On art and fencing.

 This came up in my feeds of  things from interesting people and I thought it would make a good starting point.

It often happens that a fencer is graceful and clean with sword in hand, but is nevertheless ineffectual. Facing another who is very unaesthetic with sword in hand, as soon as they exchange blows, the unaesthetic fencer takes the upper hand.

This occurs because the ugly fencer cares only about effectiveness. He does not care much for beauty, only utility, leaving pomposity aside. The fencer who is clean with sword in hand delights in crispness without taking care of utility.

However when any fencer faces another, he should assess how he behaves. Whether his play is effective, or whether he is ostentatious with sword in hand, and does not attend to the utility of his play.

You must have good judgement in this, because on infinite occasions people say of a clean and graceful fencer: “oh doesn't he fence well”, but nevertheless his play is ineffectual. Likewise a fencer might seem very unaesthetic, so people say he does not know how to hold a sword, and his fencing is poor. But when put to the test he beats the beautiful fencer.

Anonimo Bolognese – Early 16th Century

The English schools tend to put more emphasis on the martial part of the art and has substantially fewer triangles, engravings and peculiarly specific targets in the texts.  Poncy boasts like being able to stab any button are to be treated with mild scorn. So, with a brawler's charter, I'm prone to agree with this as a matter of principle. Good fencing is when the pointy bit goes in the other person and you leave untouched.

One of the problems with really good fencing is that, although you can fight with grace, you should be doing it without really letting people know what's going on. You'll take the shortest possible line into your opponent and if you can see what's going on you can see the elegance in it's simplicity.  Note that simplicity can be unaesthetic, there's no frills and you don't get to gasp in admiration as some kind of stage-play happens.  It can be simply going from guard to stab to recovery before anyone realises what's going on.

There's a trick to telling the difference between ugly-bad fencing and ugly-good and it's all about the lines. Somehow ugly-good shows this ability to always be in just the right place to miss getting hit. You don't quite know how because the wild cuts are still wild, the parries are much wider than needs be and it's more like an explosion in a sword factory than the noble art of fencing.

Sure, if you can be graceful and stay intact, this should be encouraged..  but stay intact first, otherwise you're not going to develop the chance to become graceful.