From Amazon: Wealthy Chicagoan George F. Harding Jr. could afford the expensive hobby of collecting art and used his keen eye for medieval and Renaissance armor and weapons to do just that. The Harding collection was eventually donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and today it is that museum's most popular holding. This volume showcases those pieces in large and lavish photos and illustrations within a layout that is inviting and balanced. In his accompanying text, Karcheski, the curator of arms and armor at the Higgins Armory Museum, puts these examples and the general subject of medieval armor and weapons into context for the general reader. 
Already in its third printing in Germany, the lushly illustrated book offers Heinz Götze's reasoned arguments tying the design of the Castel Del Monte, the mysterious, singular, southern Italian fortress built under the revered leader Frederick II, to the Mediterranean culture of the Middle Ages and to the intricacies of Arab geometry circulating in North Africa at the time. Götze is steeped in his subject: he has led architectural digs at other sites to search for European antecedents for this extraordinary eight-sided star of an edifice (there are none), and he draws on a seemingly vast knowledge of the delicate geometries of celestial and terrestrial designs of the period that stretch from France to Syria. His impeccable scholarship seems to liberate him from the pedestrian prose of many such books (there are cheerily triumphal exclamation points scattered throughout this one).
FRRL Price: $8
