The Thun album's images not only stand among the most precious documents of the armourer's art, but also embody its connections to other media. Further, these depictions of armour, whose creation and compilation span a period of nearly 150 years, traverse the boundaries between the late medieval and early modern (or Renaissance) periods.
A paper armoury and its Augsburg origins
Though the Thun album is bound in unassuming plain parchment, its first pages feature a series of regal enthroned figures with their bodies encased in armour. Elsewhere in the codex, pairs of armoured fighters, some mounted and some on foot, spar on fields of creamy paper. These are only a few of the 112 drawings that fill the Thun album, which offer a wide spectrum of date, style, and martial subject.
The core of the album's collection, however, is tightly focused. Watermarks and stylistic analysis reveal that 101 of the drawings were created in the Swabian city of Augsburg, located in the present-day German state of Bavaria, between the late 1530s and 1550s by two now-anonymous artists connected to that city's burgeoning book industry. These
