You thought that the exhibition “Knight” at the Met in 2018 was great? Then book your tickets to Iron Men. The curator of the exhibition, Stefan Krause, brought us some stunning show, very impressive exhibition of a magnitudinal scale in a beautiful setting.
Not only the objects of the Hofjagd und Rustkammer here in Vienna build on of the greatest and finest collections on princely arms and armour in the world (and they dusted off previously unknown objects for the show!), but great loans from the Schloss Ambras, the Kunstkammer Dresden, The Alberina, the Metropolitan Museum and the Wallace collection (amongst others!) add more cherries on the cake.
The exhibition will take you on a journey about armours of 15th and 16th centuries, from child armour to funerary armour (the whole cycle, but also wandering in chivalric games and armour as diplomatic gifts). It features focuses on the interplay between textile (in and out!) and metal, fashion and functions, and different style of armour (alla turca, all’antica, etc.). Women are also there, from the margins and at the centre. It aims at going over the vision we get of the armour through the cultural lenses of the late 19th, 20th c. and more recent pop culture, in order to bring back an actual period image of the armour as an object in all its dimensions. And it succeeds!
To tease you a bit, and instead of sharing pictures of the rooms which you can find already online, I chose to share one mighty impression I got out of it when touring the show. Some of the armours are displayed in elevation, looking down at the visitor. I felt at the feet of gods, well, martial empowered sculpture of superheroes, in their indestructible artful steel carapace. A feeling, I figure, will be shared by many visitors.
And here a selection of details of the objects, which caught my eye
I was fortunate to play a humble part in it, with a contribution in the exhibition catalogue, and with videos about moving in armour and putting on the armour, on display in the exhibition. We also shot great promotional videos for social networks. Material is released bits by bits, you can now already see the trailer;
an abridged version of the movement studies’s video;
and the coffee break (hard job it is to be an armour standing all day long on its stand, it deserves expresso breaks)
More is coming, I’ll update this post as it unfolds.
The KHM team invested a lot of work for an online version of the exhibition. Visit the exhibition’s website at least if you can’t go to see the show. And buy the catalogue, it includes great contributions from Stefan Krause, Fabian Brencker, Tobias Capwell, Marion Viallon, Chassica Kirchhoff, Pierre Terjanian, Jonathan Tavares and your humble servant. You’ll be amazed by the new look on female warriors and gender fluid knights 😉, alongside great scholarship on arms and armours.