The methods of painting heraldry have changed very little from those that were employed in the early MSS. In the unfinished Bible at Winchester Cathedral, of which the illuminations are in every stage of progress from the sketch to the finished work, the sequence is clearly shown. First, the design lightly sketched in with fine charcoal or a leaden stylus, then carefully gone over with a black line. The gold masses put in and burnished and then the colour. Shading and correction of the outline followed, and finally the high lights put a finish to the work.
Vellum, a fine parchment made of calf skin, is the most suitable surface for heraldic painting in water-colour, although paper, which includes various “boards,” is useful for students’ work and for preliminary drawings. The colours bear up, and gold acquires an appearance of solidity on vellum which cannot be obtained on paper. No doubt the surface is somewhat difficult to deal with at first and painting on it has a technique of its own, but there is nothing that cannot be overcome if it is approached in a practical way. The colour of vellum varies from a yellowish white to darkish ivory colour, a variety that is due to the natural colour of the skin. It can also be obtained in positive colours, the kind that is used in book-binding. It is somewhat thickly coated on one side with a chalky preparation, and if this side, the front, is used it requires delicate handling, for it is easily injured by the scraping that may be necessary for erasure, so that a rough spot of skin appears through the preparation and the surface can only be restored with great difficulty. Unless, therefore, it is necessary to use both sides as for a leaf of a book, the back of the skin will be found preferable. It is a little darker in tone and not quite so smooth, is tolerably hard and bears erasure well, but the knife requires deft handling, and then small corrections can be made with it successfully, for colours do not penetrate vellum very far, though when properly prepared they adhere to the surface with ample tenacity. It will be found very desirable to keep vellum clean rather than to trust to subsequent cleaning.
As it is difficult to properly remove pencil marks except with the knife, the design should first be made as fully as necessary on paper or other surface, and transferred to the vellum by tracing or rubbing down or by pouncing. The best way of transferring a design is to go carefully over the back of a tracing of it with a sharp pencil and having carefully placed it in position on the vellum to rub it down with a knife held slanting, a palette knife will do very well, and in that way the lines are clearly transferred to the vellum without the depression on the surface that a point is likely to make. Tracing down the design with a style and coloured transfer paper is less satisfactory owing to the blurring of the line, unless the point used is very sharp and then it is likely to cut through. In making the preliminary design the colour composition with regard to such parts as are susceptible of free treatment (such as the mantling) should be carefully noted so that nothing experimental need be tried on the vellum. Unless both sides of the skin are to be used it is well to strain the vellum over an ordinary frame by means of glue or with small tacks at frequent intervals, first well damping it on the reverse side to that which is to be used. A piece of cardboard should be placed between the vellum and the frame to give support to the surface and help to throw up the colour, care being taken, however, that the vellum though damp is not actually wet or it will stick to the cardboard in patches with disastrous effect. Having the design traced on the vellum the next step is to lay in the gold. This is provided in shells or cakes and is painted on very evenly with a sable brush and when dry is burnished with an agate burnisher, or a tusk does very well.
Burnishing is facilitated by first gently passing the finger tip over the gold, and a piece of card or other firm substance should be placed behind the work during the whole process, or, when a high degree of polish is desired, a piece of plate glass may take the place of the card. But it must be remembered that over-burnishing deprives the gold of its beautiful colour and tends to blackness.
The principal colours are then laid in their places and their quality will depend of course on the taste and intention of the artist, but in the absence of necessity for modification, the traditional strong brilliance will probably be sought after and the colours will be used in their fullest strength and purity. For red, Vermilion is unapproachable in its place, has great body and is therefore easy to use. For blue, Cobalt is very beautiful but is somewhat difficult to lay from its want of opacity, a quality which is not improved by the glycerine which is used in “moist” colours. French ultramarine or French Blue (it is known under various names) forms when mixed with white a fairly efficient substitute for cobalt and presents no difficulties in laying.
Green. The most brilliant is of course Emerald Green, but as it is extremely difficult to lay and easily works up it is much feared and avoided. It is very useful in combination with greens of lower tone mixed with white to lighten them. Green oxide of chromium (not chrome green) is excellent in this way and possesses good body.
