Offered for two dollars and fifty cents, a decorative barding for the player's steed that conferred no measurable advantage, the Horse Armor is regarded by the museum as the type specimen of the paid cosmetic. It was met, upon circulation, with near-universal derision.

The derision is instructive, for it did not last. Within a decade the arrangement it introduced — a completed work, sold again in fragments — had become the settled economic foundation of the medium. The specimen is displayed here not as an aberration but as an origin.