Giganti Book II

It’s no secret that Nicoletto Giganti is by and far my favorite fencing author. His 1606 rapier treatise, dedicated to Cosimo II de Medici who was also the patron of Galileo Galilei, is the most clearly laid out progression I have ever seen for how to approach the art of swordplay. He presents the material in a straightforward, linear fashion that gets the point across without going off into the weeds on this or that tangent. When I’m invited to come and teach rapier workshops, I feel like most of the work has already been done and all I have to do is fill in the gaps as we go from plate one, to plate two, to plate three, etc. Even if rapier isn’t your thing or you study a martial art that sadly doesn’t include any swords, I think his text is worth studying just for the pedagogy alone. He doesn’t spend a ton of time on just the theory itself, although when he does it’s magnificently straightforward, but instead hides his pedagogy in the way he progresses from one plate to another. First he’ll start off by teaching you a basic action and then goes to show you when that action might be used. After that he’ll show how to use a basic action to counter a more complex one, only teaching you to perform the more complicated of the two only after you’ve learned how to apply to fundamentals against it. It turns out that using the basics to survive against anything your opponent might throw at you is more important in a fight than the ability to pull off this or that tricky shot. The entire first book contains just 42 plates, but in my own teachings I tend to stress that almost all of fencing can be found in plates 1-7 and rarely will you need to go past plate 10.

Last year I found myself with some unexpected time off and decided to go out and find a way to present his material in a format that might be more accessible to some folk than just sitting there trying to read the book. The book is great and there’s a reason it was translated into multiple languages within just a few years of it’s publication.

These past few months I decided to take the next step in helping preach the good word of the prophet of Venice. Up until 2012 rumors had been circulating about a lost second book covering what some these days might call “black belt techniques”. At the end of his first book Giganti tells us that if he has the time left on earth he wants to spend it putting out the additional material. A few decades later, though, we already have people talking about the myth of his second book. At one point, after his death, his first book gets republished alongside an unattributed copy of Salvator Fabris’s book II, adding to the mystery of it all.

Seemingly out of nowhere, almost a half millennia later, we found a copy of his 1608 treatise hiding on a bookshelf in the Howard De Walden collection. A year later we had an English translation.

While I know of a decent amount of people who have spent their time studying Giganti’s first work, I have yet to see much attention paid to his second treatise. While there has been a few videos showing this or that play, to my knowledge there has not yet been a complete video of his entire second book. That is, until now. I am happy to announce that I have finally completed my latest quest and have put together my greatest fencing video to date. Hopefully this will stir a resurgence of interest in this long lost text, getting people to dive deep and really engage with the text.