Camillo Agrippa

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Camillo Agrippa's portrait, found on his Treatise.

Camillo Agrippa was a noted fencer, architect, engineer and mathematician of the Renaissance. Though born in Milan, he lived and worked in Rome. He is considered to be one of the greatest fencing theorists of all time.

He is most renowned for applying geometric theory to solve problems in armed combat. In his Treatise on the Science of Arms with Philosophical Dialogue (published in 1553), he proposed dramatic changes in the way swordsmanship was practiced at the time. For instance, he pointed out the effectiveness of holding the sword in front of the body instead of behind it. He also simplified Achille Marozzo's eleven guards down to four: prima, seconda, terza and quarta, which roughly correspond to the modern guards used today. He is also regarded as the man who most contributed to the development of the rapier as a primarily thrusting weapon.

Agrippa was a contemporary of Michelangelo, and the two were probably acquainted (or so Agrippa claims in his later treatise on transporting the obelisk to the Piazza San Pietro). Based on a spurious inscription in a copy of Agrippa owned by a British collector, the fencing historian Edgerton Castle in his book Schools and Masters of Fencing (1885) claimed that Michelangelo may have provided the copperplate engravings for Agrippa's book. Many authors since then repeated this claim as fact based on Castle's book, but other, more likely candidates have since been offered as the unknown engraver.

There is evidence indicating that Agrippa's work may have been the inspiration for the Spanish school of swordplay (commonly referred to as Destreza). Don Luis Pacheco de Narváez makes the claim that Don Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza based his text on the work of Agrippa in a letter to the Duke of Cea in Madrid on May 4, 1618. This seems to be reinforced by a common use of geometry in both systems.

In the fictional work The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Inigo Montoya and The Man in Black duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity where they mention various fencing techniques they have studied, including those of Agrippa.

[edit] Works by Agrippa

Dialogo sopra la generazione di venti
Nuove invenzioni sopra il modo di navigare
Trattato di transportare la guglia in su la piazza di s. Pietro
Treatise on the Science of Arms with Philosophical Dialogue

[edit] References

De Boni, Filippo (1840). Biografia degli artisti. Venezia: Gondoliere.
Mazzuchelli, Giammaria Bresciano (1753-1763). Gli scrittori d'Italia: cio, notizie storiche, e critiche intorno alle vite, e agli scritti dei letterati italiani. Brescia: Bossini.