Spartimenti di Marte. Visioni e narrazioni nelle armature da parata

Steel plate armour, developed at the end of the fourteenth century to dominate battlefields until the first decades of the seventeenth century, is a device in which each element is part of a whole and represents the concept of ‘union in division’. In the sixteenth century, German and especially Milanese workshops proposed a model of parade armour where the engraved and embossed decoration becomes the absolute protagonist of the surface, creating a great variety of decorative subdivisions, functional to distributing very rich iconographies. The armourers developed a rhetoric of images in which the armour itself is the first and most important. Vasari’s theme of spartimento thus finds an interesting field of application, quite peculiar to armour. This essay takes into consideration some specific cases that show the different decorative solutions devised by sixteenth century metal masters and briefly outlines their genesis. The aim is to demonstrate that metalworks, and in particular steel armour, offer an original interpretation of a theme that animates the artistic debate and production of the Cinquecento. The ‘armourers’ way of spartimenti’ dialogues with painting and architectural decoration, but develops shapes and models that are only possible on armour.