The Name in the Title Is the Part That Is Not Documented

An armour can date itself, and it cannot name its wearer

An armour is one of the few classes of object that carries its own date on its surface. The Greenwich garniture now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is dated 1527 on the backplate, on the fauld reinforce and on the lower tace lame, three separate plates of the same harness. The harness Kunz Lochner made in Nuremberg is dated 1549. Those numbers were put there by the workshop that made them, and they are the one part of each object's history that rests on the object rather than on somebody's recollection of it.

The famous name is a different kind of claim, and it arrives by a different route. It comes from a family tradition, from a shrine's memory of a donation, from a seventeenth-century household inventory, or from a curator reading a wearer's build against a portrait. None of that is worthless. All of it is testimony, and testimony is what this archive grades.

The result is a pattern we did not expect to find when we started tagging certainty on every ownership link. Armour is the object class most likely to be named after a famous person and the least likely to be able to prove it.

Arms and armour carries three times the archive's rate of disputed ownership

Twenty-two of the 95 graded provenance links on the fourteen arms and armour records in this archive are graded disputed, which is 23 per cent. Across all 285 records and all 1,994 graded links, the figure is 8 per cent. The classes at the other end of the range are not close: furniture carries one disputed link in 98, printed books one in 95, photographs one in 69.

The gap is not a matter of how hard we looked. Furniture and printed books in this archive are researched to the same standard and carry chains of comparable length, five to six links per record against armour's seven. What separates them is that a book has a title page and a piece of French furniture has a guild stamp, and neither of those has ever been asked to prove that a king held it.

Two museum titles here carry the doubt inside the title, and both are armour

The Metropolitan calls one object Armor Garniture, Probably of King Henry VIII of England, and another Half Armor attributed to Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba y Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa. Those are the museum's own words, not ours, and they are doing real work: the qualifier is a curator declining to assert something the file cannot support.

What makes it worth counting is that nothing else in this archive does it. Two of fourteen arms and armour titles hedge. Across the other 271 records, covering paintings, ceramics, silver, manuscripts, maps, instruments and everything else, the count is zero. No museum here writes Probably of into the title of a painting, however contested the picture.

The Sessa hedge is well earned. A 1643 inventory of the Infantado armoury at Guadalajara is reported to record a full head-to-foot harness said to have belonged to the Duke of Sessa. The object in New York is a half armour, upper body only, which is why this record grades that identification disputed rather than documented. The museum's own 2012 scholarship goes further: forensic comparison against a Madrid photograph of about 1865 to 1870 shows that the finished object combines elements of two different fire-damaged armours, assembled and altered inside the collection of the dealer Frederic Spitzer before it was sold in 1895.

Where the title states the name flatly, the provenance often disputes it

The Metropolitan's Armor (Yoroi) of Ashikaga Takauji carries no qualifier in its title, and the link that puts Takauji in the chain is graded disputed in this record. Shrine and family tradition holds that Takauji gave the armour to the Shinomura Hachimangu near Kameoka during a ten-day stay before his campaign of March 1333. The attribution to Takauji by name was first published by the scholar Yamagami Hatiro in 1928, roughly six hundred years after the event it describes, and no contemporary fourteenth-century document or inscription names him as the donor.

The dating of the armour itself is on firmer ground and rests on the thing in the case: lamellar kozane construction, the closure type and the surviving original silk lacing identify it as a shiroito tsumadori odoshi yoroi of the early fourteenth century. Nothing about that evidence requires Takauji, and nothing about it excludes him.

Ferdinand I is the same shape of problem with the dates reversed. Through the nineteenth century the Erbach-Erbach collection believed the harness had belonged to Ferdinand's son-in-law Albert V of Bavaria, a fellow knight of the Golden Fleece, on the reasoning that it must have been made for Albert as a young man because he grew heavy later. In the early twentieth century the director of the armoury at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna reassigned it to Ferdinand, reading the wearer's build and the crowned Reichsadler etched on the sabatons against Ferdinand's documented physique and his title of King of the Romans. The reasoning is good. It is also the whole of the evidence, and the sources consulted for this record name neither the curator who made the call nor the year he made it.

Presumably is the museum's own word, and it holds up a whole chain

The Henry VIII garniture shows what happens when a hedged title is followed down into the provenance. The Metropolitan's reading is that Henry presented the armour to the vicomte de Turenne, who led a French embassy to London in 1527. The museum states this as belief rather than record, and no contemporary document naming this armour and this recipient is cited in its entry.

The next link is weaker still. After Turenne's death in 1532 the armour passed, the museum says, presumably to his friend Galiot de Genouilhac. Presumably is the museum's word. That link matters more than any other in the chain, because the older name for the object depended on it, and because the reason anyone connected the armour to Genouilhac in the first place is a nineteenth-century tradition in the Crussol family, who descend from him. The tradition supports the link and the link supports the tradition. This record declines to close that circle.

Behind both sits a gap of about 330 years. The museum's published chain resumes only in the nineteenth century, with a bequest recorded in terms that cannot be right as printed, since the text gives the legatee the same name as the testator. We have flagged that rather than quietly correcting it, because a silently repaired record is worse than a visibly broken one.

How to read an armour label

Separate what the metal says from what the file says, and do it before anything else. A date struck into a plate, a workshop mark, a guild stamp and a construction technique are properties of the object. A king, a general, a shogun or a duke is a claim about a transaction, and on this evidence it is the claim most likely to fail.

Then read the qualifier as information rather than as throat-clearing. Probably and attributed to in a museum title are a curator telling you exactly where the file runs out, and they are rarer than they should be. Their absence proves nothing: two of the strongest cases here, Takauji and Ferdinand, carry unqualified titles over disputed links.

Ask what the name is doing. If removing the famous person leaves an early fourteenth-century yoroi with original lacing, or a Nuremberg harness dated 1549 by a known master, the object survives the loss intact and remains worth exactly what it was worth as a thing. If removing the name leaves very little, the name was carrying the object, and that is worth knowing before anyone pays for it.

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