Helmet all'Antica

A Milanese parade helmet of about 1532-35, embossed from steel as a head of tightly curled hair under a wreath of oak leaves, so that the wearer appeared as an ancient hero. The oak may be a pun on the name of the della Rovere, dukes of Urbino, though nothing documents the connection. It is attributed to Filippo Negroli and is not signed.

The Museum's own publications do not agree about it. The online record gives a height of 11 1/4 inches converted as 85 centimetres, a figure that is wrong by a factor of three on its own arithmetic; the Museum's 2012 article gives 12 3/4 inches and adds copper alloy and leather to a medium the website lists as steel alone. The metallography carried out for the Museum's 1998 Negroli exhibition sampled the helmet in three parts and found two of them iron, where every sampled armour signed by Filippo Negroli was steel. The cheek-pieces are, the Museum says, probably nineteenth-century restorations.

It came out of the estate sale of Eugene Piot at the Hotel Drouot in May 1890, lot 282, bought by the dealer Bachereau for the duc de Dino, and reached New York in April 1904 when the Metropolitan bought Dino's five hundred pieces sight unseen for just over 250,000 dollars - a purchase that founded the Department of Arms and Armor and that the Museum has since published as containing composites and outright fakes. The Museum's bibliography for this helmet begins with the posthumous sale of the painter and armour restorer Mariano Fortuny in 1875. Its provenance field does not.

The label carries three hedges

The Museum's entry for this helmet reads: Armorer, Attributed to Filippo Negroli. The reference to the oak may indicate that the helmet was made for a member of the della Rovere family. The cheek-pieces are probably nineteenth-century restorations.

Three qualifications in three lines, and all three are load-bearing. The object is not signed, so the maker is an argument. The patron is an argument from a pun. And part of what a visitor looks at is not sixteenth-century at all. This is a good object, catalogued honestly, and every one of those hedges has evidence behind it that is worth setting out.

A head of curled hair under an oak wreath

The helmet is embossed from steel to resemble a human head with tightly curled hair, encircled by a wreath of oak leaves. It is a burgonet, an open-faced helmet, made to be worn in a parade or a triumph rather than in a battle, and the effect it aims at is that the wearer appears as an ancient hero, perhaps a Roman emperor.

That is the whole programme of Milanese parade armour of the 1530s in one object. These helmets are not disguises; they are quotations. A commander riding into a city under an oak wreath is citing the corona civica, the Roman oak crown awarded for saving the life of a citizen, and he is citing it in a decade when the Italian wars had made the question of who saved which city a live one.

The oak also puns. Oak in Italian is rovere. The Museum's suggestion is that the wreath is a canting device for the della Rovere, dukes of Urbino, whose arms are an oak tree. The helmet was shown at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino in 2004 in an exhibition on that dynasty, which is the Museum acting on its own suggestion. No document connects the object to any della Rovere.

The Negroli, and what a Negroli attribution is

The Negroli were a family of Milanese armourers, and Filippo, whose life the Museum gives as about 1510 to 1579, is the one whose name carries the highest premium in the history of the craft. His reputation rests on embossed parade armour of extraordinary sculptural quality made in the years around 1530 to 1545.

In 1998 and 1999 the Museum mounted Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and His Contemporaries, organised by Stuart W. Pyhrr and Jose-A. Godoy, which set out to sort the surviving body of that work. The catalogue's own structure is the answer to what a Negroli attribution is worth. Its objects fall into groups: works signed by Filippo Negroli; works attributed to him; works possibly made in the Negroli workshop or by Milanese contemporaries; and works signed by or attributed to his brother Giovan Paolo.

This helmet is catalogue number 21, in the second group. The Museum's signed Filippo Negroli is a different object: the burgonet of 1543, accession 17.190.1720, which came in with the Morgan gift of 1917. When the same building holds a signed Negroli and an attributed one, the attributed one is being measured against something.

The metallurgy says something the label does not

For that exhibition the Museum invited Alan R. Williams to carry out metallographic examination on Negroli and related armours in New York and Vienna. A sample one to two millimetres square is taken where it leaves no visible damage, usually inside the turned rim of a plate, then polished and etched so the grain structure can be read under a microscope.

