The Avant armour is a Milanese harness of about 1440 and one of the earliest substantially complete European plate armours to survive.
The Avant armour is an Italian plate harness of about 1440, made in Milan, and among the earliest substantially complete European armours anywhere.
That completeness is what makes it matter. Fifteenth-century armour survives overwhelmingly as loose pieces, and a harness that hangs together as one object of one date is a rarity.
It takes its name from the word AVANT struck into the metal — a motto or war cry rather than a maker's name.
It is dated to roughly 1440 to 1450 on style and on armourers' marks, and attributed to a Milanese workshop of the period when Milan was arming much of Europe.
Its earlier ownership history is not fully traced, which is common for armour that passed through the nineteenth-century collecting market before entering a public museum.
It is now at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, among the most important medieval objects in Scotland.
It is Italian in every respect: smooth rounded surfaces without fluting, shaped to deflect by curvature, and asymmetric — the left side heavier, because that is the side presented to an opponent.
The harness includes the helmet, cuirass, arm and leg defences articulated by overlapping lames on internal leathers, and it shows the mature Milanese solution to covering a moving body.
Some elements are restorations. Almost every displayed armour of this age includes replaced or reassembled parts, and a complete-looking harness should always prompt the question of which pieces belong.
Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century was the centre of European armour production, exporting complete harnesses across the continent on a genuinely industrial scale.
A harness of this quality was equipment for a man-at-arms of substantial means, at the point when plate armour had reached its functional peak and before firearms began to change the calculation.
It belongs to the same world as the Churburg harnesses in South Tyrol, which are the other principal group of surviving Italian armour of the period.
The Milanese attribution rests on armourers' marks and on style, both of which are reasonably firm, and the date is broadly agreed.
What should not be assumed is that the harness as displayed is exactly as it left the workshop. Restoration and reassembly are part of its history and are documented rather than hidden.
The AVANT inscription gives the armour its name but not its owner. It is a motto, and it does not identify the man it was made for.
It is displayed at Kelvingrove in Glasgow, mounted as a complete harness, and is one of the museum's best-known objects.
It has been studied and published as a reference piece, and other harnesses and loose components are routinely dated by comparison with it.
Being on open display in a case rather than in a study collection, it is unusually accessible for an object of its importance.