The white will be Chinese White, made from oxide of zinc, which does not change colour as the lead whites do. The latter, however, are extremely useful for temporary work, such as for design that is to be carried out in other materials, when the drawing is no longer of consequence after it has served its purpose.
The difficult colours Cobalt and Emerald Green can nevertheless be laid satisfactorily by means of patient trial, the result depending on that skill of manipulation which can only come by much practice as well as on the exact degree of moisture with which the colours are used. Indeed, it may be well to point out, especially for the benefit of those who are familiar with water-colour sketching, how comparatively dry all the colours are worked in illumination. Tints, even, are best put on with a sparely filled brush in a manner that approaches a scumble much more nearly than a wash. This will be found most troublesome in tints that are painted on the vellum itself, as in white mantling, for instance, or in objects that are “proper,” and anything like a wash with a full brush being impossible, a certain amount of stippling will probably become inevitable. The work is certainly somewhat difficult, and too much disappointment, therefore, should not be felt at the failure of first efforts. Shortly, the effort should be directed to getting the colour on with as little moisture as will suffice, so that the surface of the vellum may not become wet and disturbed.
The principal masses of colour being in, such dividing or other strong lines as occur will be drawn with black. A drawing pen will probably be used for straight ones and in this also care must be taken that the black, lamp black or ivory black, is not too diluted, or it will probably spread, especially when in contact with colours that contain glycerine or waxy constituents.
This done, the next stage of the work, if it is to have the elaboration of the real illuminated MSS. rather than of the diagrammatic Rolls of Arms, will be to model up the forms with shadow colour, using carmine or crimson lake to shade vermilion with the addition of a little sepia when stronger colour is required. Blue will be shaded with French blue to the required tone, and green with darker green.
The lights may then be put in with light tones of their respective colours. Gold is shaded with a low tone of yellow as a general shadow colour and with umber, and is sometimes high lighted with Naples yellow and white. In accessory decoration gold may be shaded with green and finished with a darker tint of the same colour.
In the colour treatment of mantling the tone may well be kept low in relation to that of the shield to which it will thus lead up and give value.
Instead of lighting with tones of their own colour the parts in which modelling is suggested, a very beautiful and decorative effect is produced by the mediaeval practice of heightening the whole design with gold in lines which coalesce into masses on the high lights and trail off into the shadows where also they help to define the form in a very effective way. This use of gold throughout the work serves at the same time to harmonize and pull the whole thing together into unity. It is a method which requires considerable skill of hand and clearness of intention, for the lines must be drawn with firm certainty, but when successful is most effectively beautiful.
In the treatment of the helmet its relative importance in the composition must not be forgotten, nor its brilliancy in combination with its central position be allowed to attract undue attention. The broad shadow which its body takes in its forward tilted position is very useful in keeping down the general tone, in colour work as well as in black and white. Also it may be remembered that helmets were themselves painted and their rivets gilt.
In painting on paper, where yellow is substituted for gold, Cadmium will be found to be the most useful kind of that colour.
Until the invention of moist colour the pigments were obtained in powder and mixed with gum water, a great deal of small knowledge being required in order that the colours should not rub off the surface on the one hand, or crack or otherwise misbehave on the other. Gold was mixed in the same way, but if with too little gum it rubbed off and if with too much it refused to burnish. Nevertheless, the colours when so mixed have a certain advantage in having more body, and a better because less waxy surface. However, the greater convenience of moist colour is undoubted and in some of them the surface is very good. So-named luminous body colour made by Newman of Soho Square has been recently tried with very satisfactory results, the cobalt among the “difficult colours” being particularly good.
The notable revival of Enamelling has restored to heraldry a very beautiful means of expression, one which has proved from the twelfth century downwards to be especially suitable to its subject, as well from its broad simplicity of treatment as from its permanence and beauty. In this connexion one’s thoughts inevitably turn to the stall-plates of the Knights of that Most Noble Order of the Garter in its Chapel in Windsor Castle, and one is led to hope that they may once again be done in a way not unworthy of their splendid and monumental predecessors of the old days.
