The Thun-Hohenstein Album: Constructing and Commemorating the Armored Body in the Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

Through the lens of the Thun-Hohenstein album, this dissertation explores the ways that late medieval constructions of martial identity continued to inflect how the armored body was represented and perceived in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. The album includes 112 artworks with diverse origins and antecedents, which were created from the 1470s through the 1590s. This diversity lends itself to the use of case studies of individual drawings as foci from which chapters depart to explore thematic nodes within the bound collection. These case studies illuminate the ways that the drawings’ pictorial antecedents and retrospective representation of specific armors situate the album within a culture of remembrance centered around Maximilian I and his court. The chapters’ progression roughly parallels the viewer’s progress from the beginning of the album through its codicological arrangement. It simultaneously evokes a temporal progression through the martial culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and its retrospective representation in the middle and late 1500s and into the early seventeenth century, when the album was bound. Chapter 1 introduces the album’s history and codicology, as well as the artistic circles from which the drawings that fill it emerged. This chapter also traces the development of European plate armor as well as the historiography of arms and armor studies, and establishes theoretical foundations for considering how armor functioned within the commemorative imaginary of the early modern Holy Roman Empire. Chapter 2 focuses on three late-fifteenth-century drawings placed between the album’s first and second quires. As the oldest works that the Thun album collects, these images represent fifteenth-century pictorial and literary genres that established visual languages of the armored body that resonate through the album’s later drawings. Identification of the drawings’ original contexts or antecedents exposes aspects of the unknown compiler’s body of source material, which, in turn, hints at what associations he was seeking to evoke in compiling the collection of drawings in the album. Chapter 3 considers visualizations of the tournament collected in the album and the pictorial traditions that influenced them. It suggests that the Thun album derived meaning not only from its own content and from the meanings associated with the real armors represented on its pages, but also from the pictorial strategies, representational lineages, and retrospective focus that it shared with the tradition of Augsburg artworks from which it emerged and in which it took its place. Chapter 4 examines a drawing that depicts Maximilian I clad in armor and riding a horse that is also fully encased in steel plates from its head to its hooves. This image was drawn during the 1540s, but it retrospectively imagines Maximilian’s ceremonial entries into the cities of Namur and Luxembourg in 1480. By analyzing this drawing and its models, Chapter 4 places the drawing within a tradition that mythologized Maximilian’s Burgundian exploits and retrospectively celebrated his idealized knightly identity. Chapter 5 considers a drawing of a splendid armor that is part of a group of sixteen full-figure drawings that form the album’s fourth and fifth quires, at least nine of which picture recognizable armors crafted for imperial or princely wearers. This chapter analyzes the drawing and its codicological context within the album alongside exploration of the real armor’s history as a component of a commemorative collection in the so-called Heroes’ Armory of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol. In each case, the armor—both real and depicted—was juxtaposed with other armored bodies that were associated with the Habsburg imperial court. The Conclusion highlights conceptual narratives that unfold through the five chapters and identifies pathways for future research. Four Appendices support this study by providing diagrams of armor for man and horse, a table of codicological data that details the previously unstudied physical structure of the album, visualizations of the familial and social networks that connected Augsburg artists and armorers, and a glossary of common technical terms that appear throughout the dissertation.