Item ref: 4184
Private collection, Belgium
Formed of arched triangular side-panels with raised cabled borders and rising to a rectangular box for the leathers. The treads formed of convex narrow plates front and rear and enclosing a pair of rivetted transverse bars.
The sides are decorated with a matching vertical arrangement of delicate fretwork tracery involving the armorial double-eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, together with a pious invocation or monogram formed of the letter M in gothic Uncial script, its lower half a repeat in inverted mirror image. The device may stand for ‘Maria’, in invocation of The Blessed Virgin. Alternatively, as a patriotic monogram the device may be a reference to the Archduke Maximilian, crowned King of Bohemia and of the Germans in 1562, reigning as Holy Roman Emperor 1564-76.
The outer plates of the treads are decorated with pounced and file-cut mouldings bordering their edges, the forward plate cut with a fretwork panel filled with the abbreviated inscription ‘GOT W ALT’ between gothic tracery terminals. This inscription is probably an abbreviation of ‘Gott Wird Alt’, translated literally as ‘God will become old’. The phrase ‘Gott Wird Alt’ appears in religious contexts, in reference to God’s eternal nature, or yet more obliquely as an allusion to God’s eternity, compared to the temporary nature of earthly beings.
The whole construction is lightly engraved and picked-out with a series of very small rivets with decorative projecting brass beaded heads. The ironwork would almost certainly have originally been tinned, providing both a brilliant and preserving finish; feint traces of tinning would appear to remain.
The fretwork ornament and the lettering style of the prominent inscription are each very closely related to many of the elaborate iron or brass horse muzzles produced in Austria and Germany throughout the second half of the 16th century. One obviously close parallel is the armorial double-eagle device of the Holy Roman Empire, which is similarly cut on many of the recorded surviving muzzles of this period.
These muzzles, and by extension stirrups of this type also, would have been made by Master Spurriers. The muzzles are believed to originate within the southern regions of Styria and Carinthia, and from German centres of production in Bavaria, the middle Rhine valley and Saxony; it is reasonable to suggest that the present stirrup and those like it shared the same origins. A related pair of stirrups ascribed to circa 1550, the fretwork again involving the double-eagle, is in the Wallace Collection, London (A 429).