Enamel entered to an enormous extent into the decorative metal work of the Middle Ages. Altars, Church vessels, and crosiers, caskets, nefs and other domestic objects, the girdles and clasps for ladies’ use, as well as the details of military trappings were among the many things that were adorned in this manner. The massive military belts that were worn below the hips and were indicative of high rank were especially rich in goldsmiths’ work and enamels, infinite pains and enormous sums being spent on their execution.
Of the various methods of enamelling that which is known as Champlevé is especially associated with Gothic art. Among the most interesting of the personal ornaments is the cloak clasp of Queen Eleanor, wife of the warrior King Edward I (Fig. 172). Here the arms of her husband, England, with those of her own blood, Castile and Leon, unite to make a unique fastening to the Royal mantle of that Queen “of Good Memory.” This clasp was probably made at Limoges, where Champlevé enamel was certainly produced as early as the latter half of the twelfth century and probably earlier, the art having been imported, it is said, from Venice, whither it had come from the East.
At this same time heraldry was coming into systematic form, and enamel was soon employed to display it on the Royal and other monuments, beginning perhaps with the memorial slab to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (father of Henry II), who died in 1151, which is now in the Museum at Le Mans.
The succeeding centuries are increasingly rich in heraldic enamels, the shields in the monuments of Edward III and his Queen, Philippa of Hainault, and on the magnificent tomb of William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, in Westminster Abbey, may be taken as examples. The shield on the latter monument is reproduced by Boutell and others and will well repay study, especially when it is rendered in the colour which is necessary to a full appreciation of its beauty (Fig. 174).
Towards the end of the mediaeval period began the Garter stall-plates already alluded to as still to be seen on the panels of St. George’s Chapel, which date from the early fifteenth century, though some of them relate to personages of an earlier time.
These have most fortunately been brought within reach of study in the valuable facsimile reproductions in the work by Mr. St. John Hope, which includes in its scope the plates which were executed down to nearly the end of the fifteenth century. As examples of heraldic composition they are invaluable, for although the deterioration of the Gothic was already begun, they possess to a remarkable extent those decorative qualities that their modern successors so unfortunately lack.
Enamel itself consists of a rather dense glass coloured with metallic oxides, and must not be confused with the enamel colours which are employed in painting on porcelain. The latter are vitrifiable but not vitrified material; that is to say, in them the metallic colours in powder are mixed with powdered glass, and the whole becomes fluxed together when the work is fired in the kiln or muffle, while in true enamel the glass and its colouring are intimately combined from the first. By way of definition it may be said that enamel work is therefore an arrangement of one or more layers of coloured glass on fused metal.
In Champlevé work the design is first outlined on a metal plate, usually copper, and then, by means of gravers and chisel-like tools called scorpers, the space which is to receive the enamel is cut out to the necessary depth, from ¹⁄₃₂ to ¹⁄₂₀ of an inch, the rather rough surface that is left by the scorper serving as an additional key to the enamel (see Fig. 173), which having been ground to a powder and moistened with water, is then placed in the cavities prepared for it, and, after being carefully dried, is put into a muffle raised to a red heat, and thus fired until the enamel is fluxed. The work is then allowed to cool, is smoothed and polished, and the metal parts may then be gilt. Champlevé is usually executed in opaque enamel; that is, in glass made opaque by an admixture of oxide of tin.
In very early specimens two or more colours are found in contact in one space, but this is extremely difficult to do, and the resulting line is a somewhat ragged one in European work, though wonderful effects of opaque colours are produced by the Japanese. Since the thirteenth century each colour, in Western work, fills its own space.
The design, must, from the nature of the work, be kept very simple without too much subtlety of line that might be lost in the cutting, and the laying of the enamel will be facilitated if the angles of small spaces are not made too pointed. The principal qualities of form will consist in good distribution and well-balanced masses rather than in expression of detail. The outlines of charges which are in colour on metal, or vice versa, are formed by the edges of the sunk spaces and such further definition that maybe required, such as the marking of the junction of the further legs with a lion’s body, is effected with a line of the ground colour laid in a groove cut for the purpose. This perfectly natural method of drawing with the materials that are immediately concerned has resulted in some singularly inept modern examples of heraldry, where the limbs are deliberately represented as detached from the bodies, as though there were something mysteriously mediaeval in such an unreasoning travesty of a perfectly simple expedient.
