Bolognese Fencing
The Italian fencing tradition of Bologna, documented by a series of sixteenth-century treatises. Marozzo did not found it; Lippo Dardi did, in 1415.
Quick Facts
ItalyCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Bolognese Fencing
About Bolognese Fencing
Bolognese swordsmanship, also called the Dardi school, is the Italian fencing tradition associated with Bologna. A correction is needed here, because this entry previously named Achille Marozzo as its founder. Marozzo is the best-known author of the tradition, not its founder: his Opera Nova appeared in 1536, more than a century after the school came into being. The documented founder is Lippo Bartolomeo Dardi, who established the school in 1415. He was a swordsman, an astronomer and a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna — a combination not unusual in Renaissance Italy, where fencing was understood as a subject with a geometrical foundation. No manuscript by Dardi survives, so the shape of his own teaching remains unknown; the founder field is therefore left empty and the name given in the text. The tradition received its actual form from Guido Antonio di Luca, who was active in Bologna around 1500 and became its most influential teacher. A contemporary remark says that more warriors came out of his school than out of the belly of the Trojan horse. It was he who fixed the terminology and the curriculum we then find in the surviving treatises; his students included Antonio Manciolino, Achille Marozzo and the condottiero Giovanni de Medici. The surviving works form an unusually continuous series: Manciolino's Opera Nova of 1531, Marozzo's Opera Nova of 1536, Angelo Viggiani's Lo Schermo written around 1550 and published in 1575, Giovanni dall'Agocchie's Dell'arte di Scrimia of 1575, and an anonymous Bolognese manuscript found in Ravenna. It is precisely this density of sources that makes the Bolognese school one of the most reconstructable European traditions.
Styles & Branches
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.