Williams's overall finding was that most of the specimens were steel, and that the hardest steel predominates in the best armours. Of the three armours signed by Filippo Negroli that were sampled, the three specimens gave one low-carbon steel and two medium-carbon steel, and no iron at all. Williams's conclusion on the master was blunt: Filippo Negroli used a medium-carbon steel, apparently the best that was then available.

This helmet was sampled in three parts. Two of the three came back iron.

That figure is per object. Williams's tabulation lists this helmet by its accession number, records that three parts were sampled, and marks two of them iron. What it does not record is which parts of the helmet those were. The group totals printed beside it - seven specimens across the three attributed armours, of which three are iron, three low-carbon steel and one medium-carbon - are given as sums, so an individual reading cannot be matched back to an individual plate from the published table alone.

There are two honest readings and this record does not choose between them. The first is that the iron samples came from the cheek-pieces, which the Museum believes are nineteenth-century restorations, in which case the metallurgy corroborates the restoration note and says nothing against the attribution. The second is that iron in a Negroli is a discrepancy with the signed group. Until the sampling locations are published, the number sits there unexplained.

The Museum's own measurements do not agree with each other

The online record gives the height as 11 1/4 inches, converted as 85 cm; the width 8 1/4 inches or 20.9 cm; the depth 9 inches or 22.7 cm; the weight 2 lb 2 oz or 964 g; and the medium as steel.

Pyhrr's 2012 article, published by the same museum, captions the same accession number as height 12 3/4 inches or 32.5 cm, weight 2 lb 2 oz or 967 g, and the medium as steel, copper alloy and leather.

Three problems follow. First, 11 1/4 inches is 28.6 cm, not 85 cm, so the metric figure in the online record cannot be right on its own terms. Second, the two Museum publications differ on the height by an inch and a half. Third, they differ on what the object is made of: the online record says steel, the 2012 article adds copper alloy and leather. A reader taking dimensions from the website for a comparison with another helmet would be working from a figure that is wrong by a factor of three.

This is not pedantry about a typographical slip. Dimensions are how a specialist tests whether two published photographs show the same object, and a museum's own record is where that test starts.

Piot, Bachereau, Dino

Eugene Piot, a French collector and antiquarian, owned the helmet at his death in 1890. His estate was sold at the Hotel Drouot in Paris from 21 to 24 May 1890 as Objets d'art de la Renaissance composant la collection de feu M. Eugene Piot, and this helmet was lot 282.

It was bought by the Paris dealer Bachereau, acting for a client. Pyhrr's account of that transaction is worth quoting in substance: at the Piot sale Bachereau bought for his client an important if somewhat damaged curly-haired burgonet of classical inspiration by the distinguished armourer Filippo Negroli of Milan. Somewhat damaged, in 1890, by the man who handled it.

The client was Charles Maurice Camille de Talleyrand-Perigord, duc de Dino, 1843 to 1917, who was assembling in France in the last two decades of the nineteenth century what was then reckoned the finest private collection of arms and armour in Europe. Bachereau was his principal supplier and sold him more than forty European helmets; the following year he sold Dino the so-called Colbert helmet, a French burgonet of about 1550 associated with Henry II, which Pyhrr calls arguably the most beautiful and important object in the Dino collection. In de Cosson's privately printed catalogue of the Dino armoury of 1901 this helmet is number B.26, plate 9.

Sight unseen, for just over 250,000 dollars

In April 1904 the Metropolitan Museum bought the Dino collection en bloc: almost five hundred pieces, mostly richly decorated European work of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It was the Museum's first important acquisition of arms and armour and it committed the largest sum the institution had paid to that date for a single acquisition, just over 250,000 dollars.

Pyhrr records what was not public at the time. The Museum bought the collection sight unseen, on the enthusiastic recommendation of one of its trustees, and without reference to Dino's own privately published catalogue. The local press greeted the purchase with considerable fanfare.

The purchase created the department. The Museum appointed as guest curator in 1904 a zoologist and arms enthusiast, Bashford Dean, 1867 to 1928; he became honorary curator in 1906, and the trustees established a permanent, paid Department of Arms and Armor on 28 October 1912. The Metropolitan's arms and armour collection, now among the largest and most encyclopaedic anywhere, was founded on a purchase nobody at the museum had examined.

