Browsing the Internet Archive this week, I came accross an Italian book with the magnificently long title: Le guerre festiue delle reali nozze de’ serenissimi e cattolici re di Spagna Carlo secondo e Maria Luisa di Borbone : celebrate nella felice e fedelissima città di Palermo, dall’ Illustrissimo Senato della medesima citta … nell’anno M.DC.LXXX (1680).

Can’t translate that precisely(!) but basically the book appears to concern knights and tournaments of 17th century Spain and features 11 full-page illustrations of horsemen in armor, each with emblem and motto atop his plumes, etched by Giovanni Battista Mansella.

See all the images on Flickr HERE or download a zip file of all the illustrations HERE.

Unfortunately, the quality of these probably isnt high enough for print making (I had a struggle getting decent quality images from the pdf – a lot of print screening, cutting and pasting as the screen capture in adobe just wasnt rendering the images properly when pasted). However it got me to thinking about vintage books on knights, armor and suchlike – a very popular subject – and there is masses of material available in the public domain on this topic so there is probably lots of potential for product creation there.