Marshal wrote:Gaston de Vieuxchamps wrote:He's right about the perspective thing. You can't rely on the distance depicted between the fighters because art of the time pretty much never shows distances between people and objects. Look at the paintings of tournaments where everyone is shown elbow to elbow...
But if this is so can we rely on other distances depicted, ie that between swordhilt and buckler, or arm and arm? In other words, how much can we derive from the pictures about ANY detail of the method?
As Jester said, you have to do a lot of subjective determination and best guesses. These books seem to have been, by and large, written not to learn from, but to jog the memory. Methinks you are expected to hire the master to teach you and then commision your own copy of his book to help reinforce the lessons when you get home and practice. That makes them the best we have but still not very good resources for reconstructing a lost art.
If you look at art from the time, distances between objects and groups of objects (basically any large empty spaces) seem to be reduced or eliminated altogether. Fighters in a large tournament are shown basically elbow to elbow. Cities are shown far more cramped than reality and closer to other cities in landscapes. However, individual objects usually show much better (but not perfect) proportions.
I would give a lot more credibility to the position of the arms and legs and sword relative to the body than to the position of the two fighters relative to each other.
I just thought of something in regard to the feet always being depicted with the foreground foot trailing. What if this particular master didn't give a crap? I know it would be inconsistent with later manuals like Fiore where the student is told to always follow an attack with a step from the leg on the attacking side. What if this "author" feels that the techniques should be done from either leg forward and endorses liberal use of passing steps in a casual "walking" manner such that an attack can be started from either foot as the situation demands? That's what Musashi seems to have supported in Japan and it was clearly not the norm there either. Perhaps not a coincidence that Musashi developed his atypical philosophy on footwork while fighting with something in each hand (daisho) and this manual is about fighting with something in each hand. Just a thought.
I've been reading "Go Rin No Sho" as I go to sleep the last few nights and trying to reconcile my own ideas of rigidly defined footwork for SCA fighting with his very different ideas. Belatrix's mark runs deep in our game and he was one of those Musashi style "just walk like it's no big deal" fighters. It obviously can work but unfortunately, the watered down version of that is just no footwork at all
Even if the illustrations were perfect (the equivalent of a photograph) we would still have problems. Everyone knows that trying to learn a martial art out of a book (without the benefit of an instructor) is a process fraught with errors. We will probably never arrive at an perfect understanding of what the manual was trying to depict. But we can fun trying.