Bashford Dean. Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare

London: Yale University Press, 1920. — 325 p.Helmets and body armor are usually considered as objects beautiful, rather than useful. They are exhibited in museums, in halls hung with tapestries, beside faience, ivories and enamels of olden times. Some of them were designed by artists whose names are highest of all in the history of art,—Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, Holbein, Michael Angelo — and those who actually made and decorated the armor were masters hardly less distinguished. Certainly in their day they were paid the highest honors. Serafino di Brescia, armorer of Francis I, was received at court on the same footing with Titian: the Milanese Missaglia lived in princely splendor, and Seusenhofer, the helmsmith, was one of the intimates of the knightly Maximilian. It is, then, from the viewpoint of artistic excellence that armor has largely been treated, especially as to its decoration and its various forms. Its technical side is little known, and few there are, even among specialists, who have considered how difficult armor was to make, and how time consuming,— for a suit of armor of high quality might cost its maker years of labor. And, particularly, little is known as to its usefulness in combat, which, none the less, was the main if not the only reason for its existence. Armor, in a word, has been studied as a dead language or, better perhaps, as the bones of a fossil animal, which the anatomist examines attentively and from which he is led to explain the habits and capabilities of the animal itself. Nevertheless, there are clearly other paths leading to a knowledge of armor which deserve to be more carefully followed, and two of these, especially, guide us in practical directions. One of them points the way to early references, which at the best are scanty and difficult of access, but which tell quite accurately what armor could do and how the early masters gained their results,—a path opened up delightfully for us by M. Ch. Buttin* in his studies of early armor of proof.