Breastplate (c. 1540): Art, History and Details

Breastplate (c. 1540) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The breastplate protects the chest and abdomen and is normally worn with a backplate. This one features a lance rest which start to appear as early as the late 1300s. The purpose of the lance rest is not to bear the weight of the lance. Instead allows a mounted warrior to hold the lance firmly couched under his right arm and stops it from sliding backward. If the target is hit the lance rest also acts as a shock absorber, preventing the lance from shooting backward and dispersing the impact via the breastplate all over the upper body rather than leaving it concentrated on the hand. When not needed it can be folded up so that is is out of the way.

Object facts

• Title: Breastplate
• Date: c. 1540
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Arms and Armor
• Technique: steel
• Dimensions: Overall: 43.8 x 36.9 cm (17 1/4 x 14 1/2 in.)
• Collection: MED - Arms & Armor
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.1804.b

A detail from the museum

The decoration along the edge is known as a roped edge.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of Arms and Armour. [Boston, Massachusetts]: [Frank Gair Macomber], 1900.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Helen Ives Gilchrist. Handbook of the Severance Collection of Arms and Armor. Cleveland, O.: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• Fliegel, Stephen N. Arms and Armor: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Museum, 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.