Educational Arms and Armor Charts (1928) Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The book, Educational Arms and Armor Charts (1928), was published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and credited to curator Bashford Dean. Illustrated by renowned artists Hashime Murayama and Stanley J. Rowland, the six featured charts below primarily track centuries of European body armor evolution, from roughly 650 A.D. to the early 1800s.

The overview plate lays out the entire evolutionary arc in a single figure-by-figure lineup, moving chronologically from a barely-armored Post-Roman soldier through Norman mail, Gothic plate, and the fluted Maximilian suits of the early 1500s. Four detail charts zoom into individual components — helmets, breastplates, gauntlets, and spurs — each tracking a parallel timeline that branches into dozens of regional and functional variants.

The burganet alone, for example, splits into siege, lobster-tail, and morion-cabasset forms. Breaking pattern, the shield chart starts around 800 A.D. with round bucklers and stretches into 1600s targets and Pisan fencing shields, proving that shape and purpose diverged even more drastically than the armor itself.

It's worth nothing that full-body armor was dozens of separate technologies — for the head, torso, hands, and heels — each operating under its own specific pressures, encountering its own dead ends, and reaching its own peak, before ultimately dissolving when gunpowder made the entire apparatus obsolete. The following selections are a look at their individual evolutions over time.

The full-body overview chart runs from a 650 A.D. Post-Roman soldier to the stripped-down "late armor" of 1675, using the 1350 mail-and-plate figure as the hinge point where metal begins visibly replacing rings.

The helmet chart traces a single lineage from the 600 A.D. spangenhelm down through named regional forms — bascinet, sallet, burganet, armet — before flattening out into 17th-century iron hats and pikeman's pots once the closed helm gave way to firearms-era practicality.

The breastplate chart follows the torso alone from a 1300 soft hauberk to the deliberately exaggerated, downward-curving peascod breastplates of the late 1500s, engineered specifically to deflect a blow rather than just absorb it.

The gauntlet chart shows the hand splitting into two competing solutions by the 1400s — jointed "finger gauntlets" for dexterity and solid "mitons" for raw protection — a divide that never fully bridges even by 1700.

The shield chart is the outlier of the set, starting earliest at 800 A.D. and ending earliest too, with the kite shield's slow narrowing into the heater-shaped targe by 1400 marking the last real innovation before the shield fades from the record.

The spur chart runs the longest span of any plate, from a plain 200 B.C. prick-spur to the ornate 1800s Mexican spur, with the rowel's introduction around 1300 marking the one true redesign in an otherwise conservative two-thousand-year-old tool.

Note* Image available via Fair Use and Public Domain. | For the full document from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which also includes timelines of weapons, download the PDF below.

p15324coll10_130601.pdf

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