St. a écrit :
> "Vincent Le Chevalier" <gal### [at] libertyALLsurfSPAMfr> wrote in 
> message
> 
>> A plate from the biggest fencing manual ever written (Girard Thibault's 
>> Académie de l'Espée):
> 
>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Girard_Thibault_-_Academie_de_l-Espee_1628_Met._museum.jpg
> 
>    Wow, what an amazing picture. Ok, drawing. Notice that all unused arms 
> just hang freely and vertically, even when the person is depicted as moving. 
> Also notice that a right-handed guy is always fencing a left-handed guy - in 
> all pairs shown.
> 
>     I wonder why? Easier to draw from some template?
> 

I think the unused arms are shown like this because people were posing 
for the artist. Or it is a way to show economy of motion, of which 
Thibault seems quite fond of. Actually, I only really understood what 
the plates show when reading the text, because the engravings look so 
static... I believe the author did not intend them to show fight scenes, 
but training scenes, which is why most of it seems so calm, discounting 
the fact that sometimes swords go through heads :-)

As for left vs. right, it's simply because that plate goes with the 
chapter about how to fence a left-handed opponent :-D There is one such 
plate for each chapter, each of the figures show parts of a continuous 
action, a bit like a flip-book. As close to a film as they could get in 
1628 ;-) And there are 46 chapters, just to give you an idea of the work 
that went into that book...

There are scans from all the pages here if you want to take a deeper 
look (the engravings are always the last scans in the listing):
http://ardamhe.free.fr/biblio/Thibault/

One especially significant scan for the geometry lovers:
http://ardamhe.free.fr/biblio/Thibault/Livre%201/Tableau%2001/L1%20Tab%2001.jpg

I actually think he put some unnecessary lines in there :-)

-- 
Vincent

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