# Half Armor attributed to Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba y Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa (1520/1524-1578) > Lucio Piccinino (also called Lucio Marliani), Milanese armor workshop - Partially mid-16th century (elements traditionally placed ca. 1560-1570); comprehensively reworked, completed and re-decorated in Paris in the 19th century > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/lucio-piccinino/duke-of-sessa-armor-piccinino-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-20 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Lucio Piccinino (also called Lucio Marliani), Milanese armor workshop - **Date:** Partially mid-16th century (elements traditionally placed ca. 1560-1570); comprehensively reworked, completed and re-decorated in Paris in the 19th century - **Medium:** Steel and gold, etched, embossed and gilt; later steel, leather and textile completions - **Dimensions:** Weight approximately 30 lb. 7 oz. (13.8 kg) overall; helmet component approximately 7 lb. 11 oz. (3.5 kg) - **Object type:** Arms and armour - **Period:** Italian Renaissance parade-armor tradition (Milan), overlaid with 19th-century Parisian restoration and completion - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary The Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue date for this half armor reads, in full: partially mid-16th century, comprehensively reworked in the 19th century. That sentence, not the attribution to the Milanese embosser Lucio Piccinino or the identification with Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa, is the object's real subject. The armor entered the Museum in 1904 as part of its founding purchase of the Paris collection of the Duc de Dino, catalogued and attributed by Dino's own paid adviser, Baron de Cosson, who linked it to a 1643 Spanish inventory describing a Sessa-owned harness - a full, head-to-foot suit, where the Metropolitan's object is explicitly upper body only.Piccinino signed nothing; every attribution to him, on this piece and on every other, rests on stylistic comparison to a single textually-documented commission for the Duke of Parma, now in Vienna. The Duke of Sessa was a real, thoroughly documented Spanish grandee, twice governor of Milan and a Golden Fleece knight from 1555, but no direct record ties him to an order from Piccinino, and the two men's working lives, on the dates given in the sources consulted, overlap by at most a few years.Later Museum scholarship has identified this specific object as one of the more elaborate examples of the 19th-century armor market's practice of composing, altering and completing older steel into a saleable Renaissance masterpiece, sold with a documentary-sounding pedigree assembled from real but disconnected fragments. That does not make the piece worthless or the story invented from nothing. It makes it exactly what its own catalogue entry already says: a genuine mid-16th-century core, substantially rebuilt and re-sold, three centuries later, as something more complete and more famous than what survived. ## 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. - **by 1643-1643** Dukes of Infantado (Mendoza family), Guadalajara, Spain - armoury inventory record `[disputed]` (inventory record) A 1643 inventory of the Infantado family armoury is reported to record a cap-a-pie (full, head-to-foot) harness described as having belonged to the Duke of Sessa, decorated with the Order of the Golden Fleece - an emblem consistent with Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, 3rd Duke of Sessa, who was elected to the Order in 1555. The identification of this inventory entry with the object now in New York is unverified: the inventory describes a full suit, while the Metropolitan's object is a half armor, upper body only. Graded disputed rather than documented for that reason. This is de Cosson's own claim, made while cataloguing the piece for sale (see below) - Pyhrr 2012 reports it as de Cosson's assertion, not as independently confirmed. - **1643-ca. 1865-1870** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No source consulted for this record traces ownership of the Sessa-associated harness, or of the separate armor later combined with it (see the next entry), between the 1643 Infantado inventory and the mid-1860s. - **ca. 1865-1870** Unrecorded (location: Spain) `[documented]` (photographed, prior to alteration) A photograph by the Madrid studio of Jean (Juan) Laurent, probably taken about 1865-70, shows elements of what would become this armor while still in Spain, before Spitzer's workshop altered them (see next entry). The Metropolitan's own 2012 scholarship uses this photograph to reconstruct the object's original, unaltered appearance and to establish that its steel elements were genuinely in Spain at this date - the one fixed point of documented physical location between the disputed 1643 inventory and the object's appearance on the Paris market two decades later. - **by 1895-1895** Frederic Spitzer collection, rue Villejust (now rue Paul Valery), Paris `[documented]` (assembly and alteration) The Metropolitan's own 2012 curatorial reconstruction (Pyhrr) identifies this piece by name as having been assembled and altered within the collection of Frederic Spitzer (1815-1890), one of the best-known and, by the Museum's own description, most infamous dealers of the 19th century. Forensic comparison against the ca.1865-70 Laurent photograph establishes that the finished object combines elements of TWO different, fire-damaged armors - a breastplate, backplate, right tasset and probably the gorget from one; a helmet, arm defenses and gauntlets, mostly modern replacements, from a second, unrelated armor with different edge decoration. Both source armors were re-gilt, and the etched decoration on the breastplate and backplate was reworked to add extra bands purely for ornamental effect. Pyhrr states this embellishment approach is 'a hallmark of Spitzer's restoration philosophy.' Spitzer himself was dead by 1890; the alteration is understood to have been carried out by his workshop before the collection came to sale. - **10-14 June 1895** Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Duc de Dino, Paris `[documented]` (purchase at auction) Dino bought this armor, one of his four most expensive armor purchases, at the Spitzer collection's historic sale in Paris, 10-14 June 1895, where he was the single most important buyer, spending over 150,000 francs. The Museum's own 2012 scholarship states plainly that most of the armors Dino bought at this sale, including his four best, later proved to be disappointments - composites or fakes recognized only after