as a as an illustration in the in the text we looked at the beautifully preserved homogenius early 16th century armor earlier where all the parts belong together and are preserved essentially in the way the armor was originally worn and this armor is a fabulous example of the opposite this looks like a complete armor but the more you look at it the more you might think there's something vaguely strange about us your your basic human senses might tell you this doesn't look very much like an actual human being and that's because the entire thing has been put together in the mid 19th century what we have here is a wonderful example that you can really follow in some detail the story of a dealer we don't know who it was but it was almost certainly in Paris who had some good fragments he had a good LAN suit helmet and matching pair of gauntlets that were missing their phones separately he had an extremely fine Augsburg breastplate and he had some other disparate elements shoulders a left elbow bits of some legs made in North German later in the in the sixteenth century and he's looking at these pieces and thinking to himself these are fine pieces but I can't sell them I can't sell a left elbow a helmet some gauntlets that are missing thumbs and some other random elements what I need to do is build this into an armor that someone can set up in their drawing room then it will sell so he's put this together this is nothing like anything that would ever have been worn in the sixteenth century even though it is composed of very very fine quality pieces it is in fact made up of pieces from five different armors made in at least three different places and in dates widely spread across the first half of the 16th century I've opened the case you can come in and have a look at this have a have a quick look at the the etching pay attention also to the state of preservation some of its in better condition than other pieces and if this thing had all been together since the 16th century the condition on all the pieces should be the same so when you see radically different states of preservation some pieces seem like they're heavily pitted and deeply oxidized and heavily agree cleaned and other pieces don't that's another warning sign these are some replica pieces they're modern made but they are very good representations of certain real real types of armor but showing you what the thing might have looked like when it was new so very finely polished in this case and also having the padded linings and and furnishings that you need to wear to wear the helmet this is one of mine I've been this helmet was made for me in the late 90s and so it's a nice example of the longevity of armor I've just stood in tournaments all the world in competition in this helmet it's been hit Lots with Lance's and swords and all kinds of things but they the quality of the the carbon steel I think testifies to itself then you've got another a pair of gauntlets so often only the metal parts survived but Armour usually has integral leather textile elements that overtime organic elements degrade and fall out and don't survive the this this goat skin glove is stitched in just with linen stitches if the stitching rots away the glove falls out and the end is lost but this is a nice example of what a piece of armour is is meant to look like when it's functional we've picked these pieces too because they have their nice demonstrations of different decorative techniques embossing and chasing acid etching with some with some recessing and a bit of embossing to to refine in the forms and also this is a nice example of bluing and gilding and etching all put together on a royal object this much smoke have you done that one yeah but that's a clue this is the fighting helmet and this isn't okay if it's just for parade you don't need it to be heavy so the first test will it work as armor if it is claiming to be a helmet then it has to work as a helmet and if it doesn't agree with the proportions of a human face or if it has some other basic functional problem then you should have alarm bells going off and the two mask visors here are our examples of this one of these is completely original and one is a fake I think I heard some of you picking up on this already does someone want to categorically put their put there whatever to the mask colours to the mast sir yes yes and why would you say that heavier there needs to be maybe uh-huh uh-huh well yes you're basically nailed it if you look at this one it's a mask visor the good ones were portraits of the person inside or sometimes they're more generic grotesque faces but these are still for fighting we have these examples of these used in tournaments and on the battlefield so if it's going to cover your face like the helmets you could put on over there you need to be able to see out of it right and these little pierced holes in the eyes of the mask are not good enough you need to have real helmet sights just like these just like these and this has the pierced eyes which are cosmetic they're the piercing might actually be much later actually it might not even be original to the object but still the thing comes down and you can see out of here not out of the office [Music]

Channel: Colnaghi Foundation

Views: 10,254

Keywords: arms and armour, tobias capwell, knight, wallace collection

Id: pLocCQeYX_0

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Aeriosus]

Always love watching Toby's lectures!

[u/sirelagnithgin]

Tobias is really outstanding and enthusiastic when it comes to his study and interpretation of medieval technologies. No wonder they let him curate the Wallace Collection.