Where one colour approaches another, as in the de Valence shield (Fig. 174), it will be necessary to leave a narrow rim of metal as an outline, and where the work is sufficiently large other details of form will be shown in a similar way. Diaper also may be thus drawn in lines of metal among colour, as is shown here in the running ornament, or by lines of colour in metal, as the case may be.
The gilt outlines of the de Valence Champlevé shield somewhat suggest the effect of Cloisonné work, the way in which the Byzantine enamels were executed; but this method has been little, if at all, employed heraldically. In it the spaces to be filled are made of flat wires that are bent to the requisite form and soldered into their places on a metal plate, and the work then proceeds as in Champlevé.
In the fifteenth century, when Renaissance art was beginning to look at things in a new way and was discovering new methods by which to express itself, a new kind of enamel work took the place of the more formal Champlevé, just as a freer kind of heraldry was about to supersede the decadent Gothic. This became known in time as “Limoges Enamel,” though, as we know, that place had been celebrated for enamel in another form for hundreds of years. This painted enamel did not, however, take the place of Champlevé on monuments, rather the use of enamel in that way died out. Probably the painted plaques were too tender for the purpose, and in any case the treatment would have had to be much modified to bring them into harmony with monumental conditions. Although the method was new the treatment of the subjects was largely that of the missal paintings, and figure compositions, both sacred and secular, were accompanied by decorative borders into which heraldry naturally entered. Fig. 175 is an heraldic example of this method as it was practised by the celebrated Nardon Penicaud.
This kind of enamel is done on a smooth plaque of thin copper or other metal which has been slightly domed for the purpose. It is covered with a coat of enamel which forms the ground, the back also being enamelled in order to equalize the contractile strains, and fired. The design is then painted in white of suitable thicknesses, which on being fired form tones with the ground colour according to their relative opacity, and the result is called grisaille. This is a very charming form of decoration in itself, and is frequently done with that intention. Usually, however, coloured enamel is painted over it, the work being carefully fired at each stage, a very anxious process, and finally it may be heightened with gold after the manner of the illuminations. An additional method of obtaining decorative effects, in diapers, etc., presents itself in the power of scratching the painted gold with a needle before firing. Fig. 176, executed in this manner, is a plaque that is the property of W. H. Weldon, Esq.
From the capacity of painted enamel to imitate the effects of the illuminations it presents few technical difficulties as design. Its practice, however, is another matter, as may be imagined when the risk of the numerous firings is taken into account.
A form of enamel that is occasionally used for badges and similar heraldic subjects is that which is called bassetaille. In this method the subject, usually in the form of a medallion, is carved in low relief and the transparent enamel fluxed completely over it, the surface being afterwards ground and polished. The varying thickness of the enamel, from the deepest part of the relief to the highest, gives a quality of gradated colour that is extremely beautiful. In a badge or jewel of this kind there is, of course, a rim raised to the height necessary to contain the enamel and extending above the highest point of the carved subject.
Still another method is that which came into use in the fifteenth century for jewels, and is known as plique-a-jour, a kind of transparent Cloisonné which is said to have been produced by Cellini, who certainly knew of it. It is an extremely difficult process, but the effect is remarkably precious and jewel-like, the enamel being fired into a design which has been built up of bent wire and soldered together like Cloisonné without the bedplate, so that the work looks like a miniature piece of stained glass (as indeed it is) and of great beauty. In a similar way a design may be cut out or saw pierced through a plate of metal and filled with enamel à jour.
In all methods of enamelling, a drawing of the design must of necessity be first made, and it is of course essential that the designer should have a practical knowledge of the methods that are concerned, the design and the finished work being necessarily interdependent, and though written descriptions are useful to indicate the nature of the processes nothing can supply the place of actual experiment under competent instruction. Familiarity with the practical side of art craftsmanship need not imply an intention to produce the work itself, but is absolutely necessary to adequately designing for it.
