FrankenArmor 3: The Brimmed Bascinet

Hi guys, welcome back. I'm Ian LaSpina and today we're going to be continuing our series on frankenarmors, this time with the brimmed bassinet. There exists a singular example of a helmet in a museum in Switzerland that on the surface appears to be an otherwise unremarkable 14th century style bassinet, except this particular example has an addition of a brim or a peak projected out over the brow of the helmet. Now the idea is pretty straightforward. Take a very popular style of helmet like a bassinet, add a brim to it, and you've got additional protection on what is already a very useful piece of equipment. When we dig a little deeper though, this particular helmet really raises more questions than it answers. Let's take a closer look. When you start to examine the details, you'll quickly begin to observe that the brim is likely not original to the helmet. The most obvious red flag that the helmet was not originally designed with its brim in mind is the presence of holes for visor pivots. If you look at the sides of the helmet, you'll notice a rivet on either side plugging up the hole right where a standard visor pivot should go for a normal side pivoting style visor like a hound skull for example. Now this is not without precedent. The famous bassinet from the Wallace Collection also has a plugged up hole, in its case right in the center of the brow, but it does tell us that the maker of the brimmed helmet originally designed it for use with a normal visor. So another kind of curious feature is when we look at the photograph here from the front, you'll see that it appears that the lining holes, the little holes around the facial opening, actually go up and are obscured by the presence of that brim. Now it's difficult to tell how bad access to the lining holes is at the very top front of the the opening, but it looks like they're at least very difficult to get to if not completely inaccessible, which would be a very curious feature if this helmet was designed with that brim in mind from the get-go. Also the presence of aligning leather is curious for a bassinet. We would expect to see a liner sewn directly to the skull of a bassinet, not to a lining leather, which is one of the reasons that bassinets have so many lining holes, because it keeps the stitches very close together to really keep the helmet in there, I mean the lining in there securely. Later helmets like armets and sallets that were designed for use with a lining leather usually have much fewer holes because you don't need very many rivets to keep that lining leather secured to the inside of the helmet. In my personal opinion, if the leather is actually contemporary to the brim, one possible explanation might be that whoever added the brim, realizing he was making the original liner holes inaccessible above the brow, added the leather so that he could still attach a liner without having to always disassemble the helmet, but that's just a guess and it's really only applicable if the leather is the same age as the brim, which I don't have any information about. Another thing I'd like to point out is the presence of mostly intact verveils, the staples for attaching a male aventail, which are still present on the bassinet here, which implies the use of a male aventail. However, later on when we look at the artwork that shows a lot of brimmed helmets of this time period, male is one of the things that's almost always omitted from those renditions. Finally, when viewed from above, the patina on the helmet skull and the patina on the brim are a mismatch. That is not definitive proof of anything, but it is a common indicator for two pieces that have been associated later on in life. So when you take all of these factors together, the mismatched metal, the fact that the brim kind of interferes with the original lining holes, the presence of old visor pivots that have been plugged up, it kind of leads us to the conclusion that this helmet was almost certainly modified at some point in its life. But when was it modified? And that's exactly the problem is we don't really know. Now because of this helmet's kind of unique and curious nature, it's a very popular helmet amongst reenactors. The problem is that reenactors from basically the 14th century onward all want to claim it as definitively belonging to their period, and obviously all of those things can't simultaneously be true. So let's look at some of the possibilities that exist. One of the main going theories is that this helmet is the product of our favorite armor tinkerers and that the brim was added in the 19th century. The Victorians were known to have reworked and modified actual antique armors. They were also known to make outright forgeries in order to sell unique objects to otherwise overeager collectors who maybe weren't able to identify real from fake. Now many of you may be familiar with Greg Mele of the Chicago Swordplay Guild or the Publishing House Freelance Academy Press. I spoke with him recently and he actually had the opportunity to speak to the collections manager of this particular helmet and with a couple other curators who have had the opportunity to examine this piece in person. And what they concluded was that the brim itself is inconsistent with what we would expect with 19th century forgeries. So the idea that the brim is a Victorian addition is really one of the weaker theories at present. So now I think it's important to mention here that to the best of my understanding what this doesn't rule out is the possibility that each individual component is authentic on its own. In other words a genuine 14th or early 15th century bassinet skull and a genuine late 16th century or 17th century burgonette or sashaga lobster tail pot helmet brim. Because as we're going to see the shape of this brim is uncannily similar to some of those late period helmets and that they were associated or basically composited together well after either of those individual components would have actually seen use in the field. Another possibility is that it's a 16th century or later modification for the field. Armor is known to have been repurposed as long as it was still useful. Now front brimmed open-faced helmets became very popular in the 16th century and found use on the field in the form of the burgonette. If this bassinet were say lying around in some armory from the late 14th or early 15th century modernizing it into a kind of retrofitted burgonette is not outside the realm of possibility as long as the base helmet was still in good condition. The shape of the peak is very reminiscent of the shape seen on purpose-built 16th century burgonettes as well which might lend this theory