Word: helmeters
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...protect him against sword cuts and even the slow-flying lead balls of a matchlock, he was a sight: the armor consisted of hundreds of lacquered leather platelets, like fish scales, bound together with silk cord. But his mask, finial, badge and troops' standard, all in one, was the helmet, on whose design much fantasy and theatrical cunning were expended. Because they were an inviting target for the other side, not many helmets survive. The best that do, considered as sculpture, are unique in their formal beauty and dramatic power...
Beneath its distinctive decor, the conspicuous helmet was a cap of riveted metal leaves, weighing up to 11 lbs. and meant to protect a man's skull against sword and club. But was ever a martial object more drenched in symbolic fancy? The helmet had to convey no meaning to the warlord's troops except its own singularity. It was the exact reverse of a "uniform"; it was a portable spectacle. Its shape was not determined by the kind of functional rules that governed the making of a samurai's main emblem, the katana or long sword, whose basic form...
...silver leaf, or an iron eggplant. Sometimes they are ironically lowly: a rustic straw bag done in gold-and-silver-inlaid iron, or a common rice bowl. Some convey (at least from inside a glass case) a feeling of sacerdotal calm rather than ferocity, like a wonderful 17th century helmet in the form of a courtier's hat, rising like an inverted keel some two feet above the head and decorated in a tortoiseshell pattern of black and honey-colored lacquer. Others seem not to be there--a helmet, for instance, covered with a wig of animal hair to mimic...
...every dragon, lion or bear, there is an emblem that seems to have no ferocity at all. A modern officer might not wish to appear before his men with a pair of enormous formalized rabbit ears stuck to his helmet. One might as well pretend to be a chicken. But not in 17th century Japan, where rabbits symbolized long life and virility and were a favored helmet motif. (Americans see an old man in the moon; Japanese saw the silhouette of a rabbit with mortar and pestle, pounding out the elixir of life.) Likewise, the clam is peaceable...
...protection, identification and impressing the enemy? To transform, as the sculptor Isamu Noguchi pregnantly suggests in a short introduction to the catalog; to turn the mask, the effigy, into the man; to transcend death in the moment of challenging it. If one can imagine a philosophical hat, the conspicuous helmet would be it. --By Robert Hughes