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'Wild Boar Hunt'. Engraved by Virgil Solis the Elder, c. 1550. British Museum, London (1837,0616.58.) Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum
The helmet of our armour, which has different decoration to that on the recessed band that runs parallel to the main edges of the cuirass and legs, is almost certainly not the helmet originally supplied with most of the rest of the armour. Its decoration is dominated by scenes of hunting boar and either hare or rabbit that are clearly drawn from the engravings of Virgil Solis the Elder, who was active until his death in 1562 and who inspired a considerable amount of sporting decoration on arms and armour. This scheme of decoration is by no means unique to our helmet: very similar decoration appears on the skull of the burgonet of a Brunswick black and white halfarmour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (No. 14.25.711) and on another of the helmets from the collection of the Dukes of Brunswick at Schloss Blankenburg that was illustrated and described by Robert Bohlmann in 1915 as belonging to what he numbered as armour 9 (Fig. 31 in his survey). There is one element of the decoration of the burgonet in the Metropolitan Museum that has been lifted directly from an engraving by the Nuremburg artist Virgil Solis the Elder. This, illustrated above, shows a hunter with a spear, facing to the left, with a tree to his immediate right; aided by one hound at his side and two from the far side of his prey, he is attacking a boar that has fallen onto its back. On the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s helmet, this scene is very carefully copied from Solis’s engraving. On our helmet the scene appears again on the band on the left of the skull but here is more freely copied: the hunter, the tree, the boar on its back and the three dogs are all still there but are somewhat more adapted. Two other features are of interest on the helmet. Firstly, on the prow of the upper bevor is a large cartouche bearing three small, plain shields. The same Arms appear on the comb of a decorated Brunswick morion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (No. 1999.62) and have been identified as the Arms of the Guild of St Luke, which was the painters’ guild and the trade association to which many Brunswick etchers belonged. This has given rise to the suggestion that that morion may have been a ‘masterpiece’ submitted by an etcher to gain acceptance as a master of his craft. It will be remembered, from the historical contextual analysis above, that the Painters and Etchers of Brunswick made it clear in 1566 that, among other things that could be accepted as a ‘masterpiece’, was an etched heavy field armour or light field armour. It is very possible, therefore, that our superbly decorated helmet may belong to one of these ‘masterpiece’ armours. Secondly, while the presence on the front of the lower gorget plate of a sheep’s head may have religious significance, it may also link the helmet to our cod-piece, the following item, which is decorated with a ram’s head. Finally, of the other elements of our armour only one bears a clue as to its origin. The winged heart pierced with an arrow that appears on the small, associated gorget, may suggest that it originally formed part of one of the ‘wedding’ armours.