Gothic Mitten Gauntlet for the Right Hand (c. 1490): Art, History and Details

Gothic Mitten Gauntlet for the Right Hand (c. 1490) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The forging of steel, a very hard material, into precisely fitted, interconnected plates was a task that required great skill and patience. The elements of a suit were never riveted directly together which would make them inflexible. Instead they slightly overlapped and were attached by different types of rivets.

Object facts

• Title: Gothic Mitten Gauntlet for the Right Hand
• Date: c. 1490
• Culture: South Germany or Austria (Innsbruck), late 15th Century
• Type: Arms and Armor
• Technique: steel
• Dimensions: Overall: 32 x 9.5 cm (12 5/8 x 3 3/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Arms & Armor
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.2081

A detail from the museum

Embossed decoration adds beauty to this gauntlet that would have protected the hand.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Fliegel, Stephen N. Arms & Armor: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.

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.