Getty 33v
Four plates, each beginning from an admitted failure — the thrust will not enter, the strikes achieve nothing, the sword does nothing — and each escalating: the visor, the elbow, the hold, the lock. This is the Getty's page in the strictest sense: three of the four plates exist in no other manuscript.
When I see that my thrust can enter neither the chest nor the face because of the visor, I lift the visor and put the point in his face. And if this does not suffice me, I move on to the other, stronger plays.
- You are thrusting, and the thrust will enter neither the chest nor the face — the breast is covered and the visor is down.
- Lift the visor. With what, the text does not say; nor what the sword is doing meanwhile.
- Put the point into the face through the opening you have just made.
- If that does not suffice, do not persist: "I move on to the other, stronger plays" ([SwordArmor 11]–[SwordArmor 13]).
The escalation clause is the grappling section's habit exactly ("seek other plays and holds", [Grappling 9]). The armored plays are ordered by increasing force, and the text says so out loud.
When I came to close quarters (le strette) with this player, I had struck him plenty from the front, and because of his armor it availed me nothing. But by the elbow I will push him hard, so that I will make him turn; if his armor is strong from behind, I mean to test it.
- You are at close quarters (le strette), and you have already struck him repeatedly from the front — and the armor has made every one of those blows worthless. The play begins from that admission.
- Push hard at his elbow (per lo cubito lo penzero forte).
- Push far enough to turn him, so that his back comes round.
- Strike there instead. The reasoning is given plainly: the front of his harness has answered everything, so "if his armor is strong from behind, I mean to test it".
The premise is not that armor is impenetrable but that this armor's front is. The answer is to change which surface you are attacking — and the mechanism is the elbow, the same lever the counters use at [SwordArmor 25] and [SwordArmor 27].
When I saw that with the sword I could do nothing to you, immediately I took this grappling hold (presa d'abrazare); for I believe, and see, and feel that your armor will avail you nothing, since I will put you in the strong lower lock (ligadura de sotto) — in the one placed behind me. I will make you give the demonstration of it at once.
- The sword has achieved nothing: "with the sword I could do nothing to you."
- Immediately take a grappling hold (presa d'abrazare). The sword is not dropped or sheathed — grappling is entered with it still in the hand (compare [SwordArmor 15], [SwordArmor 19]).
- The claim: his armor will not help him, because what is coming is not a blow.
- Carry him into the strong lower lock (ligadura de sotto) — and again Fiore does not describe it, he points at the plate behind him ([SwordArmor 13]).
- The Paris adds a finish the Getty never mentions: once bound, "I will strike your chest with a lethal wound."
In the lower lock and strong key (ligadura de sotto e chiave forte) I have shut you in such a fashion that you cannot get out, and strength avails you nothing. I can torment you, and I can give you death; I could write a letter [in the meantime], and you could not prevent me. You have neither sword nor armor for your head; you have little honor, and will make a short celebration of it.
- He is shut in the lower lock and strong key (ligadura de sotto e chiave forte) — the two names for one thing, equated here in the same breath ([Dagger 54]).
- There is no next step, and that is the point: he cannot get out, and strength does not help him.
- What the holder may now do, at his leisure: torment him (stentar), or kill him.
- The boast measures the leisure: "I could write a letter, and you could not prevent me."
- The condition that makes it terminal, stated last: "you have neither sword nor armor for your head" — the lock has taken the weapon, and the head is bare.
Doctrine rather than technique: the plate exists to fix what the lower lock is worth in harness, and the answer is everything. The dagger says the same of it ([Dagger 54]).
Glossological analysis
- visera ([10]) — the visor: on this folio the whole armored problem in one word. The face is the target, the visor is what stops the point, and lifting it is a technique in its own right. The axe does the identical thing ([Axe 10]).
- le strette ([11]) — close quarters, the near measure. The same root as the longsword's close play (zogho stretto), but here it names a place you have arrived at once the sword has failed, not a class of plays.
- presa d'abrazare ([12]) — a grappling hold, taken with the sword still in the hand. The phrase is the section's pivot in three words: armored swordplay resolves into the grappling grammar.
- ligadura de sotto / chiave forte ([12], [13]) — the lower lock = the strong key. Fiore uses both names for one action and joins them explicitly at [13]. Not the middle lock, which [SwordArmor 5] named separately.
- cubito ([11]) — the elbow: this folio's mechanical hinge, and the section's most reused lever ([SwordArmor 25], [SwordArmor 27]).
- stentar ([13]) — to torment, to make suffer, to hold a man in pain at will. Not the modern stentare ("to struggle, to labor") — the sense here is transitive, done to someone.
- farai breve festa ([13]) — "you will make a short celebration of it": an idiom of contempt for a triumph that will not last. No feast is meant.
Manuscript comparison
- This folio is the Getty's alone. [10], [11] and [13] exist in no other witness — not the Morgan (which jumps straight from [9] at 10v-d to [14] at 11r-a), not the Pisani Dossi, not the Paris. Only [12] has any companion at all, and only the Paris. Four plates and one verse line among them: the sparsest correspondence in the section.
- Where the Paris does speak, at [12], it does not translate. The Getty gives the mechanism — sword failed, hold taken, lock to come, look at the plate behind me. The Paris gives only the outcome, and adds a killing stroke the Getty never mentions: "by the lower bind you will go away laid low, and I will strike your chest with a lethal wound." The section's whole pattern in one couplet: the prose supplies the method, the verse supplies the finish.
- What is missing is a kind, not a quantity. The Getty's unique material here is precisely the material that is least like a guard-boast and most like instruction: the visor lift, the elbow turn, the lock. The verse tradition keeps the guards and the outcomes ([1]–[9], [14]–[15]) and loses the connective tissue between them (Manuscript comparison §4A).
- Illustrations. All four plates are Getty figures (33v-a…d) — the first fully Getty page in the section, and necessarily so: where the manuscript is alone in its text it is alone in its pictures, and Wiktenauer's illustration column has nothing else to draw on.