The Fior di Battaglia Facsimile Project
Books of past centuries offer us a rare gift: the wisdom of our ancestors in their own words. But while these precious manuscripts are part of our shared heritage, they…
Introduction
Books of past centuries offer us a rare gift: the wisdom of our ancestors in their own words. But while these precious manuscripts are part of our shared heritage, they can’t be loaned out like any other book at the library. Most surviving manuscripts are simply too fragile and valuable to be handled regularly. A number of institutions have uploaded scanned images from their collections, but there’s no comparison to the feeling of turning real pages. So where’s the compromise?
Facsimiles, or near-perfect reproductions of a manuscript, give readers a chance to interact with ancient works without putting the original at risk. The Getty’s Fior di Battaglia, or “Flower of War,” will soon have facsimile copies available for modern readers to enjoy. The Fior di Battaglia is the most complete collection of the teachings and techniques of 15th century Italian Fencing Master Fiore de'i Liberi. It is the oldest surviving Italian fencing treatise, as well as the oldest illustrated treatise covering each of its weapons, which makes it one of the most important historical fencing manuals in existence.
The Manuscript
Fior di Battaglia is a beautiful illuminated manuscript created in Venice or Padua in the first decade of the 15th century. It is written on vellum in a Friulian dialect of Italian, using a humanistic hand. It describes an entire martial system and details how to grapple and how to fight with everything from a baton, to a sword both in and out of armor, and how to fight on horseback or defend against someone on horseback.
The complete manual with translations can be found on Wiktenauer.
The Facsimile Project
The Getty Manuscript currently resides in the J. Paul Getty Museum in sunny Malibu, California. A facsimile is a careful reproduction of the entire physical book in exacting detail. Such facsimiles are often produced of famous manuscripts and early printed books for collectors, and they are also exhibited by museums and libraries in cases where the original can't or shouldn't be displayed. In other words, it's a book you can pick up and touch without endangering something priceless.
Currently, the only historical fencing manuscripts that have been reproduced are the Gladiatoria manuscript held by the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Kraków, Poland, and Walpurgis Fechtbuch, held by the Royal Armouries in Leeds, UK. Last year, Michael Chidester, a prominent HEMA scholar and the head of Wiktnenauer, the largest database of historical fencing treatises in the world, produced a facsimile of Hans Talhoffer's manuscript Thott 290 2º.
This proved that affordable facsimiles of important sources could be produced for a general audience and spurred the creation of a facsimile for the Getty.
This facsimile is designed to be as close to the original as possible. Aside from accurate dimensions it also includes
An accurate page count, including two licensed text-only pages and 13 blank pages to give an accurate page count cover to cover.
Goatskin pages to replicate the original vellum of the pages.
The original quire structure layout of the pages so that each page is center-sewn and bound in the exact same way as the original.
The facsimile is set to be finished and ready to ship to customers by December 2020. If you would like to support the project or order your own copy, you can do so on Indiegogo.
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