Monthly Archives: February 2014

How many guards are there in Dall’Agocchie?

“Coming to the guards now, I’ll tell you that there are a lot of them…” Giovanni Dall’Agocchie, Dell’Arte Di Scrimia Libre Tre, 9 Recto, translated by Wm. Jherek Swanger

How many guards are there in Dell’Arte Di Scrimia Libre Tre? Nineteen. (Or twenty, depending on how you count.) But that answer isn’t really helpful – not all guards are created equal. Let’s look at the guards and how to classify them in more detail.

In the passage cited above, Dall’Agocchie goes on to tell us that there are “eight that are the most important, four high and four low.” But he doesn’t treat or use all those guards in the same way. Let’s look at a few ways to categorize the guards.

Most Important:

  • coda lunga stretta
  • coda lunga alta
  • porta di ferro stretta
  • cinghiale porta di ferro stretta
  • guardia d’alicorno
  • guardia di testa
  • guardia di faccia
  • guardia d’entrare

Please note that Dall’Agocchie does not distinguish between right-foot or left-foot forward guardia d’alicorno when he describes the guards, but he does distinguish between them when going through the various actions in the system.

Other High Guards:

  • guardia alta
  • unnamed underarm guard
  • unnamed overarm guard

Variations on Low Guards

  • porta di ferro larga
  • porta di ferro alta
  • cinghiale porta di ferro larga
  • cinghiale porta di ferro alta
  • coda lunga larga – right foot lead
  • coda lunga distesa – right foot lead
  • coda lunga larga – left foot lead
  • coda lunga distesa – left foot lead

That is everything named in the book, in sort of the groups Dall’Agocchie uses – 19 total guards (well, 20 if you count guardia d’alicorno right-foot-forward and left-foot-forward as separate guards).

I think that there’s another way of grouping these guards, based on how he implements them in Dell’Arte Di Scrimia Libre Tre.

Dall’Agocchie only uses five guards as starting and ending points in his defenses and provocations with the unaccompanied sword.

Unaccompanied Starting Guards:

  • coda lunga stretta
  • coda lunga alta
  • porta di ferro stretta
  • cinghiale porta di ferro stretta
  • guardia d’alicorno (right foot forward)

He uses six starting guards when the sword is accompanied by either dagger or cloak in the left hand.

Accompanied Starting Guards:

  • coda lunga stretta
  • coda lunga alta
  • porta di ferro stretta
  • cinghiale porta di ferro stretta
  • guardia d’alicorno (right foot forward)
  • guardia d’alicorno (left foot forward)

Three of the guards are only used as transitions – the martial artist never starts or ends in these guards; they merely describe positions that the artist moves through during certain actions.

Transitional Guards:

  • guardia di testa
  • guardia di faccia
  • guardia d’entrare

Dall’Agocchie describes but does not use three guards – he mentions them at the tail end of the section on guards, but never uses them in any action. I suspect that these are holdovers from older systems, especially from masters (like Manciolino or Marozzo) that feature sword and buckler. Dall’Agocchie makes it clear that he sides with “the ancients” (see his comments in 11 recto), so I suspect that he includes these guards as a nod to the overall tradition. Amusingly, regarding the second and third of these guards, he tells us that they have the same name, but forgets to tell us what that name is. I’ve added a name used in older systems in parenthesis.

Note that this list is the same as the “Other High Guards” list above.

Traditional Guards:

  • guardia alta
  • unnamed underarm guard (guardia sotto il braccio)
  • unnamed overarm guard (guardia sopra il braccio)

I’ve put together a table with all the guards, with these various categories applied. Unfortunately, I need to sort out and install some WordPress plugins to make it work the way I want it to, so that will be a future post.

In the meantime, have I missed anything? Do you have a different way of thinking about the guards in Dell’Arte Di Scrimia Libre Tre?

Dall’Agocchie and Me

As a Scholar at the Sacramento Sword School, I study La Veradera Destreza. But outside of that context, most of my martial arts effort goes to learning the art described in Giovanni Dall’Agocchie’s treatise from 1572, Dell’Arte di Scrimia Libre Tre (The Art of Fencing in Three Books). I love this work, and my main personal martial arts goal at this point is really learning the art it describes.

Modern martial artists include Dall’Agocchie’s work with several other treatises under the heading of “Bolognese Swordsmanship”. We know of a small handful of books from the 1500′s, all from the region of Bologna, Italy, all describing a similar, but not identical, martial tradition. It’s a fun tradition, too. Both cuts and thrusts, designed to work for sport, or battlefield combat, or self-defense, or duels on the field of honor. When I first joined the Sacramento Sword School a few years ago, this was what they were working on, and I was instantly hooked. We’ve mostly moved on as a school to other material, but I’ve tried to do a little work on the Bolognese material here and there ever since then.

The early Bolognese treatises emphasize sword-and-buckler, with time spent on several other weapons as well. But unaccompanied sword sometimes seems like an afterthought. Dall’Agocchie (along with the other principle late Bolognese-tradition author Angelo Viggiani) focuses on the unaccompanied sword as the main weapon.

Score one for me – while I enjoy off-hand weapons, unaccompanied sword interests me more than anything else.

Most, if not all, of the Bolognese authors include assaulti, or forms. Similar to kata in Eastern Martial Arts, an assaulti describes a pre-defined sequence that the student can use to internalize their art.

Score two for me – the system includes fun training sequences, great for solo practice. I run through Dall’Agochie’s form for unaccompanied sword at the beginning and ending of my daily practice sessions, even when I’m working on something else.

Dall’Agocchie structured Dell’Arte di Scrimia Libre Tre as a dialogue between himself and his friend, Lepido Ranieri. Unlike some dialogues, they stay pretty much on-topic throughout, so the form of the work doesn’t add much overhead for someone just interested in understanding the content. However, for some reason I can’t explain, I find the dialogue, admittedly stiff and formal at times, utterly charming.

Score three for me – it’s a rare and wonderful thing to have a historical fencing manual describe a cool system and be a joy to read at the same time.

Over time, I will be writing about my process of working through this system, and what I’m discovering along the way.

(Nod to my friend Pete since I’m riffing on his title.)