Long known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch, or Thun Sketchbook, the earlier of the two Thun-Hohenstein albums is not what scholars perceived it to be throughout the twentieth century. Rather than the sketchbook of an exceptional dynasty of armorers, the codex is a multivalent object that emerged from a sequence of creative acts that began in the late 1400s and culminated in the early seventeenth century. The bound collection visualizes the passage of time through additions and juxtapositions that permit retrospective glimpses of armored bodies. The album is as much an early modern reconstruction of late medieval martial identities as it is a composite object that is very much a part of the moment when it was collected and bound. The codex also offers insight into the ways that cultures of remembrance influenced early modern patterns of collecting. Shared patterns of production, reception, and acquisition connected the highest courtly elites to the upwardly mobile citizens of imperial free cities like Augsburg. Perhaps most importantly, the drawings that fill the Thun album display the meaningful, dialogic connections between armor and its representation and between physical and imagined collections of martial objects.

The structure of the album as a composite object or bound collection lends itself to thematic consideration of the drawings that it contains in comparison with one another and with related works of art and cognate collections, situating the codex within its artistic and cultural context. As the preceding chapters demonstrate, many of the images in the album intersect with genres that were familiar within the visual culture of the Holy Roman Empire, and that shaped the strategies for depicting martial subjects that were deployed by the Augsburg artistic circles from which the codex and the drawings that fill it emerged. The martial manuals that Chapter 2 analyzes not only conditioned viewers to use images as mnemonic prompts that recalled bellicose actions or deeds. Through works like the Art of Knightly Defense and the many volumes collected or commissioned by Paulus Hector Mair, the fight book tradition also encouraged Augsburg artists from the 1490s through the early seventeenth century to develop innovative approaches to representing armors, whether empty or encasing bodies in motion.