AT THE HELM: Master armorer Hermes Knauer shows off his workshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
AT THE HELM: Master armorer Hermes Knauer shows off his workshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (
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He’s the kind of guy who actually appreciates chinks in the armor.
New Yorker Hermes Knauer is the country’s only “master armorer,” and he plies his unique trade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art conserving armor and weapons worn and wielded for ceremonies, battle and jousting contests as far back as 400 AD.
“An armorer is really a tailor of steel for people who could afford to have a suit of armor,” Knauer told The Post as he prepared for the Met’s armor exhibit “Of Arms and Men,” opening Wednesday.
“These were fashion statements for a well-dressed king or members of the court,” he said last week from his cramped workshop under the stairs of the museum.
Using a doctor’s scalpel or even simple Q-tips, Knauer has spent months scraping away centuries of rust to restore funnel-shaped hand protectors called vamplates or the points of a lance called a coronel.
“These are links to our ancestors,’’ he said, adding that, when caring for them, “the key is patience.”
In the first-ever tour by a reporter of his workshop, Knauer demonstrated the traditional method of riveting a bolt to a 21-pound jousting helmet from 1500s Germany, using a hammer just as the original craftsmen had.
The 62-year-old married dad noted he was working on the same jousting helmet he had once admired as a child visiting the museum with his parents a stone’s throw from where he grew up in Yorkville on the Upper East Side.
“We have to protect the integrity of the object. It’s not about us. It’s about the artist who made it so long ago,” Knauer said.
He began as a stock boy at the museum 40 years ago. For 28 years, he worked conserving all kinds of objects, from pottery to tapestry.
Then, in 2001, he apprenticed in the museum’s arms and armor department, looking after objects including shirt mail from India and Iran from the 1600s as well as lacquered iron and leather armor from Japan.
In preparation for the exhibit, Knauer is dressing a life-size model of a horse and rider in elaborate armor used in jousting from the 1500s.
“I have a real affinity for metal, probably because my father was a watchmaker,” he explained.