Enamel is increasingly employed in commemorative tablets and in objects of ceremonial use, and is also used with equally charming effect on the decoration of cabinets, jewel caskets, and other boxes to which as wedding gifts or other presentations, heraldry, properly marshalled and well executed, is peculiarly appropriate. To such purposes the “Limoges” painted method readily lends itself, especially when the general design is of somewhat ornate character. With regard to the mounting of enamels, metal as framework seems especially suitable to their perfect display, as the setting to the gem, and so when a plaque is used to decorate a wooden panel it is well to introduce metal as an intermediary. But, nevertheless, I have found a well-cut ebony frame very satisfactory in itself, and the matter is clearly one for experiment.
Champlevé and Cloisonné go well with the more severe styles of design, both ornamental and heraldic, in fact, enamel goes best with styles similar to those with which it was associated in the early practice. The one with the freedom of the Renaissance, the others with the greater severity and strength of the Gothic.
For salvers, inkstands, lamps and other utensils heraldry in Champlevé enamel is very suitable and it is somewhat remarkable that it is not more often employed in place of the engraving which is usually inappropriate because of its lack of decorative quality.
Metal.—Although heraldry in metal work has so wide a range, from the massive bronze gate to the badge worked on a buckle, that it can only be partially dealt with in a general work, it is desirable to touch upon such parts of so large a subject as may help the student to find in early work good examples for present application. The value of the beautiful metal coffret, the jewel case of the Middle Ages, for instance, to the designing of the modern box, whether it be intended for a similar use or as the repository of a city’s thanks to a hero, is obvious. Even the obsolete weapons of early times may be made useful for their decoration, as admirable models for the making of trowels and other ceremonial implements whose after character as souvenirs of interesting occasions renders them suitable to, if indeed it does not demand, heraldic or symbolic decoration.
Of the large work the stately bronze doors of Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey are among the most distinguished examples in their perforated design of work whose duty is rather that of a gate than a door. The panels are filled with badges in pierced work, the Beaufort Portcullis, Henry’s favourite badge, the Falcon and Fetterlock of York, the entwined roses of York and Lancaster, and the Royal Monogram, all telling their story in terms of beautiful metal work. Within is the monument with the effigies of the King and Queen recumbent on the tomb, while at the foot amorini support a shield of arms and at the corners are placed angels who once held crowns. Designed by Torregiano and executed by him or under his direction, it is without doubt the most splendid and complete heraldic metal work of its time and style in this country. Over the gates in the grille which surrounds the tomb are the Royal Arms, France and England quarterly with the dragon and greyhound supporters. The latter was the badge of the Nevilles, but the former, the Dragon of Cadwallader, was of especial value in the King’s eyes. It denoted his descent from Llewellyn and King Arthur, and perhaps he liked to feel that his greatness was not wholly dependent upon York and Lancaster. It had been flown, on a flag of the Tudor colours, argent and vert, on the field of Bosworth when the “White Boar” was slain and his crown was plucked from the hawthorn bush into which it had fallen and placed on the head of the victor. As badges, the dragon and the greyhound are repeated on the upper part all round the grill and in its parapet portcullises and roses alternate in the cuspings of the tracery. One of these dragons is shown in Fig. 173. Even the great candle sconces are Tudor roses placed horizontally, which support crowns whose crosses and fleur-de-lis form a decorative rim. As heraldic design the proportion of the parts, the vigour of the animals and the excellence of the spacing (and this may be especially seen in the supporters over the gates) leave nothing to be desired, while the general arrangement of the repeated heraldic motives in a decorative and yet reticent way is as admirable an example as can be found.
Relief in metal work, cast or wrought, was very fully employed in the Renaissance monuments in place of the flatter treatment which preceded it. The mediaeval memorials more frequently employed the flat decoration done in Champlevé enamel fixed into the spaces of sculptured stone, or else the incised metal slab, somewhat similar in its method of production, which is known as a Monumental Brass. These are so comparatively numerous and of such admirable workmanship as to form one of the most interesting and instructive means of studying most that pertains to good heraldry. They were executed with great care, and afford examples of almost every kind of application of arms and badges to costume. Their wealth of heraldic lore is ably set forth in the works of Creeny, Waller, and others, and a single illustration must suffice here. Fig. 178 is the interesting brass to the memory of Sir John de Brewys, which is in many respects typical. The figure of the knight in his armour, his hands in an attitude of prayer, his head resting on his great helm, which bears his crest, and his feet on a couchant lion. Around him are shields of his arms six times repeated, and between them on little scrolls the words “Jesus” and “Mercy” many times occur.
