“Deliberò di far uno elmo azogielato”. Francesco Zen e l’elmo di Solimano

On the morning of 14 March 1532, in the workshop of the goldsmiths Caorlini, Marin Sanudo saw “a helmet of beautiful gold, full of gemstones with 4 crowns”. This is the splendid helmet destined for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, which we can get a precise idea of thanks to an anonymous woodcut of the same year and an engraving made in 1535 by Agostino di Musi, better known as Agostino Veneziano. Historiography has long recognised the material preciousness of the object and the various symbolic levels connected to the theme of sovereignty, but the correct identification of the creators and promoters of the enterprise can help to further understand its overall significance. If the details of the commercial enterprise reported by Marin Sanudo in his Diaries are mostly known, the discovery of some memoirs written by Pietro il Giovane in the Zen private archive allows us to add new pieces and protagonists to the story. Firstly, the Zen family’s involvement in such works was not isolated and occasional, and secondly the role of Francesco, already mentioned by Serlio as an amateur architect and here indicated as the creator of the helmet design, is analysed in more detail. The contribution aims to reconstruct this commercial activity and its meaning in the light of new documents, exploring the figure of Francesco through the study of the inventories and documentation now available.