Limit

The ever present image of the knight in popular imagination is the mounted warrior in shining armor. If you've followed this blog  for any length of time, you may know that I'm fond of taking popular misconceptions of the middle ages and dashing them to the ground, however you can rest assured that this particular trope isn't inaccurate. Not entirely.

But what color was armor? We certainly have innumerable artifacts

(Milan, ca. 1400, KHM)

and period depictions of fighting men wearing brilliant polished steel,

(France, 1350-1355, Works of Guillaume de Machaut)

more than enough to say for certain that people in the middle ages did wear polished steel on the field of battle, however this wasn't the only color represented.

Delving into the manuscripts and looking at extant pieces, we see a wealth of colors available, from bluing

(Augsburg, before 1560, KHM)

to russeting

(Milan, 1495, KHM)

to blackening.

(Dutch, 1490-1495, KHM)

In manuscripts, russeting

(France, 1350, Roman de la Rose)

and blackening

(Vienna, 1448, Bibelparaphrase)

seem to be particularly prevalent.

However, one must be cautious when dealing with manuscripts. In particular, there was a convention in illuminated manuscripts of using silver leaf to make metallic weapons pop and shine brightly. Given time however, this silver will tarnish, and turn black, giving the appearance of black armor to what was originally meant to be bright and shiny, as illustrated below.

(France, 1350-1360, Roman de la Rose)

It is often easy to distinguish if this is the case if the weapons in the scene also appear black, or if the black armor appears smudged and blurry, both as in the above image.

Gilding is another particularly popular style of armor decoration, most often used as a form of accent to white or black armor in the middle ages.

(Hagenau, 1443-1446, Parzival)

and we see gilding to the extreme in the Renaissance.

(Arbois, 1508, KHM)

The final common option was painting. Less expensive than the others above, this was likely an option for poorer soldiers who wanted to look fancy, and give their armor a measure of protection from the weather. There are numerous extant pieces of painted armor in various musea, such as these Sallets,

(German or Austrian, 1505-1510, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

(Germany, 1490-1510, Royal Armouries)

this breastplate,

(German or Austrian, 1470-1490, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

and this breastplate and helmet for the Gioco del Ponte.

(Italy, 17th century, The Met)

The final point to consider is how much extant armor there is that may have been blued or gilt when it was made, but is no longer. Bluing and gilding will fade with time,

(Germany, early 16th century, Swedish Royal Armouries)

and many pieces were polished clean in the name of "conservation" by their housing institutions.

I hope this has been entertaining and informative. Cheers!

the image from the manuscript: (France, 1350, Roman de la Rose)

Unique front-facing Mario and Luigi sprites from the clock function of the 2020 Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros., extracted from the system's files.

in understanding the particular political tones and bends of genre, which do exist, you often come upon the secondary realisation that genre's descriptive nature is more about taking a slice of history's tapestry to elucidate the window in which a conversation is had and how it continues along its present course, which means that certain things, by consensus, will split with this slice

at risk of being overly structuralist in pointing out, there exists a prominent notion that a "genre" is an aesthetic that is pulled from the sky and can be adopted by simply choosing to enter into it, which holds true in music, literature, and even games. a genre as an aesthetic signifier that signifies nothing in particular except for a circular affiliation with the genre as an entity, which (as you may have picked up from the very first run-on sentence) is just not how it has ever worked

this is where you run into issues with saying things like "what if I made [genre] but [genre]?" if it involves hewing together conversations that you haven't been a part of, nor made any attempt to catch up on

the concept of the poser is a crude articulation of this, but fundamentally, it boils down to the etiquette violation of walking into a room and introducing yourself with both confidence and disinterest. it is a universally-emerging agitation because even a conversation centring incoherence is achieving coherence through the understanding and inversion of its corpus

which is to say, while it is possible to be open in your conversation and invite people into it, the control of any articulable genre will always fall into the hands of circles with an idea that they are willing to voice and defend about what it should be, because you can't really retain steering power over something as descriptive as a genre when you cede your participation in shaping it

on its surface, that just means "I personally produce all of the sounds I use" as a fully solitary mode of operation, but given even the slightest scratch, you've placed yourself in direct opposition to a half century worth of artistic movements, whether or not you consciously intended to. you have entered into a conversation and taken a side in a debate within it

you cannot clarify or caveat your way out of this. every opinion expressed on genre is an entry into its canon, firmer the more you entrench it in an understanding of the genre

because genre is an attempt to analyse the movement of the broader conversational body that is art as a whole, there is no way to remove yourself from it until you stop making music and seal yourself dead-and-cold in a coffin

Your 5h coding session did save you 10 minutes of work !

It's okay to forget your semicolons.

The next distro you'll hop to WILL be the right one !

Your O(n!^n) algorithm is good enough.

No, you don't need to multithread everything.

All of the red when you compile is your compiler showing you ❤️Love❤️