The method of work is very similar to that of the Champlevé enamels, allowing for the difference in scale, the lines being boldly incised in the metal with chisel-like tools and then filled in with black or colour much after the way of the niello and enamel of the smaller and more precious work, a hard waxy composition being used as the colouring material.
Among the smaller metal work of domestic use, the firedogs, firebacks, hinges, locks and other parts of furniture, there is no lack of examples. The slabs of cast iron that are known as firebacks were very generally used as spaces for heraldry, the emphatic central position which they shared with the chimney-piece making them similarly appropriate. With the revival of dog-grates the accompanying fireback has also returned to favour, and a study of old castings therefore becomes additionally necessary. The Tudor examples are usually very excellent and bold in design, as in that illustrated here (Fig. 179), which displays the Royal Arms, probably of Henry VIII. In a form of work which is to be subjected to the action of fire, and even to be seen for the most part through lighted fuel, a design is obviously fitting in proportion to the degree of elimination of unessential detail that is effected, and in the case in point this has been most efficiently done. The arms, and the lower part of the centre generally, are much fireworn, but anything of this nature simpler and finer in pose and modelling than are the supporters it would be difficult to find, while the proportion and spacing of the whole composition leave nothing to be desired. Fig. 180 is another well-designed Tudor example, the arms being those of Queen Elizabeth, who sometimes used the greyhound for a supporter as her father had done, instead of the dragon.
It must be remembered, in designing firebacks, that the work is to be carried out by casting and should therefore be of suitable character. Casting is necessary because every time that wrought iron becomes red-hot and cools again it scales, and so loses a considerable thickness of material in a comparatively short time, a disadvantage that does not exist in the cast metal. The design in most cases is treated panel-wise within a raised border, but in the later backs the outline of the design, of the mantling and crest, sometimes formed the edge of the fireback without a containing rim. A space at the bottom, the part that was most embedded in the fire, is frequently left plain, or simply fluted.
Fig. 181 is also interesting as heraldry in cast metal, which in this case is bronze; and an Italian example is found in the arms of the Martelli, cast in bronze by Donatello (Fig. 182), which has much spirit, but lacks the excellent distribution of the same creature on the decorative shield for the Palazzo Guadagni now in the Museum at South Kensington.
The elaborate hinges, clasps, and locks of doors and coffers that were often enriched still further with coats of arms are also of great interest and appear to have been made subjects of lavish decoration before the larger domestic belongings were so treated. Of the decorations of lock-plates the German example of the Imperial Eagle from the Town Hall, Nuremberg (Fig. 183), is interesting as an instance of great simplification of form to suit the material in which it is expressed. Fig. 184 is another but more ornate example of the treatment of pierced and chased metal.
The French lock-plate in chiselled iron (Fig. 185) was in the Spitzer Collection, and is decorated with the crowned Arms of France, and with Navarre, Aragon, Bearn and Bourbon quarterly and with a coat at top repeated on either side, consisting of three pommes de pin, or pine cones. The fleur-de-lis in Gothic tracery on the hasp is also notable. Fig. 186 bears the crowned Arms of France surrounded by the beautiful collar of St. Michael. Below is the well-known monogram which combines the initials of Henry II and of Diana de Poitiers, and her badge of crescents forms a circular device interlaced within the guilloche border, and a further allusion to her goddess namesake occurs in the bows and arrows at the sides. A fellow bolt-plate in the same collection has the Arms of France dimidiating those of Medici and Dauphiny on the shield at top, and in place of the crescent badge below, is a rainbow in clouds and surrounded by laurel; and the monogram, a double K for Queen Katherine, is several times repeated.
A very beautiful work, also in chiselled iron, is the panel of the armorial insignia of the Emperor Charles V, the Arms with the Columns the latter rising from waves of the sea, being the device that represented the Pillars of Hercules and the motto “plus oultre” (Fig. 187). The arms are encircled with the collar of the Toison d’Or very boldly treated. The work is Spanish of the early sixteenth century, and is notable for its exquisite finish as well as for its general excellence of design and drawing.
