LATE 15TH CENTURY

This belongs to a rare group of one-piece breast-plates which were fashionable in the late 15th/early 16th centuries in Western Europe, including England. They are depicted on English church monuments of the period, and, above all, in the famous Warwick Pageant manuscript of c. 1483-90. A few surviving examples bear marks that appear to be Flemish - for instance, the breast-plates of, respectively, a child's cuirass made for Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, in c. 1490 in the Hofjagd- und Leibrüstkammer, Vienna (inv. no. A 109a), and of a cuirass in the Royal Armouries, Leeds (inv. no. III 71), possibly from the historic collection - while another, in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zurich (inv. no. LM 4955), bears the mark of the workshop founded in 1495 at Arbois in Burgundy by the future Emperor Maximilian I
Only two other examples with such prominent turns at the neck and armholes appear to be recorded, of which one, in the Royal Armouries, was acquired from a London dealer without a provenance. The other, now in an English private collection, came originally from the Tollemache family armoury at Helmingham Hall, Suffolk, founded in the early 16th century
See G.F. Laking, A Record of European Armour and Arms, I, 1920, p. 207, fig. 241; The Art of the Armourer, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1963, cat. no. 9; A.R. Dufty and W. Reid, European Armour in the Tower of London, 1968, plates XV and CX; B. Thomas and O. Gamber, Katalog der Leibrüstkammer, I, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1976, p. 127 and plate 49