The next piece (D13) is a salade (or helmet covering the nape of the neck), of German fashion, but made by one of the Negroli family. It is a pure, vigorous piece of work, cast, except the visor, in one piece. The decoration exhibits the same happy combination of the Italian and Oriental styles that characterises D12. The design inside the circles on the skull might easily, at a cursory glance, persuade one of the Moorish origin of the helmet.
The headpieces D14 to D22 emanate from Flanders. The Salade D14 (plate 125), worn by Philip I., has the skull-piece of octagonal shape and ending in a knop, surmounted by a pomegranate. It seems to have been suggested by the Moorish helmet and turban; and we read, in fact, that Philip appeared before Ferdinand and Isabel in the tilt-yard at Toledo in Moorish dress. D22 is a Flemish cabasset--an ungraceful head-covering--forged in one piece.
Armour reached its highest point of development at a time when it had become at least highly probable that the use of fire-arms would drive it altogether from the field. Yet the armour-smith’s craft, so far from languishing, seemed to renew its youth, and flourished exceedingly in the early sixteenth century. That was an age of mighty Kings--of Maximilian and Charles V. of Germany, of Henry VIII. of England, of Francis I. of France, and of Ferdinand of Aragon--Sovereigns who loved “the pomp and panoply of glorious war,” and who were keenly alive to the potentialities of the knightly harness as a medium for display and ostentation. This, too, was the age of the Renaissance, when the setting of a gem or the moulding of a goblet was a matter that would occupy a grave potentate to the exclusion of affairs of state. The armourer’s art came in for a large share of the interest taken in all the applied arts. But as in the latter half of the fifteenth century, armour had already arrived at a purity of line and adaptability to its purpose which could not be improved upon, the energies of the Renaissance artists were perforce expended upon ornamentation and enrichment. This tendency was naturally the more freely indulged as the inefficiency of armour as a defence for life and limb became more generally recognized.