# Armor for the Joust of Peace > Daniel Tachaux - Genuine elements probably late 15th century; assembled and completed as a composite armor by Costantino Ressman, 1881-1891; helmet made by Daniel Tachaux, Paris, 1891 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/daniel-tachaux/joust-of-peace-helmet-tachaux-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-24 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Daniel Tachaux - **Date:** Genuine elements probably late 15th century; assembled and completed as a composite armor by Costantino Ressman, 1881-1891; helmet made by Daniel Tachaux, Paris, 1891 - **Medium:** Steel, copper alloy, leather, textile and horn - **Dimensions:** Helmet (a), wt. 21.5 lb (9752 g); breastplate (c), wt. 23 lb (10.4 kg); tassets (e, f), wt. 6 lb each (2723 g); backplate (i), wt. 5 lb (2268 g); rondels (o, p), wt. 5 lb each (2268 g); shield (q), wt. 6 lb (2723 g); overall wt. 85.5 lb (38.78 kg) - **Object type:** Arms and armour - **Period:** German, late 15th century, with French restorations of 1887-1891 - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Arms and Armor - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary What the Metropolitan Museum catalogues as "Armor for the Joust of Peace" and lists under its own culture field as "German; restorations, French, Paris" is a composite Stechzeug, the massively reinforced armor built for the Gestech, the German tournament joust with blunted lances. Most of its plates are genuine fifteenth-century fragments the Italian diplomat and collector Costantino Ressman bought one at a time between 1881 and 1889 from named dealers and sales. The helmet is not one of them. In October 1891 Ressman commissioned the Paris armorer Alexandre Lebon to complete and mount the assembly, and Lebon in turn employed a young armorer named Daniel Tachaux to forge the helm itself, along with a new shield and a pair of tassets, from scratch.Ressman sold the whole armor to the Duc de Dino in 1899, during his final illness; Dino's entire five-hundred-piece collection was bought sight unseen by the Metropolitan in April 1904 for just over $250,000, the largest sum the Museum had yet paid for a single acquisition. The purchase created the Museum's arms and armor curatorship on the spot: Bashford Dean, hired that same year, examined the piece and by 1905 had put his own doubts about the helm into print, in the Museum's own handbook, guessing that it was modern but misjudging where it had been made. It took until 2012, and a different curator working from the collector's own surviving papers, to put the Paris armorer's name on it.Tachaux's own later career completes the irony: in 1909 Dean hired him outright, as the Museum's staff armorer, to found the conservation workshop that still maintains the Arms and Armor collection today. The man whose early, uncredited work fooled a curator became, within two decades, the person that curator trusted most with the genuine article. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1470s-1889** Various, prior to Costantino Ressman `[documented]` (origin and dispersal of the genuine elements) The gauntlet, breastplate core, vambrace, pauldrons, besagews, backplate and shaffron are individually documented fifteenth-century (or, for the shaffron, later) pieces that passed through named dealers and sales before Ressman acquired them piecemeal between 1881 and 1889. No single earlier owner or origin unites them; they came from at least five separate sources. - **1881-1891** Costantino Ressman, Paris `[documented]` (assembly and completion) Ressman bought the gauntlet from Baron Basilewsky (1881), the breastplate with new tassets, lance-rest and counter-rest from Bachereau (1887), the vambrace at the Londesborough sale (July 1888), the pauldrons and besagews from Baron de Cosson (December 1888), a new shield from the restorer Negre (November 1889) and the backplate from Maurice Chabrieres-Arles (November 1889). In October 1891 he commissioned the armorer Alexandre Lebon to complete and mount the whole armor, a job for which Lebon employed Daniel Tachaux to forge the helm. Total cost to Ressman: 7,950 francs. Sourced to Ressman's own inventories, correspondence and receipts, preserved among the Baron de Cosson papers at the Royal Armouries Library, Leeds. - **1899** Charles Maurice Camille de Talleyrand-Perigord, 4th duc de Dino `[documented]` (purchase) Bought from Ressman, during Ressman's final illness, for 30,000 francs, as part of what Pyhrr calls "the Ressman purchase of 1899," Dino's last major arms and armor acquisition and Ressman's largest single sale to him. Price negotiated by Baron de Cosson, who was Ressman's friend and Dino's paid agent in the same transaction. Ressman died 8 July 1899. - **1899-1904** Charles Maurice Camille de Talleyrand-Perigord, 4th duc de Dino `[documented]` (ownership) Held as part of Dino's roughly five-hundred-piece collection, catalogued privately by Baron de Cosson in 1901. No individual valuation of this armor within the Dino holding is documented in the sources consulted. - **April 1904-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition