today I would like to share with you some screenshots of a video of the German Gothic Medieval Saddles kept on display at the MET - Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York. Light is rather dim in there and I did make some video instead of taking the photos this time.
These XV century saddles are beautifully carved in bone (stag). They must remind us about the wonderful pageantry of the Medieval horse worlds. The best book to talk about that may be the famous book '
The waning of the Middle Ages' by Johan Huizinga
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ol2rd6MM474C&printsec=frontcover&dq=waning+of+the+middle+ages&hl=en&ei=wC9kTNbtOsOBlAea94COCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
We can only imagine how splendidly these saddles must have looked when taken on a glorious parade day done somewhere in Nuremberg or some other beautiful Medieval German Imperial city of the period. The tree is lindenwood (which is very soft) covered with thin rawhide, and with a birchbark lining glued onto it, in order to make it waterproof and stronger, then the bone plates were attached/glued. Museum curators linked it to the Prague, Czech, workshop based on some orders from mid XV century from Prague. More MET images and short description are here http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/40.66
Note the stirrup and cinch holes/slots in their relationship to the saddles' center. MET Curator S.V. Grancsay stated that according to this opinion the rider must have been sitting on the cantle when ridding.
More on the bone carving in the Gothic Era http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/goiv/hd_goiv.htm
ps
Interesting article about mounted lance combat, saddles etc http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/shock.php
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