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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2011
The Franciscan monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie is situated on the bank of the Mincio some five miles west of Mantua on the road to Cremona. My attention was first drawn to it by the late Baron de Cosson during a conversation in Florence in 1926, when he showed me a photograph of the interior of the church. He understood that the local tradition was that the statues were clad in armour taken from the battlefield of Marignano in 1515, and mentioned that there appeared to be some basis for this belief as the armour looked to to him genuine enough, so far as it was possible to see it from the floor of the church. ‘Rien n'est plus rare qu'une arinure ancienne’ The suggestion that there might be in existence a church full of armour dating from the early part of the sixteenth century, hitherto unrecorded, inspired a desire to visit the place at the first opportunity. I was unable to fulfil my intention that year, but two years later I was in the north of Italy again and was able to make the promised pilgrimage. The antiquary is well used to receiving specious accounts of treasures which on examination turn out to be utterly worthless. Perhaps objects associated with warlike exploits lend themselves even more commonly to exaggeration than most, and I was prepared to find that I had made a journey in vain. On my arrival a brother informed me that the armour on the statues was only of carta pesta and not worth looking at. But the first figure that I inspected showed that my hopes had been exceeded. Not only was much of the armour real, so far as one could tell through a coating of thick black paint overlaid with the dust of countless Italian summers, but its form was not that of the time of Marignano but of some fifty years earlier, when the art of the Italian armourer had reached its zenith. Last year I returned to the monastery and arranged to have a scaffold erected, and to have the seventeen figures which wear armour out of the total of sixty-seven photographed; for permission to do this I wish to record my gratitude to Monsignor Guarnieri and the Soprintendente di Belle Arti of.the district.
page 118 note 1 Historia dell'origine, fondatione, et progressi del famosissimo Tempio di S. Maria delle Gratie, in compagna di Curtatone fuori di Mantova. Con la descrittione del Monastero dignissimo, sue giuridittioni, et altre attinenze della sopradetta Santa Cara, per il M. Rev. Padre Frat' Hippolito Donesmundi da Mantova, lettore theologico generale, de Minori Osservanti. Composta in Casale, per Bernardo Grasso, stampator Ducale MDCIII.
page 119 note 1 Compendio storico del Tempio della B.V. Maria delle Grazie … estratta del Donesmondi. Mantua, 1825.Google Scholar
page 119 note 2 The existing verses of three lines of Italian are printed in the 1925 guide.
page 120 note 1 The guide of 1825 included with the first row the three figures of the second row over the entrance to the Chapel of the B.V.M., which breaks the sequence of the lower row.
page 123 note 1 Record of European Arms and Armour, 1920–22, vol. i, figs. 201, 218, 224–35, 237, 238.Google Scholar
page 124 note 1 The Armoury of the Castle of Churburg, by Trapp, Oswald Graf, edited by Mann, J. G., 1929.Google Scholar
page 125 note 1 Böheim, Waffenkunde, fig. 162.
page 126 note 1 ‘Quant au harnoys de jambes, l'une des faczons est clou davant et derrière par le bas, ainsi que on le faict à Millan, et a grande gardes au genouil et un pou de mailles sur le cou du pié’ Renė de Belleval, Traité Anonyme du Costume Militaire de 1446.
page 126 note 2 Angelucci, A., Le armi del cavaliere Raoul Richards alia mostra dei metalli artistici di Roma, 1886.Google Scholar
page 129 note 1 See Archaeologia, vol. lxxix, pls. LXXIX, LXXI (2), LXII (I), and p. 225, fig. 1.
page 131 note 1 Reproduced on pp. 167–73 °f Francesco Novati's facsimile edition of the MS. published by the Instituto di Arte Grafici of Bergamo in 1902.
page 132 note 1 Quoted by the Baron de Cosson in Burlington Magazine, xxxvi, p. 149, and the writer's preface to Armoury of the Castle of Churburg, English edition, 1929, p. xiv.
page 132 note 2 A. Venturi, Le R. Gallerie Nazionale, vols. iii and iv, 1901 and 1902. Dr. Venturi attributed them to the Paduan artist Giusto Menabuoi (†1397), believing them to be studies for his frescoes in the Church of the Eremitani, which were destroyed early in the seventeenth century. Dr. von Schlosser, J. challenged this attribution in the Vienna Jahrbuch, vol. xxiii, 1903, p. 327Google Scholar, among other arguments pointing out that the armour could not have been drawn by an artist of the second half of the fourteenth century. But Venturi, maintained his opinion in L'Arte, 1903, pp. 79–82Google Scholar, and rejected von Schlosser's contention about the armour on the ground that there was no material change in the fashion of arming between the end of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century. No one who has studied the representations of Italian armour during these years will agree with this statement, and recent scholarship seems to have abandoned Venturi's attribution (van, Marle IV, pp. 172–4, VII, p. 399).
page 132 note 3 Brasses of John Poyle, Esq., †1424, Hampton Poyle, Oxon (brass probably set up ten years later); John Cople, Esq., †1435, Cople, Beds.; John Leventhorpe, Esq., †1433 (brass dates from the death of his widow in 1437), Sawbridgeworth, Herts.
page 133 note 1 Home, H. P., in the Monthly Review, Oct. 1901, p. 114.Google Scholar
page 136 note 1 Archaeologia, vol. lxxix, p. 229.
page 137 note 1 Sterzing is now within the Italian frontier and has been renamed Vipiteno. Its geographical position easily explains the ‘Italian influences’ which Mrffoulkes, correctly discerned when discussing it in The Armourer and his Craft, 1912, p. 14, but where it is stated to be at Augsburg.Google Scholar It is in fact a truthful portrait of the Milanese armours, such as were worn in Tyrol at this date and are still preserved in the Castle of Churburg, which is not so very many miles from Sterzing.
page 137 note 2 Most Italian armours of the fifteenth century were fitted with large heavy pauldrons, and it is conceivable that the light, laminated rerebraces with besagues on the Count Palatine's suit were, like the long-toed sabatons, a concession to German taste. They appear, however, on Giorgione's San Liberale at Castelfranco, and the study for it in the National Gallery. A letter from the governor of the castle at Milan to the Duke, 14 Oct. 1473, reports that a German from Basle has bought. molto quantitade de armefacte a la todescha’, Motta, , Archivio Storico Lombardo, 1914, p. 216.Google Scholar In 1436 Tomaso Missaglia appointed Gasparo de Zugnio his agent in Spain, and considerable correspondence exists between the King of France and the Duke of Milan concerning the purchasing of armour and the employment of Milanese armourers, op. cit.
page 140 note 1 Illustrated by J. von Schlosser, Kunst und Wunderkammer der Spätrenaissance, fig. 6 b. That at Grazie can be seen in fig. 6 of the same book.