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2005-10-23 - 9:36 p.m.

Sword, Buckler and Powerpoint

If my college professors had used a sword as a pointer, I would�ve paid closer attention.


So, cause I love Roland, we spent the weekend in Chicago at the Armor Research Society�s first annual conference. I�m not quite sure how you get to call something annual when it�s the first, but I approve of positive thinking.

Friday was a romp through the Art Institute of Chicago, and when I say romp, I mean �and then we went to the armor room and spent three hours.� Luckily for Roland, the docent, a fabulous fellow named Hugh, and I entertained each other. It went like this:

Docent comes over to see what humorous thing the tourist will say when he asks us to guess what the lance rest, affixed to the breastplate, does.

Roland asks some elaborate articulation question involving terms I can�t spell.

Docent blinks, smiles slowly, and says Oh, I love people who really look at the details.

Hugh explains that much of their collection is in storage because of ongoing construction and then unfolds his ambitions for a more fluid armor display to replace the cases of swords all arrayed together. Looks great on the wall of Victorian gentleman�s club, but completely removes the weapons from context of how they were used, and what suits the might match. Oh, and the tragedy that they don�t even have a lance on display, so all day long tourists tell their kids knights jousted with halberds.

An hour later, Hugh and I are admitting, shamefacedly, that we both appreciate the fine tournament work from a Knight�s Tale, which is a guilty pleasure since the armor, history and clothing is abhorrent. Roland is still taking pictures.

It�s good to know my husband would rather look up the skirt of a suit of Maximilliam armor than ogle another women. (Fall, says Roland. It�s not a skirt. And you spell it f-a-u-l-d.)


Eventually, we did leave the armor room for a tour of the European art (Oh-how-shocking: Another Sienese Madonna and child These Sienese were obsessed.), a wander through the Monets, and a turn through the architecture gallery which had a surprising (to me) amount of Frank Lloyd Wright work.

(Yeah, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, sometimes I�m oblivious. Like not noticing the World Series was in town till after we got there.)

Navigating the Art Institute is slightly easier than getting around the Louvre, and I mean only slightly. Eventually, we triumphed over the elevator that time forgot and found the basement food court where we splurged on the Garden Restaurant rather than the cafeteria. Good choice, because it�s catered by the staff of Bon Appetit magazine. The butternut squash bisque was rich enough to be a dessert.


Of course, we walked Lake Shore drive. I�d never seen the great lakes, except from the air. Roland took pictures of ducks, apparently as a favor to Kymber. Though, I do think the goose behind use was quacking Give me your doritoes.


Saturday, was the conference at the Pritzker Military Library.

Walter Karcheski from the Frazier started with a slide show on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly an amusing discussion of art history and shady antique dealers, or the struggle of the curator versus the faker. We haven�t actually visited the Frazier collection, but I feel the trip to Louisville is inevitable. Kentucky, always a place you associate with armor.


Then, Tobias Capwell, curator of the Kelvingrove armor took a quick run through the Robert Scott collection�s fifteenth century pieces. (Robert Scott�s bequest makes up the bulk of their armor.) Tobias is fairly new to the museum, having taken the post in 2003, two years after we visited Glasgow. I always accepted armor was abused on the battlefield, but I never realized the evil men do by reworking pieces, adding bits of other old suits, turn tassets into pauldrons, mixing together pieces to form a complete suit. The entire room let out a uniform groan at a corroded pauldron that had been sloppily repaired by riveting in a similar bit of armor along the shoulder line. Yep, it looked pretty spanked.


The Kelvingrove, in case you don�t know, is under renovation; come back June 2006. Dr. Capwell is lobbying to get rid of the George Lucas stormtrooper that used to mark the entrance to the armor hall (No kidding. I�ve seen it.) In the packing and unpacking during construction, he unearthed a rather plain breastplate that just may be the earliest intact example of that type of plate. And, then, says Dr. Capwell, Mac came along and encouraged my hatred of the back fauld and Dr. Alan Williams kindly did a very speed analysis of the metal and pronounced it bloomery iron or �crap medieval metal.� The metallurgical samples date it to 1440s and show that the bubble-butt back fauld (skirt) is, in fact, a much later addition, which is a relief because it looked awful.

