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Description: DETAILED DESCRIPTION

with rectangular wooden body formed with a strongly boxed gutter, the sides and the gutter all tapering from the widest section at the top, the inner face applied with canvas and retaining a pair of leather enarms, almost certainly the original, the outer face covered in leather decorated with a painted and applied leaf design with elaborate punched and incised detail against a contrasting punched and lightly silvered ground, involving scrolling acanthus sprigs crossed beneath a minutely-detailed figural group of St.George and the Dragon, the acanthus executed in heavier silver leaf with gilt upper surfaces, incorporating seed pods of exaggerated size also picked-out in gold leaf, with St. George drawn in full Gothic armour of silver leaf, including a sallet pushed back to reveal the face, a rectangular basketwork pattern shield charged with a cross, and the borders picked-out in gold leaf throughout, the dragon with tooled scaly body decorated en-suite and slain by a sword, and the painted surfaces preserved in fine muted untouched condition throughout (some of the narrow border strips of leather outside of the decorative scheme replaced top and bottom, the subsidiary edges with minor shrinkage).

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Dimensions: 82cm 323/4in

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Provenance: THE PROPERTY OF AN AUSTRIAN NOBLEMAN

Schloss Gunterdorf, Lower Austria

This highly distinctive design is possibly unique within the recorded groups of 15th Century Bohemian pavises. The incorporation of tooled detail is particularly unusual. The present example was examined by the late Dr. Ortwin Gamber, senior curator of the Waffensammlung in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Gamber suggested that the pavise was left at Guntersdorf by troops from the army of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary and Titular King of Bohemia (r.1470-90), following their withdrawal from Vienna in 1490.

The closest parallel to the styling of the acanthus pattern is possibly a design for Gothic stone tracery by the noted etcher of armour Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg. Whilst the Hopfer design is of greater complexity the character of the foliage remains very similar and notably incorporates the distinctive seed pods. An example of the Hopfer design for Gothic Tracery is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Harris Brisbane Dick fund, 1924, 24.68.2).