some more credibility. Another possibility is that this helmet was modified shortly after it was built which would place it closer to the late 14th or early 15th century based on the style of the underlying bassinet. Now helmets with brims appear all over Italian artwork at the turn of the 14th 15th century and these artistic representations really warrant some further examination. Now a lot of the artwork that depicts brimmed helmets in turn of the 14th 15th century Italy is religious in nature and clearly falls into a category called all'antica style. All'antica is an intentional artistic style used to evoke classical antiquity usually ancient Rome. It's not intended to be reflective of the real equipment used at the time of the artwork's creation rather it is a representation of equipment that the viewer of the artwork would have immediately recognized as ancient in order to set the stage for the art's subject matter. The particular way that the all'antica style brimmed helmet that we're concerned with is rendered in turn of the 14th 15th century Italian art is not unique to that point in time. This general form of helmet can be seen in artwork representing ancient armor for a span of almost a thousand years. Here you can see a very similar form of helmet rendered on a series of silver plates dated to the middle of the 7th century depicting events in the life of David. Almost a thousand years later during the Italian renaissance it became fashionable to actually realize all'antica armor in the flesh so to speak in an almost early modern version of cosplay with highly decorated parade armors giving the wearer the appearance of what would be recognized by the onlooker as an ancient hero like this example of a negroli burgonet. It intentionally departs from contemporary styles of field burgonets to really invoke that all'antica form that we saw in the other examples with the only exception that this particular one is missing its original hinged cheek pieces. The point is a lot of the artistic representations of brimmed helmets in 14th 15th century Italian art falls into this category and is not necessarily intended to be representative of contemporary armor so using it as evidence for it is a bit problematic. Now all'antica style artwork can't be used to explain away all the depictions of brimmed helmets at this point in Italy. There are a lot of secular works and even fighting treatises that show helmets with pointed brims over the brow. The works of Fiore dei Liberi show several in the armored sections of the Getty manuscript. Comparing them to the surviving bassinet though a notable difference is that the examples in Fiore almost always show a helmet with a very sharply outturned tail on the back of the helmet and no associated male aventail at all. They don't really look like what I would be comfortable calling a bassinet modified with a brim but more like an experimental early salad or possibly even representative of an entirely different form of experimental helmet from the beginning of the 15th century Italy. Another very well-known example of artwork that shows brimmed bassinets is the famous fresco in the Palazzo Pubblica in Siena by Spinello Arantino which depicts a hypothetical naval battle. Some of the helmets in this image are clearly just visored bassinets with the visors worn in the up position. Others look more like intentionally brimmed helmets though but absent are any indications that they would have been worn with a male aventail. Meanwhile others that do have an aventail are just standard open-faced bassinets with no brim at all or are unfortunately obscured just enough to make it frustratingly difficult to tell exactly what was actually intended. So looking at early 15th century Italian artwork the instances the frequency with which brimmed helmets appear even in secular paintings and secular pieces of art it becomes difficult to chalk up all of the all of the instances of brimmed helmets simply to intentional depictions of antiquated armor. We also have to remember that early 15th century Italy is a time of great experimentation and innovation in armor design a lot of things that you don't really see anywhere else. Now with that in mind in my opinion when I look at the artwork what I see is a purpose-built light helmet designed from the get-go for use with that brim. When I look at the actual surviving piece you know it looks very clumsy it looks like the brim is an afterthought it's just an ugly helmet it's not put together well it doesn't carry the elegance that real armors carry and in my opinion what I see on the surviving piece and what I see in the artwork are two different things and that the brimmed helmets that likely did exist around this time were a separate form of helmet that was built from the ground up to look like it did. So this brings us back to the original piece and unfortunately we're really no closer to determining with any degree of certainty exactly when this modification most likely took place. Different time periods have different compelling theories and hints that kind of pull it in one direction or another. Is it a 16th century repurpose? Is it a original to the 14th century and if so why not just build it with a brim from the get-go if that kind of helmet was already commonplace? With no surviving examples and no other supporting evidence it's really hard to answer these questions which is very frustrating. The only thing that's truly certain about this helmet is its uncertainty. We know that it was modified but we can't answer when that modification took place and that's really the most important point here is because we know it was modified we can't use it as definitive proof of that kind of modification taking place at any specific point in time without further evidence which to me makes this one of the more fascinating but ultimately one of the most frustrating pieces of armor history. So after all that where do I stand on this piece? This is my personal opinion but what I think that we're seeing given all the red flags given kind of the state that this armor is in and the way that it's put together to me it looks like two individually authentic components that were composited together at a later date. I don't really believe without additional evidence that it is a genuine field helmet in the state that it is in today. So guys I hope you enjoyed that video I hope you guys learned something as always comments questions leave those down below if you enjoyed the video please give me a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already thank you very much to all of my subscribers and patreon supporters we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching bye