I first came across Lovino’s manuscript many years back, in a booklet about fencing history. The colorful plates, the variety of weapons, but also the great artistic consistency of the whole have fascinated me ever since. Little by little, this manuscript got out of the shadows, first through the publication of a complete French translation, followed by the French National Library making high-res scans available on Gallica. As I have described here, the manuscript has a number of original features which make it stand out among Italian treatises of the time, besides the gorgeous illustrations.
For some time, I had been ruminating the project of acquiring a pair of sword and dagger that would be representative of those in the manuscript. This series of posts will detail how that project went, and all the information I have gathered while preparing it and seeing it unfold. My intent is to keep things in a relatively wide and objective focus in the first few posts, only going into the personal choices I have made in the last post detailing the realization of the project. In this way, other interested people will hopefully be able to use the information for their very own Lovino projects!
Post in the series:
- Weapons in the manuscript
- Contemporary paintings
- Museum examples
- Making it real