Examples of keys, also from the Spitzer Collection, are given in Figs. 188 and 189. The former bears the arms of a Cardinal Archbishop, and the latter, which is excellently pierced and chiselled, has two lions supporting a badge, a crowned castle. Each is of good design, its use and material having been well considered so that it is of a decorative shape that does not impede its usefulness. The latter is full of minute and exquisite detail, indistinguishable in the illustration. Besides the decoration of the barrel with a spiral band, there are eagles’ heads on its wards and the words “vive le roi” are twice inscribed on it in letters of gold.
The beautiful and elaborate repoussé and engraved work that was very largely employed in the decoration of metal in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, found full scope in the magnificent armour in which the greatest artists and the most skilful craftsmen combined their forces to make a gift that should be worthy of a princely hand. Repoussé decoration consisted for the most part of the allegorical and mythological subjects that were so fashionable at the period, and comparatively little heraldry was done in that way. Engraving and etching, on the other hand, were extensively used to decorate metal with arms and badges.
In the execution of repoussé work a metal plate is fixed down to a bed of pitch, a material which affords an efficient support while being soft enough to yield to the shaping metal as it is hammered and punched into the designed form. The work is afterwards chased and finished on the face, but the essential quality is, of course, that of being modelled into relief from behind. A very beautiful piece of repoussé work is the quadrangular buckler, of late sixteenth century work, in the Royal Armoury at Stockholm, which was bought in Holland by Charles XV of Sweden (Fig. 190). The design is a fine bold treatment of the Arms of the Visconti, and the workmanship is probably Italian. There is a backplate with repoussé arms in the same collection.
The powder horn (Fig. 191) in the Royal Armoury at Dresden is a very good example of the treatment of heraldry on a small object, and incidentally shows the practice of placing helms on the heads of supporters in order to display some of the crests.
Engraving being extensively used to cut decorative bands of ornament on the armour, was naturally the method adopted for ornamenting the blades of weapons and other flat surfaces. Indeed, it was from the engraving for ornament’s sake that engraving for the purpose of reproduction by printing was evolved by Finiguerra, the famous Florentine goldsmith, in the middle of the fifteenth century. This interesting experiment, if it were an experiment and not a practice whose application had been before unnoticed, is said to have been made on a piece of plate, a pix, of which the only impression is said to be in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Engraving was also preliminary to niello work and to damascening, two somewhat analogous methods of decoration, that are peculiarly suitable to the ornamentation of metal. In the former the lines of the engraving are filled with a sort of black enamel which is fixed in its place by heat, while in damascening the design, drawn with boldly cut lines on the steel, is filled in with gold or other metal hammered in with mallets, and the whole surface is then polished.
The halberds and partisans that were of the nature of ceremonial weapons, the arms of body guards, for example, were usually decorated in some such way. The bill or glaive (Fig. 192) is a good example of German work of its period, and the halberd (Fig. 193) is a very interesting specimen of French work of a little earlier date.
These examples will be found valuable in their bearing on the decoration of ceremonial tools such as the trowels with which foundation-stones are laid.
In engraving a surface for subsequent treatment with another metal or with enamel the process itself will dictate the use of a strong and suitable method of cutting. When, however, the engraving is to stand on its own qualities it is important to bear in mind the difference between engraving that is employed as decoration and that intended for printing. This distinction has frequently been lost sight of, with the result that there is much engraving of the sort that, however well it might print, and in some cases this is more than doubtful, it certainly does not decorate; while fine bold cutting that is done in the right way will realize the value of the play of light on the incised line, and the consequent ornamental effect. In this connexion it may perhaps be permitted to define shortly the technical distinction between etching and engraving. In etched work, then, the design is bitten into metal with an acid mordant, while engraving is done with a cutting tool.
Etching is largely evident in the decoration of metal, frequently taking the form of lowering the background by biting-in with acid, and thus leaving the design to appear in masses of polished surface in contrast with the darkened colour of the bitten metal, and the details are put in with lines that are etched or engraved, as may be most convenient.
An important quality of this kind of treatment is that while the objects are enriched and very expressively decorated their practical efficiency for work is in no way impaired, and this may fairly be taken to be a conclusive test of right decorative treatment.