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Pisani Dossi 10a (no Getty text)
Turning the dagger into its owner's thigh
A single Fourth Master play carried by the Pisani Dossi alone. It is the logical extreme of the two disarms beside it ([Dagger 62], [Dagger 63]): instead of carrying the dagger away from the man, the scholar carries it into him — and lets his own hand do it.
[64] The dagger driven into the thigh
Cod. 1324 · 36r-c
Illustrations: Cod. 1324 36r-c; Pisani Dossi 10a-d · Text: Pisani Dossi 10a-d
Pisani Dossi · verse translation
With my right hand I have made such a move
that I will make you drive your own dagger into your thigh.
Flow of actions
- From the Fourth Master's hold, work the captured dagger with your right hand — the same hand that makes the round turn at [Dagger 62].
- Rather than carrying it up and away, turn it down and back into his own thigh. You do not stab him; he does.
- That is the whole of the surviving text. The couplet names the hand, the dagger, and the target, and calls the technique itself only "such a move" — no turn, no grip, no footwork. The two figures are the only other evidence.
Glossological analysis
- "your own dagger" ([64]) — the section's governing appetite: the enemy's blade, turned. Threatened at [Dagger 35], [Dagger 51], [Dagger 72] ("a taste of your own dagger", tasta), and [Dagger 74]. Fiore's dagger-taking is never disarmament for its own sake; the point of taking it is to use it.
- the thigh ([64]) — one of the very few below-the-belt targets in the whole section. [Dagger 9] warns that from the elbow downward the descending blow has no "secure freedom without great danger", and the thigh is named only twice — here and at [Dagger 24] — both times when the player's own committed dagger is redirected into him. The scholar never chooses that line himself.
- "With my right hand" ([64]) — consistent with [Dagger 62]: across the Fourth Master's scholars the right hand works the captured dagger while the left keeps the arm. The division of labour is stable even where the text is thin.
- "such a move" ([64]) — a gesture-word standing in for the entire technique. The Pisani Dossi's verse names the result with real precision (whose hand, whose weapon, which body part) and the means not at all — the same asymmetry as [Dagger 57] and [Dagger 60].
Manuscript comparison
- A single-witness play, doubly illustrated. [64] has no Getty prose and no Paris verse; the Pisani Dossi couplet is the only text in existence for it. Yet it carries two figures — the Pisani Dossi's own 10a-d and Cod. 1324 36r-c, a further illustrated witness Wiktenauer draws on from outside our five collated manuscripts. For this play the pictorial tradition is better attested than the textual one.
- The plate number and the manuscript layout disagree. Wiktenauer's sequence runs [63] → [64] → [65]. The Pisani Dossi's own positions on 10a run 10a-b ([63]) → 10a-c ([65]) → 10a-d ([64]) — that is, in the manuscript the Fourth Master's counter stands before this play, not after it. The section numbering here is an editorial harmonization, not the Pisani Dossi's order.
- No counter answers it. The Getty's [Dagger 65] names its targets precisely — "these two plays that stand before me", i.e. [Dagger 62] and [Dagger 63]. [64] is not among them, and the Getty has no text for it at all. Whatever this play is, the counter tradition never accounts for it.
- Coverage. Pisani Dossi only. No Getty, no Paris, and no Morgan, which carries no dagger.