(Mac, in case you don�t know, is that nice gentleman that is half the skill behind �Billy and Charlie� pewterworks at Pennsic. Those LMS belts y�all buy every war are being put together by one of the finest armorers in the world.)


Now, call to mind the Monty Python Quest for the Holy Grail movie. I know you�ve all seen it. Got that? Good. Now hear the narrator�s voice in your head saying so, while it appears the Milanese really had one over on this visiting Venetian since his description of Berguian steel production is chemically impossible. It�s like they showed him the first half, took the out-of-towner out for a long lunch, then showed him the second half of the process backwards.

So, that was Alan Williams, professor from the University of Reading, he gave a talk on the metallurgy of armor, in which I learned what the hell a bloomery was, how it made iron or steel, why quenching is difficult and important. I still don�t know what slack quenching is, but I was concentrating on not embarrassing Roland by asking stupid questions like Could you explain quenching? or the one I really wanted to ask Could you say �Brave, brave Sir Robin�?.


After lunch, David Edge, conservator from the Wallace Collection gave a fascinating talk on the care and feeding of armor. If you�ve never thought about it - cause I hadn�t - there�s a merry little war between curators and conservators. Curators want to poke, prod, display, research and educate. Conservators want to clean and protect. Obviously, the curator would like to show everything to world and the conservator would rather lock it up in a dark, carefully controlled environment.

The Wallace is, literally, some wealthy guy�s house full of his art, armor and curiosities. Victorian gentlemen had more money than sense. David led an entertaining hour of conservation horror stories, punctuated by the repeated phrase so we used to use this fabulous solvent to clean the metal; took everything right off without damaging the art. Then we found it was highly carcinogenic, so now it�s banned in all laboratories.

Also, I learned that painting restoration can turn a lovely berry bush into a gravid cow if you�re aspecific about what era you�re aiming for post-cleaning.


As the armorer�s wife, let me share something many of you probably haven�t had the opportunity to learn. Many �complete� suits of armor are composites or, worse, a mix of composite and �restoration�. Take a harness from Milan and add some leg armor from Cologne � modify the decoration to match the Italian suit of course completely destroying the original etchwork � and, if you�re missing a pauldron or a gauntlet, no problem. Just fill it in with a 19th century recreation (cough, hack, *fake*).

Yeah, many of those complete suits you admire may not have originally been one outfit.

So, when the next talk, by Pierre Terjanian of the Philadelphia Museum on armor making in medieval Germany pointed out that many master armorers were not allowed to make a complete suit.

Apparently, the production of armor was tightly regulated in Germany. To become a master, you had to �pass� a guild examination of a masterwork. And, you had to pass multiple times � helmet, breastplate, gauntlet, vambrace, and leg harness. Only 8 masters qualified in all five over the century he surveyed. Eight out of 170 some. If the master wasn�t qualified, the workshop couldn�t make it. So the suits produces in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, Ulm and Strassburg could not have legally been made by a single workshop.

Pierre�s talk made a lot more sense once I figured out his French accent was making �journeyman� sound like �German�.


A gentleman from Prague spoke next, mostly about metallographic results from excavations around Chzechkoslavakia. I admit to dozing. The analysis of gun barrels, cannon, crossbow quarrels and knives didn�t hold my attention. Sorry, Jiri.


Remember the duel from �The Princess Bride?� Iago and Wesley exchange both blows and opinions on various fencing techniques. If you never realized this, they are quoting actual historical fighting manuals.

So, when Jeff Forgeng of the Higgins spoke on reading Early Martial Arts Treatises, I recognized some of them. Some, I say, for in the middle of the talk, he puts up a list, connected by color-coding spider webs showing the relation of who borrowed from whose material, laughs and says This should make everything clear.

He spoke with powerpoint, sword and buckler. I teach college and I�ve noticed the students retain so much more material when I use a sword as a pointer.


After spending a day listening to �armor-armor-helm-helm-helm?�, Roland treated me to Keefer�s Steakhouse which served up a delmonico that was one of the best five steaks I�ve ever had, and when your family has butchered their own meat, that�s saying something.

And, they had latkes. Served with sour cream and applebutter. Oh, they called them potato cake, but it was like latke day two months early.

Then, we curled up in the hotel room, enjoying a blissful food coma and the end of a movie.

What movie? What else? Chicago


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