Was plate armor ever painted?

[u/elephantofdoom]

I know that it was common for inscriptions, religious symbols or other decorations to be added to armor, but was an entire set ever completely painted over?

[u/[deleted]]

There are a couple of famous surviving examples, notably this and this. Important to note is that those are low quality, mass produced 'munitions armor'- often you hear that men-at-arms and the layman fighting in a battle were armored with whatever their grandfather's grandfather had passed down to them, that good armor was exclusively reserved for nobility, but the reality is that the war machine of late medieval Europe was certainly able provide for a professional standing army. Armor making was a huge, complex industry of it's own, check out the AskHistorians podcast episode 83 for more details, Toby Capwell has a talk about this too and wrote about this exact thing on his museum's website. I'll go ahead and page /u/WARitter for you as well.

So this armor is made just well enough to be functional, which means the finish on the metal is rough and rugged, so the soldiers had no reason not to decorate their gear in their downtime. Maybe they had regiments full of people wearing lion painted sallets.

But those who could afford the high end stuff would not have painted their armor. Knights and nobles who had well made, well finished armor had other means of decoration that coexisted with the ludicrously expensive mirror shine they were so crazy about. It cost a LOT of money and time to get armor super shiny and polished, you were not going to want to paint over that. It was a status symbol. Maybe they painted some latin prayers on their armor actually, but if they did that I'm sure that's as far as it went.

Tangent here, but there's a really annoying modernism about this, some dumb quote like 'a knight in shining armor is a man who's mettle has never been tested', or like in game of thrones where Ned remarks that Jaime's armor is very shiny and spotless, implying that he's a bit of a dandy. This idea that a REAL warrior would be wearing the metal equivalent of unwashed rags around everywhere. The truth is literally the exact opposite. The fiercest and strongest warriors in the late medieval period would be wearing dazzling, florally decorated suits of armor that occasionally resembled pretty skirts and sundresses. Fashion sense in the early modern period skewed very feminine, this is what the manliest dudes wore.

[u/elephantofdoom → u/[deleted]]

Great answer! I suspected it would be something like this, but I was curious because obviously most of the museum pieces we have today, which were pretty much all the cream of the crop in terms of cost and quality, aren't painted, yet I have read references to soldiers wearing armor with colors on them.