Too good to be true

Pyhrr's appendix to that article is titled Too Good to Be True: Arms and Armor Fakes and Pastiches in the Dino Collection, and it is the reason this record exists in the form it does.

Modern scholarship, he writes, has revealed that some of the better-known and most frequently published Dino objects are composites or outright fakes, which has tarnished the reputation the collection once enjoyed. The armours took the worst of it: of the thirteen Dino armours, two have been deaccessioned and sold, and all but one of the remaining eleven are not deemed worthy of display.

De Cosson's 1901 catalogue gave no hint of any of this, apart from two objects - a bascinet and a sword - for which no date or place of origin was given and which were identified as modern imitations on a separate errata sheet found in only some copies. Dean complained that the catalogue made no mention of restorations, gave no weights or measurements, and did not reproduce armourers' marks, yet he generally accepted his older colleague's opinions. Guy Laking, reviewing the collection with Dean in 1906 and 1909, called it publicly the finest ever gathered, and illustrated a great many Dino objects in his five-volume survey.

The correspondence Pyhrr quotes shows the trade knew. Discussing an embossed Italian parade armour, Dean wrote of a suit that was largely false, of a gorget partly genuine and partly falsely restored, of arms, shoulders, tassets and helmet splendidly fashioned in old metal but lacking any trace of the damascening the genuine pieces carry, and of shoulder pieces that are not a pair which a restorer had done his best to make look alike. De Cosson's reply was that knowing what old Spitzer was, it did not surprise him extremely.

None of that is a charge against this helmet, which is not in that appendix and which the Museum displays. It is the standard of scepticism the object should be read under, and it comes from the Museum itself.

The owner the bibliography implies and the provenance omits

The Museum's provenance for this helmet begins with Piot and runs to Dino and then to the Museum. Its bibliography for the same object begins somewhere else. The first entry is the catalogue of the posthumous studio sale of Mariano Fortuny at the Hotel Drouot, 26 to 30 April 1875, where the reference given is number 20. The seventh entry is Stephen V. Grancsay's article of November 1921 in the Museum's own Bulletin, titled Fortuny as a Collector and Restorer of Ancient Arms and Armor, cited at pages 236 to 237, figure 4.

A bibliography is a list of places where the object appears. If those two entries are correct, this helmet was in the collection of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, was sold at his posthumous sale in April 1875, and was discussed fifteen years after entering the Museum in an article specifically about Fortuny's activity as a restorer of arms and armour. None of that is in the provenance field.

Two possibilities. Either the bibliography is wrong, or the provenance is incomplete by one owner and fifteen years - an owner who was himself a restorer of armour, on an object whose cheek-pieces the Museum believes are nineteenth-century restorations. The Museum's own bibliography also records the helmet in the literature of the 1878 retrospective armour display at the Trocadero, in Edouard de Beaumont's account in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, twelve years before the Piot sale.

This record does not resolve it. It records that the Museum's two fields disagree and that nobody appears to have reconciled them.

What it has done since

Bashford Dean published the helmet in the Museum's Catalogue of European Arms and Armor in 1905, a year after the purchase, at page 113, figure 49H. Laking illustrated it in the fourth volume of A Record of European Armour and Arms through Seven Centuries, 1920-22, at page 142, figure 1229. Cripps-Day listed it in his Record of Armour Sales 1881-1924. Boccia and Coelho carried it in L'Arte dell'Armatura in Italia in 1967, and Mario Scalini in his 1987 Bargello study of Negroli heroic armour.

It travelled the United States in 1953 and 1954 in a loan exhibition of medieval and Renaissance arms and armour that went to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Pittsburgh, as number 26. It was in the 1998-99 Negroli exhibition in New York, and in I Della Rovere: Storia di una dinastia at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino in 2004. It is on view in Gallery 374.

A hundred and twenty years after a museum bought it without looking at it, the object is still on the wall, still attributed rather than signed, still carrying cheek-pieces that are probably not its own, and still the best surviving statement of what a Milanese armourer thought a Roman hero looked like.