Saviolo's Weapons

Greetings

I took it upon myself to examine the depictions given by Vincentio Saviolo, or at least his artist, of the two combatants and their weapons in order that I might discern the length of the weapons though proper by Saviolo for the practice of his art. While Saviolo gives no indication of the length of his weapons in his text, nor gives any particular preference to the length of the weapon desired by him, the depiction of the weapons gives some idea of what these weapons should be like. The following details the short bit of research that I embarked upon in the search for the weapons of Saviolo.

The first question is why? Or more to the point, why bother? To this I answer that having some idea of the length of the weapons is useful due to the effect which the length of a weapon has upon the combat in which it is involved. Clearly a weapon's make-up will have an effect on the combat. Weapons designed for cutting thrust less well, and vice versa. Thus gaining some idea of the length of the weapons in Saviolo will assist in the understanding of his combat, along with the proportion of the weapon to the user, which also has an effect.

What needs to be noted and accepted is that there are some inaccuracies that need to be taken into account. These inaccuracies will become apparent because of the method used and also some of the data collected from external sources. However, even with these factors the results of this examination are useful as it will give at least an approximate answer to the question.

First of all the "average" height of a male of the Renaissance period was researched in order to give some way to transfer the data from the page and into a "real world" setting. By the research performed on this particular subject the average height was established at approximately 5'5" or approximately 165-cm. The second part was to decide on what images to use to gain the data. So four images were selected, the first four given in the manual. Thus there is the depiction of the three single rapier and one from rapier and dagger. With this information gained it was then possible to start examining the images.

All of the images were scaled so that they were all from a common source. These images were then ...

The rest of this article can be found in Un-Blogged: A Fencer's Ramblings by Henry Walker, which is available in paperback from:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Blogged-Ramblings-Henry-Leigh-Walker/dp/098764470X
Booktopia: https://www.booktopia.com.au/un-blogged-henry-leigh-walker/book/9780987644701.html
Among other places...

It is also available in electronic format (pdf) from: https://buy.stripe.com/fZecP419c7CB9VKeUV

... or direct from the author.