further study. - **1895-1904** Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Duc de Dino, Paris `[documented]` (attribution) Baron Ferdinand de Cosson, engaged from about 1896 as Dino's paid cataloguing adviser, attributed the already-assembled piece stylistically to 'the leading Milanese armorer of the period, Lucio Piccinino,' and connected it, via the 1643 Infantado inventory, to the Duke of Sessa - in the same campaign that also identified weaker or fake pieces in the collection for de Cosson to recommend selling off separately at Christie's rather than including in the sale to the Metropolitan. The attribution and ownership story therefore postdate, and were not involved in, the Spitzer-era physical alteration of the piece itself. - **1904** Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchased as part of the Duc de Dino collection `[documented]` (acquisition) The Museum purchased the Duc de Dino's collection of nearly 500 pieces of arms and armor in April 1904, sight unseen and without reference to de Cosson's own privately printed catalogue, for just over $250,000 - its largest single purchase to date. Trustee Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, in Paris at the time, was alerted to the collection's imminent sale at Christie's, London (scheduled for 3 June 1904) by a cable from J. P. Morgan, and cabled the Museum's president urging immediate purchase before the collection went to public auction. Bashford Dean was engaged as guest curator to receive, catalogue and install the acquisition, work that led directly to the founding of the Department of Arms and Armor. - **1904-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (accession) Credited Rogers Fund, 1904; accession number 04.3.270a-o; object ID 21996. ## Open questions - Does the 1643 Infantado armoury inventory actually describe the object now in New York, or a different, more complete cap-a-fully-armed harness that has since been broken up, lost its lower elements, or never physically corresponded to this half armor at all? The inventory records a head-to-foot suit; the Metropolitan's object is explicitly upper-body only. - What proportion of the surviving armor, by element or by surface area, is genuine mid-16th-century steel versus 19th-century replacement or completion? Pyhrr's 2012 research, comparing the object against a ca.1865-70 Laurent photograph, establishes which elements belong to which of two source armors and identifies the left tasset and several helmet/arm-defense elements as outright modern replacements - but no published metallurgical or technical-imaging study of the specific plates was located, so the photographic/stylistic reconstruction has not been independently confirmed by physical analysis of the metal itself. - Which specific craftsman or workshop within Frederic Spitzer's Paris operation physically carried out the re-embossing, regilding and replacement work? Pyhrr's account attributes the alteration to Spitzer's ownership and calls the ornamental over-decoration 'a hallmark of Spitzer's restoration philosophy,' but does not name an individual restorer or metalworker responsible. - Is there any direct documentary link - contract, inventory entry, correspondence - placing an order between Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa (d. 1578), and Lucio Piccinino, whose documented activity does not clearly begin before about 1575? The two men's working lives overlap by at most a few years on the dates given in the sources consulted, and no direct record of a transaction between them was found. - What happened to the two source armors, if anything is recorded, in the roughly two and a quarter centuries between the 1643 Infantado inventory and their documented presence in Spain around 1865-70 (the Laurent photograph)? No source consulted for this record traces that interval, or establishes whether the Infantado inventory's suit is genuinely one of these two armors at all rather than a third, still-unidentified harness. - Have the related fragments recorded in the Musee de l'Armee (Paris), and in Rome, Florence and Philadelphia, been reunited, jointly technically examined, or published as a group at any point since Pyhrr's 2012 article? No source consulted for this record addresses anything after 2012. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection record for object 21996, 'Half Armor attributed to Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba y Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa (1520/1524-1578),' attributed to Lucio Piccinino. Data retrieved via the Museum's open Collection API. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection record for object 22184, 'Armor of the Dukes of Alba,' Lucio Piccinino. - [3] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection record for object 23209, 'Composed Armor.' - [4] Wikipedia, 'Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba (1520-1578).' Biography of the 3rd Duke of Sessa, 1st Duke of Baena. - [5] Wallace Collection Online, catalogue entry for 'Parts of a Ceremonial Armour in the Mannerist Style,' inventory A51, attributed to Lucio Marliani, called Piccinino. - [6] Victoria and Albert Museum, Collections record for a breastplate attributed to the workshop of Lucio Piccinino, ex-Bernal, Londesborough and Currie collections. - [7] Stuart W. Pyhrr, 'Armor for America: The Duc de Dino Collection,' Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 47 (2012), pp. 219-221 and fig. 61-63 (the Sessa armor discussion), p. 201-2 and 220 (Baron de Cosson), and the Rutherfurd Stuyvesant/1904 purchase narrative throughout. Directly fetched and read in full (pdftotext extraction of the Museum's own PDF, 48 pages); the figure 61 caption itself reads 'Embossed parade armor, reputedly of the duke of Sessa. Italian (probably Milan), ca. 1560, composed, extensively altered, and completed in France in the 19th century.' - [8] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Bashford Dean and the Arms and Armor Collection of William H. Riggs,' Now at the Met blog, 2014. - [9] Wikipedia, 'Pompeo della Cesa.' Used for the contrast with Piccinino: della Cesa signed his work 'Pompeo.' - [10] Oxford Reference, entry for 'Lucio Piccinino,' Italian armour embosser, fl. 1578-95. - [11] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Lucio Piccinino, listing the Met open-access image of this object under an earlier catalogue title, 'Half Armor Probably Made for Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba y Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa,' MET 70971, alongside the Museum's current title using 'attributed to.' --- 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.