Siege engineer and fencer, 1560-1622. He wrote a treatise on rapier fencing and combat on horseback, published in 1587, which is obscure but interesting. It is unusual, to say the least, for a 27-year-old to write a fencing treatise. Capo Ferro was 51; Giganti tells us that he had been teaching fencing for 28 years before publishing his first book, longer than Ghisliero had even been alive. The 1570s and 1580s were also a strange era for the art of fencing; the Italian rapier style had not yet cohered, as we later find it around the year 1600, so that different masters were advocating different techniques and principles, sometimes very odd ones, and occasionally in direct conflict with common sense.
Accordingly, Ghisliero's treatise, though comparatively brief, contains much that is unexampled from other works and masters: peculiar guards, strange logic, an underlying principle all his own; nor does it help that he uses his primary field of siege warfare as an extended metaphor for combat with swords, which is far from consistently felicitous, and frequently as much as tedious. Nevertheless, it is this very circumstance that makes the book fascinating.
Uniquely in my experience, the book was printed without engraved plates, but with blank pages where illustrations would go; these illustrations were then drawn in by hand. The National Library of France has a beautiful copy, illustrated lavishly in sepia ink-and-wash; a number of other known copies have fewer and cruder ones, so that it seems that each buyer paid by the picture and quality. However, it is also evident that the illustrations were drawn from, perhaps traced off, templates: the similarities are perfectly obvious between the copies, in spite of all that excellent or indifferent artistry might have done to conceal them.
300