Hi Planet

I paint one more time Tuscan and Norman. Other exemplars.







Best regards
Pawel

Czolem Pawel,
I think those are nicely animated and fearsome, warrior-like sculptures, especially the guy (Tuscan) with morgernstern.
I am a novice to this miniature art but I am academically trained historian and lately also an artist in 2d art, so I would like to offer some (combined - others and my own humble opinion) insight on one of the aspects of medieveal figure modeling.
I just would like to comment on the shield construction and appearance as shown in your sculptures. You sculpted the backside(reverse) of your shields having appearance of wooden planks or some other wooden material(which is quite common)s. These shields (these here are 12 through 14 century period figures?) probably should have been also encased in leather or some sort of covering (parchement etc) that also might have been painted on the inner part of the shield etc. It is common knowledge that wooden boards and planks, once pierced or shattered or otherwise attacked with a sharp object capable of penetrating them, do splinter and those splinters can be very sharp indeed; that is they in turn might penetrate or injure whatever stands behind them.

It then makes sense fo protect oneself from these potentially harmful splinters etc by encasing a wooden shield in some sort of a tight leather or parchment covering.
Also knights, martial class worried about appereance, would have looked with more splendour having their shields also covered and painted on the reverse.

Finally, mr Augie Rodrigues on the El Paso Honroso forum has a nice point about that aspects of modeling shields etc where he calls the ecnassing making the shield 'sausage like' - which I think does make the point very excplicitly straightforward..

On the other hand I do enjoy your sculptures and hope to see more of them . And I wish yet to attain your level of mastery of this art .
Finally, I humbly ask you to give the world to see the very first miniature sculpture of the most famous Polish medievel knight , patrician and anit-Ottoman crusader - Zawisza Czarny (Black) from Czarnkow.
Dario

Pavel, very nice work, I particularly like the Norman.

Cheers

Roc.

Nothing more to say.

Speakless. Just enjoying.

Marc

Hi Dario, good to see some historical notes like these here.

There is scant evidence to suggest that the back of shields in this period were commonly covered. It's entirely possible it would have been done with shields made for men of high status but being an essentially disposable item it seems likely they would have been made as cheaply as possible as a rule - hence the use of parchment or rawhide instead of leather (and/or linen) on the facings of some.

Einion