Luca Stefano Cristini

14th Cent. German tournament knights Luca Stefano Cristini

This collection of medieval plates, dedicated to Saxon knights in tournament dress from the 14th century, was created in 1889 to celebrate the anniversary of the distinguished Wettin family. The House of Wettin is a dynasty of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings that once ruled territories in the present-day German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. The book dates back to 1889 and was printed by Wilhelm Hoffmann of Dresden in a very limited edition of 52 x 38 cm each panel. The technique used is the chromolithography method, the lithographer is G. Hohneck, who used the collotype technique to colour all the images obtained.

Our very rare copy comes from the plates that belonged to the Dutch doctor H. J. Vinkhuijzen, an eccentric collector and passionate lover of military iconography. Since 1911 the collection has been donated to the New York Public Library by Mr. Henry Draper, heir to the Dutch doctor. And it is from this collection that Soldiershop has taken the subjects of this new publication. Almost all the 63 original images were in a bad state of preservation, full of stains, scratches and rips on all the pictures. For our book we have submitted each table to a rigorous cleaning and re-classification to provide a complete, easy and useful work for all scholars and fans of uniformology of military history, costume and beyond.