Forget the movies. Forget fantasies of knights in shining armor executing levades and courbettes–or any of that other deliberate, dramatic rearing that directors so dearly love to put in battle scenes. (“Useless,” clucks one curator, “you would never expose your horse’s belly to the enemy.”) Forget the purple prose of romance novels and throbbing theatrics of massive horses thundering toward each other in the jousting lists. It just wasn’t like that.

Proof to the contrary abounds in “The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480 to 1620,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, N.Y. The 40 objects in this small, strange show, which will stay on display through Jan. 15, 2006, are evidence that medieval and Renaissance equitation was elaborately unlike modern dressage, that war horses were, if anything, on the small side, and that they wore armor as artful, odd, and expensive as their riders’.

The show is also, at least as far as anyone at the Met knows, the only exhibit about horse armor anywhere–ever.

Most people don’t suspect such stuff exists. Paint-ers and sculptors practically never showed it.

“Even in battle, artists of the Renaissance liked to depict the attributes of the horse as an animal,” ex-plained Dirk H. Breiding, a co-curator of the exhibition (along with Stuart W. Pyhrr and Donald J. LaRocca), who can’t cite a single horse in full armor among the masterpieces upstairs in the Met’s European painting galleries.

So, because depictions are so few and far between, the exhibition includes two small, ivory chess pieces, one from the
14th century and one from the 16th century, both showing horse and rider in full battle dress and both obscuring the horse’s body so much that it looks like a parade float.

The earlier armor is made mostly of mail and envelops the animal from its muzzle and poll down to its hocks and knees. The later is made of metal plates and exposes only the legs and lower tail. Commonly, the horse’s ears were encased in metal or covered completely, while its eyes were shielded under blinder-type protuberances.

As Breiding said: “Unlike armor for a man, which follows the shape of the man, horse armor obscures the shape of the horse.”

Seeing The Light

Another hitch has been that not a lot of horse armor survives. Four fully armored horses and riders now stand as the centerpiece of the Met’s Bloomberg Arms and Armor Court, but only a handful of complete horse armors–known as “bards”–made it intact to the 21st century.

“Metal was always costly, so they were sold as scrap,” Breiding explained. “Leather armors were cheaper and maybe more common, but leather doesn’t necessarily survive hundreds of years.”

Miraculously, however, one partial leather armor did make it to the Met: A domed, two-piece “peytral,” or chest protector, that looks like a gigantic front-clasp bra, and a shaped “crupper” or rump cover, shaped like a huge horseshoe crab.

The Met’s metal pieces probably survived by virtue of sheer beauty: the “shaffron,” or head protector, owned by Henry II of France, part of an armor that transfigured his war horse into a dragon; the shaffron commissioned by Duke Nikolaus Radziwill, that’s as complexly figured and gilt as an Oriental carpet; the pair of ear covers sculpted as dolphins; the various “crinets,” or neck protectors, articulated like lobster tails; the peytral that flares forward like the cowcatcher on an old locomotive. Some surfaces are ridged to bend the sun into foe-blinding beams of light, while others are covered with curlicued mythological motifs.

“A horse’s armor was as much a status symbol as a means of war,” said Breiding. “These are works of art, custom-made and just as elaborately decorated as a man’s armor.”

They’re also light as airplane parts. “A full bard is about 70 to 80 pounds, and armor for a man is 45 to 55 pounds,” said Breiding, then, holding his arms in a shape half the size of a tack trunk, he adds: “They dismantle and fit into a box this big.”

And that’s his cue to debunk Hollywood-style history.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that armor is allegedly so heavy it makes you immobile. Armor isn’t that much weight, and it’s distributed over the entire body, making it much easier to carry,” said the 34-year-old, who speaks from his own experience of riding in full armor. “Ask the soldiers in Iraq who regularly carry 60 to 70 pounds on their back. Ask a fireman who can carry up to 100 [pounds]. Or the U.S. forces in Granada who carried 167 pounds–that’s three armors.”

As he points out, knights had to be mobile enough to remount in combat. A knight might learn to ride by age 3 or 4 and be expert by 12. “Young knights would even jump onto their horses,” said Breiding. One thing they didn’t do: Get hoisted onto their horses by cranes. Breiding calls that idea, immortalized in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 movie of Henry V and imitated in historical dramas ever since, “total nonsense.”

Logically, then, the horses that those knights rode didn’t have to be very big.

“A horse has to be big to pull weight, not to carry,” said Breiding, adding that a draft horse’s or Thoroughbred’s build would have been a great disadvantage when strong shoulders and the ability to work from the hindquarters were most wanted. “War horses were about 15 to 15.2 hands. They had to have not too long of a neck, a short back, be agile, strong, and extremely intelligent . . . like the modern Lipizzaner.”

Knights Need Power Steering

Among other battle maneuvers, Italian paintings of the 15th century show war horses being asked to kick with both front and back legs–probably via training only vaguely related to the airs above the ground of modern dressage.

“People tend not to record the obvious: For them, writing down how to train a horse would be like us writing down how to drive a car,” explained Breiding’s friend and fellow metal-head Tobias Capwell, Ph.D., a Seattle-area native who now works as Curator of Arms and Armor for the Glasgow Museums in the United Kingdom.

A deadly serious jouster, who competes in the summer tournaments sponsored by the Royal Armories, the 33-year-old Capwell favors Friesians for the kind of work done under armor.

“The closest modern equivalent is probably Portuguese mounted bullfighting,” said Capwell. “The horse had to be able to maintain a collected canter, accelerate suddenly and weave in and out.

“The horse needs power steering,” added Capwell, “although in good armor you can feel the horse through your leg, you’re really riding with your hand, your weight, and your spurs. You can’t pull the horse into position. You need a pushbutton response.”

Part of the reason is that medieval and Renaissance riders sat in a very different place. “Saddle steels,” as decorative shields to the pommels or cantles are known, rose high enough in the front and back to mean that the knight didn’t do a lot of leaning forward. Or back.

For example: The 22-pound armored saddle in the current Met exhibit has a steel-reinforced pommel high enough to shield a rider’s crotch and thigh, an equally high, steel-reinforced cantle that curves around the rider’s waist, and a bolster under the back of the thigh that would have positioned his leg straight and forward.

Many saddles were more ex-treme. In the show’s catalog, Breiding describes a type of jousting saddle called a “Hohenzeug” that made a rider stand straight in his stirrups.

“Sometimes you were perched six or seven inches off the horse’s back, with your foot level with the horse’s belly,” said Capwell. “When you’re higher and you lean, it instantly signals the horse to get closer to the enemy?to sidestep. The horse has to go that way or fall over.”

Apropos of a piece of jousting gear in the current exhibit, a “blind” shaffron that covered the eyes so completely that the horse was essentially hooded like a falcon, Breiding said it would have been relatively common equipment, often worn with bells around the neck so that the horse couldn’t hear either: “With a well-trained horse you could charge right into a wall–which is essentially what you do in battle.”

“This was all part of serious, lifelong training to kill,” Capwell concluded, in an unsentimental tone that makes his own fantasies of knights in shining armor sound both more deadly and more romantic than anything ever dreamed up in costume dramas. “This was all part of a spectacle of supreme horsemanship.”