A Cool Shield from the Met

One of my favorite things about working on the Faerie Queen series is that I can explore arms and armor and call it work! For example, I found images of a really cool exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, focused on shields.

You can see it here: Defensive Display Images at the Met. We've got a lot of round metal shields here, but we've also got some funny ones like the German tournament targe or the very narrow Italian targones.

I especially like the German shield, because it's largely made of wood (which a LOT of shields originally would have been, it's just that they haven't survived until today to be put in museums) and has a notch on one side to stick your lance through! The art on the front shows a lady holding a golden shield showing a rampant goat, another rampant goat leaping around above her, and a banner behind her and to the left that has the owner's motto on it: "Take me as I am..." According to the Met listing, over the years the owners painted over this art multiple times, probably with different pictures and designs; this image was protected underneath!

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