Gothic Breastplate (c. 1485): Art, History and Details

Gothic Breastplate (c. 1485) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Individual armor elements, like this breastplate, were shaped in ways that would make their surfaces as deflecting as possible. The contours of this breastplate, along with the pronounced vertical ridge down its center, were for precisely this purpose.

Object facts

• Title: Gothic Breastplate
• Date: c. 1485
• Culture: South Germany or Austria
• Type: Arms and Armor
• Technique: steel
• Dimensions: Overall: 50.5 x 35.8 x 15.8 cm (19 7/8 x 14 1/8 x 6 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Arms & Armor
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.29

A detail from the museum

This breastplate consists of two primary plates of steel fastened at the center by a rivet.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Gilchrist, Helen Ives. A Catalogue of the Collection of Arms & Armor Presented to the Cleveland Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. John Long Severance; 1916-1923. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1924.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Helen Ives Gilchrist. Handbook of the Severance Collection of Arms and Armor. 2d ed., 1948.
• 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.