Museum Display Pitfalls

MUSEUM ARMOUR PITFALLS
The study of museum display armours is very rewarding but there are several problems to watch out for that are fairly consistent with almost all major collections. My first introduction to display armour was in the Deyoung Museum in Oakland California. In their collection they have several typical museum display armours. On one study visit several decades ago however their collection was closed for renovations and in its place was a single very different armour. A guard stood right next to it as it was far more valuable that the rest. This piece was ragged, dark, and it had twisted bits of hard leather petrified all over it. There were bailing wire twists that held obviously mismatched pieces together in rusty masses. This was the real thing. Very very different from the rest of the collection. I whipped out my long handled plastic mirror and began fishing for views of the inside when I was approached by a curator who explained that this armour was indeed very different. This piece, on loan, was, as it was when it left the boat for its use in the conquest of the Americas by the conquistador's and was, as I recall, on loan from a Peruvian family. The curator explained that the leather was missing on almost the other armours in the museum and many pieces had been riveted together for ease of display when this was standard practice in museums and that pieces like this with the articulations intact were extremely rare. Later I met a man who did museum restorations and I saw him making pieces to fill in missing parts of an armour. The only museum that I know of that openly states what armours they have that are restored and composed is The John Woodman Higgens armory. This problem goes way back to before museums as we know them existed. The museums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more concerned with display and political message than study of the pieces in their care.
We start with the Sun King. Luis the fourteenth. His museum system is directly responsible for the destruction of tens of thousands of valuable artifacts. The problem was what was called “trophies”. These martial displays almost always involved destroying weapons and armour. Luis had a taste for these displays that is heart breaking. I have seen drawings of a dragon that was a small part of one of his court displays. This twenty foot dragon was made of wood then entirely covered with wheel lock gun locks. Over twenty thousand of them. All ripped off of guns that would be worth many thousands of dollars now. I saw these drawings with a bundle of gunlocks wired together that were a fragment of this display and available for sale. However Luis’s most horrifying accomplishment were his famous sun mandala’s. These are well represented in both art and artifact in several collections. They took all of the biggest swords they could find all over Europe and they chopped the blades off and mounted them up, highly polished, as the rays of a sun. Frequently Luis’s portrait in the center. These were given as gifts and as a result the entire continent was systematically stripped of its biggest swords. The possibility exists that studying the existing mandalas could reveal a large number of large swords that are largely ignored today because of Luis’s taste in martial trophies. These trophies and the royal competitions in their manufacture and display are a potential field of study that is largely untapped. Much could be conjectured statistically alone.
Our space is limited here so we jump to the mid nineteenth century and the Biedermeier period in museum display history. During this time the many armour collections were almost entirely involved in large museum tableau’s depicting events in history. The armour was made into sculptures around plaster figures and in some cases was nailed to the figures. No care whatsoever was made to keep historical context. Shocking by modern standards. The only Biedermeier tableau that remains is in the old arsenal at Solothurn. Made my Martin Disteli in 1840 it shows the diet of Stans in 1481. However the armour fastened to the plaster statues is all from the mid to late sixteenth century. The fact that the armour was a hundred years out of context was considered to be of no importance at all and the armour was regarded as not having study value as a historical piece as we understand it today. During this period practically every suit of armour in museum collections was probably affected.
We jump to the early twentieth century. A chap named Tachaux was making millions of dollars after convincing a group of billionaires that armour had more investment value than art. This man, and others like him were accused in their day of actually taking armours apart and making three or four complete armours out of them by making pieces to fill in. He took three quarter suits and turned them into full suits. He, in fact seems to have made more legs than any other product and the careful and educated eye can spot Tachaux legs in collections all over. He took many suits of munition armour and polished and etched them into royal armours. He sold to all the big money clients of his time.
Another issue is rolling an edge over a wire. Looking at examples in museums many can be found with cracks in them that clearly show a wire in the rolled edge showing in the crack. Some students of armour have concluded from this that the edge is rolled over a wire. Logic however dictates that the crack would have to affect the wire to have happened in the first place. A more detailed examination shows that these are museum repairs. A crack was stabilized by opening up a short length of the rolling and a short piece of wire was inserted. The rolling was pounded back down and if not subjected to much force the crack was stabilized. Now they would use a cement with filler that could be removed with a non intrusive solvent.
Today we have inherited all these problems. It is practically impossible to find armour in museums that has all its original leather and finish. Those examples which do exist are highly sought after by modern museums and many collections are taking measures to try to restore some pieces to near original condition. However this can be extremely difficult to do as all trace of the original articulation has long since been removed. The original holes may be entirely obscured by a cluster of rivets called a tinkers dam. In many cases all original rivet holes were filled and filed smooth so that only the most detailed examination shows that there was ever a rivet there in the first place. In early restorations any pits in the armour were punched through and filled with a rivet that was filed smooth. This sort of aggressive repair destroys all finish information. The confusion of trying to sort through repair rivets. Restorations. And tinkers dams can make it very frustrating for some one trying to restore a piece to original condition. A few decades back I tried writing a number of museums in an attempt to research articulations of known armours. In each case the reply was that those plates were just riveted together. I could not find a single pauldren in American collections that was able to move as originally intended. In every case past restorations were blamed. So when examining museum examples for articulation or finish you are almost always going to run into trouble. In almost every case, some articulations that originally moved are now fixed. Armour had a lot of leather in it and leather does not last. Once upon a time no one thought those fossilized scraps hanging from the armour were of any value. Now the only consistently reliable source of information on articulation and finish is the arsenal at Graz. That collection was hidden by circumstance from the museums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Discovered late in the twentieth century it is the twenty first centuries most precious resource when researching articulation and finish. I have personally seen quite a bit of armour in American collections. However I have seen only one that had all the original leather etc. Almost universally the armour in museum collections is highly restored exactly as described in the Higgins catalog. Most of the restoration information is however not generally available. It is on the other hand completely obvious that a breast and back were not generally riveted together and that pauldrens were not riveted to the breast and back. Common sense should tell you that exactly replicating a non functional restoration of an articulation that was never intended to move again will make armour that does not work. At Blankenshield we are under constant attack from chat room historians claiming that all armours in all museums are exactly as used in the appropriate time period. Any one that makes that claim has simply never done even the most basic research no matter what exaggerated claims they are making. It is a safe bet that any legitimate authority on armour will not go near a chat room or forum. Any one lurking in these places trying to convince people they are an authority on any subject is probably a fraud and if they can be found there almost daily they are surely misrepresenting who they are or they would instead, be busy as professionals in the field they claim to be experts in. When taking advice from some one on the Internet be sure that they are a working professional. If they make their living in the field they probably know something worth learning. When studying museum armour go to museum professionals and always check credentials. If they say they work for a museum, ask that museum. If they are representing themselves as an authority on armour, even if they say they work at a museum, make sure that they are not just the janitor or an entertainer on their front lawn. Make certain that the museum in question certifies their opinion. And when dealing with armour on display at a museum, remember that it had to survive not only wars but museum curators from bygone ages that modern curators would probably burn at the stake for their crimes. Just ask the curator of any major armour collection. And buy yourself a copy of the John Woodman Higgins catalog!