Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Close Helmet and Cavalry Armor
This helmet and the armor shown with it were likely made by the same circle of armorers. The decorative pattern of plain raised scales bordering the helmet’s collar as well as the armor’s main elements, combined with the broad fleur-de-lis embossed on the latter’s tassets, distinguish the works of an unidentified school of armorers who appear to have been active in Central Germany, perhaps in Thuringia. Their surviving works chiefly consist of incomplete armors and elements that were once housed in the ancestral armory of the Princes Radziwill at Nesvizh Castle in Belarus, and that are now widely dispersed.
As the helmet is the only example of its kind known to survive, its promised gift provides a historic opportunity to complete the Museum’s armor, which was equipped with an unrelated helmet when it was acquired some ninety years ago.
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