Yesterday, we got out and about and made it to the Saint Louis Art Museum. We viewed their new show, that opened last weekend, of treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Worcester boasts the largest collection of medieval armor and weapons in the US and the second largest in the world. This show is on display in the new East Wing of the museum, but not in the normal exhibition space. That place is reserved for another show on Monet that is slated to open next month and will run concurrently with the Armor show.

In the meantime, the Slammer has gone all in for this show. The first photo in the gallery above shows me wearing a helmet in the gift shop. What you cannot see is how uncomfortable it was. My nose was squished when I put it on. I could not even get it all the way on because of my nose and had to tilt my head forward just to see out of the visor. Maybe the pictured dog-faced helm or as I like to refer to it as, Madonna’s brazier shaped visor, would have worked better, but probably the also pictured grotesque visor would have been best.

In the exhibit, most of the artifacts were behind glass or plastered with do not touch signs, but even in there, there were hands-on items. I was fascinated with the armored gauntlets. I even tried to take a photo of one, with my hand in it, while it was holding my iPhone in the gauntlet, but I could not manage the task. This failure begged the question presented in the next gallery; how did the armored knight ever manage to reload his pistol? I guess that I will have to go along with Anne’s opinion that he probably had someone to do that for him.

Henry: Where is the number of our English dead?
                [Herald gives him another paper.]
Henry: Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire.
None else of name, and of all other men
But five and twenty. — Henry V, Shakespeare