Press Releases

Romance in Steel: the Heritage of Armor - January 2 through June 3, 2001

Romance in Steel: the Heritage of Armor shows the fascination exerted by knighthood and armor, from the time of its disappearance from the battlefield to the present day. The opening of the new exhibit was one of our most successful to date! Record numbers of Museum members and friends enjoyed a reception with the curatorial team on January 9th. The organizers of this exhibit, Walter Karcheski Jr., and Dr. Jeffrey Singman, provided a behind-the-scenes guided tour of the exhibit to the fascinated visitors. Walter Karcheski, Jr., Senior Curator of Arms and Armor, is the author of the recent book The Medieval Armour From Rhodes. Dr. Jeffrey Singman, Paul S. Morgan Curator, is a faculty member at WPI and will publish a book in 2001 with Higgins Armory Museum and the Royal Armouries, a facsimile of a 12th century fencing manual.

Although armor had largely vanished from military use in the west by 1700, it has never lost the symbolic power and visual appeal inherited from its heyday in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The exhibition Romance in Steel: The Heritage of Armor examines the ongoing fascination with armor from the time of its disappearance from the battlefield to the present day. Drawing on the museum's own collections, as well as other public and private holdings including the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition of some eighty objects examines the varied depictions and representations of armor. These range from a 16th century piece of armor used in the town of Pisa's annual Gioco del Ponte contest, to Emmanuel Fr/miet's nineteenth-century bronze sculpture of Joan of Arc, to ceramic lamps and chrome cigarette lighters of the 1950s. Visitors will see relics of tournament revivals staged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reproductions and forgeries of armor, original suits of armor redecorated to reflect modern ideas of medieval taste, and examples of the uses of armor in domestic decoration and commercial images.