and accession) Bought en bloc with the entire Dino collection for just over $250,000 (about 2,500,000 francs), the Museum's largest single-acquisition sum to date, negotiated sight unseen by trustee Rutherfurd Stuyvesant on Baron de Cosson's recommendation. Accessioned as Rogers Fund, 1904, under 04.3.291a-q, .292. The price paid specifically for this Stechzeug within the block purchase is not separately documented. Catalogued and displayed from 1904 by founding curator Bashford Dean, who identified the helm as modern in his own 1905 handbook; displayed in the Arms and Armor Galleries until 1988; returned briefly to the Great Hall in 2012 for the Department's centennial. The helmet's specific maker, Daniel Tachaux, was identified by curator Stuart W. Pyhrr in 2012. ## Open questions - Was the helm forged in 1891 or 1889? The 2012 scholarship that identifies Tachaux as the maker gives both dates in different places within the same publication, and nothing in the sources consulted for this record resolves the discrepancy. - Do any of the other nine helmets Ressman sold to the Duc de Dino alongside this armor in 1899 carry restorations by Lebon, Tachaux, or another Paris workshop that have not been individually reassessed? - Has the 1891 helmet ever been examined with metallurgical or technical imaging methods, independent of the documentary case Pyhrr built from Ressman's own papers? - What became of the original, older shield and tasset forms that the 1887-1889 replacements were made to match, if any survived Ressman's decade of piecemeal assembly? - The Museum's own public database still lists this accession under two separate object identifiers (35928 and 21926). Is that a data artifact awaiting correction, or does it reflect some other cataloguing distinction not stated in either record? - Is the armor currently in storage, in conservation, or elsewhere; the Museum's Collection API records no gallery number, but the sources consulted do not state a reason or a date for its removal from view after the 2012 centennial display. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 35928, 'Armor for the Joust of Peace' / 'Helmet (04.3.291a) made by Daniel Tachaux,' accession 04.3.291a-q. Accessed directly via the Museum's open Collection API; the corresponding public object page (metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/35928) returned an HTTP 429 challenge to automated fetching. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 21926, 'Jousting Armor' / 'Helmet made by Daniel Tachaux,' accession 04.3.291a-q, .292; etc. A separate database entry for what appears to be the same physical accession as source 1. Accessed via the Museum's open Collection API. - [3] Stuart W. Pyhrr, 'Armor for America: The Duc de Dino Collection,' Metropolitan Museum Journal 47 (2012), pp. 183-230, including Appendix 1, 'Too Good to Be True: Arms and Armor Fakes and Pastiches in the Dino Collection,' and Appendix 2, the concordance of Dino catalogue numbers and Metropolitan accession numbers. Fetched and read in full (PDF, pdftotext extraction of the Museum's own publication file, 48 pages). - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 23216, 'Helm for the Joust of Peace (Stechhelm),' German, probably Nuremberg, ca. 1500, accession 29.156.67a, Bashford Dean Memorial Collection, Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1929. - [5] Metropolitan Museum of Art label text for 'Armorer's Hammer,' accession 12.230.98 (object 35897), reproduced in an Alamy stock-image caption: training of Daniel Tachaux under the armorer Ludwig Klein, the 644-piece tool set brought from Paris to New York in 1909. The Museum's own object page for 35897 returned an HTTP 429 challenge to automated fetching; the label text was read via the licensed image caption reproducing it. - [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API record for object 35956, 'Prototype for Helmet Model No. 2,' Daniel Tachaux, American (New York), 1917, steel and pressed paper or cardboard. - [7] Philadelphia Museum of Art, catalogue entry for 'Elements from an Armor for the German Joust of Peace (Stechzeug),' Helmschmid workshop, Augsburg, c. 1494 with later replacements and additions. - [8] Wikimedia Commons, five CC0-licensed Metropolitan Museum photographs of accession 04.3.291a-q: File:Armor for the Joust of Peace MET DP277982.jpg, File:Armor for the Joust of Peace MET DP277984.jpg, File:Armor for the Joust of Peace MET DP277985.jpg, File:Armor for the Joust of Peace MET 168825.jpg, and File:Armor for the Joust of Peace MET 168826.jpg. Licence verified per file from extmetadata.LicenseShortName. - [9] Italian Wikipedia, 'Costantino Ressman': birth and death dates, diplomatic career and 1895 removal from the Foreign Ministry, art and armor collecting from c. 1867, and the bequest of his own collection to the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with Elena Carrara's 2008 doctoral dissertation on Ressman, cited in Pyhrr 2012's own bibliography, or with the Metropolitan's companion 2012 Journal article on the Ressman-Riggs correspondence. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.