Riefelharnisch, Riefelküriss für Feld und Turnier

In the sixteenth century, this garniture for man and horse was in the collection assembled by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, where it was installed in the so-called Armoury of Heroes to represent King Rupert I in a dynastic line of German emperors and kings. Rupert came to power in 1400 after the deposition of Wenceslaus of Luxembourg. The catalogue of the Armoury of Heroes at Ambras, the Armamentarium Heroicum, published in 1601–03, opines that Rupert was elected for ‘his virtues and great deeds’ (seiner selbst eignen tugenden und gewaltiger thaten halber).

Stylistically, however, the historical attribution of this garniture to King Rupert, who lived at the turn of the fifteenth century, is impossible. Wendelin Boheim, a curator of the Imperial Armoury in the nineteenth century, realized this mistake and attributed the garniture – stylistically equally impossible – to the king’s namesake, Rupert, Count Palatine who died in 1504.

The garniture is probably the work of Kolman Helmschmid, an armourer from Augsburg, and dates from the mid-1520s. It was presumably made for Ferdinand I, the younger brother of Emperor Charles V, in late 1526 or early 1527. This is suggested by the double-tailed lion rampant – the heraldic beast of Bohemia – on the chanfron. The small escutcheon above it is now empty but was presumably originally painted with the country’s crest.

The garniture is embellished with fire-gilt ornamentation on a blued ground. The bosses on the peytral are shaped like lions’ heads, the tail guard like a dragon. Remnants of original polychrome fringes, especially for the peytral, have also survived.