pictured it taken from its “dungeon,” carefully mounted cap-à-pie upon a charger in the middle of the gallery of a great museum, there to receive yearly the homage of a million people!
34. Giovan Paolo Negroli. Closehelmet, ca. 1540 – 45. Steel, gold; h. 10 ¾ in. (27.3 cm), wt. 6 lb. 8 oz. (3 kg). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund and George D. Pratt Gift, 1926 (26.53)
from Count Eugen Czernin of Bohemia, whose Baroque castle, Schloss Petersburg, he had visited many times before finally persuading its owner to sell. The armor had been displayed in the castle mounted in traditional fashion on a wooden horse. The horse, however, was destroyed in a fire, so that, as Dean explained, in the end the armor on its manikin was propped up in a great basket and hidden away: in fact, I was told that it saw the light of day only when I happened to visit the castle. Under such a condition the armor became known as the “knight of the clothesbasket” — a splendid but dejected creature who was dragged from his dark closet, with crippled back, shaking its helmet in silent reproach for captivity and neglect [ fig. 33 ]. Indeed, a figure so pathetic, fallen from highest estate, had, I believe, a great effect upon the chivalrous mind of its owner, who
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By the mid-1920s the flood of first-quality armors coming onto the market taxed the Museum’s already generous allowance to the department. But Dean was extraordinarily resourceful and imaginative in raising needed funds. In one unusual arrangement, Dean and Trustee George D. Pratt organized the sale of the armor collection owned by Henry G. Keasbey, a wealthy American then living in England. They guaranteed Keasbey a certain return from the sale at auction in New York. If the realized amount fell below the guarantee, Pratt and Dean would make up the difference; if, however, the income exceeded the guarantee, the surplus would go to the Metropolitan for arms and armor purchases in Pratt’s name. The Keasbey auctions in 1924 and 1925, a total of 600 lots, netted the Museum the handsome sum of $75,000. Over the next two years the funds underwrote, completely or in part, the purchases of several outstanding pieces: the two Saxon tilt armors from Dresden, a fluted “Maximilian” armor of unusually large proportions dating to about 1530, parts of a late fifteenthcentury German “Gothic” armor thought to come from a tomb, and a richly embossed and gilt close-helmet attributed to Giovan Paolo Negroli (fig. 34). Dean was unrelenting when pursuing objects he considered essential for the department’s collection. This was especially the case with a rare group of seven late fifteenth-century German shields painted with the arms of the Behaim family of Nuremberg. When he presented them for purchase in 1924 the trustees rejected them because of their poor condition, heavy overpainting, and dark, almost illegible imagery. Dean did not give up. He bought the shields from the dealer with his own funds and undertook to have them restored at his own expense, with the intent of later offering them to the Museum at the dealer’s original price. During restoration traces of earlier painting