Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica (Paulus Hector Mair)

Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica is an extensive illustrated fencing compendium that the city official Paulus Hector Mair (1517–1579) had made in Augsburg in the fifteen-forties. In 1541 Mair was city treasurer, and from 1545 he was responsible for city supplies. In 1579 he was executed in Augsburg for embezzling city money. The compendium consists of 16 books in two volumes. It teaches fighting with the longsword, dusack, staff, spear and pike, halberd, scythe, flail, peasant staff and sickle, as well as with the dagger, wrestling, rapier fencing, fighting with the war axe, and with the sword or spear and long shield. It also covers fighting on horseback, fencing in armour, judicial duels and tournaments. The work survives in three versions, each more extensive than the last. The German Dresden version has the fewest parts, is closest in style to Breu, and probably came first. The Latin Munich version is the most lavishly produced and also contains a section on tournaments. The German-Latin Vienna version is the most extensive, but cruder in execution. German is thus the language of the probably oldest version, and Latin that of the Munich version and, with German, of the Vienna one. The illustrations were made by the workshop of Jörg Breu the Younger. Mair gathered into the compendium older fencing texts from his own manuscript collection, among them a gloss on Liechtenauer's teaching and a copy of Talhoffer. The Latin copy was bought around 1567 by the Bavarian duke Albrecht V.

Martial arts in this work

Contents

The compendium survives in three copies, each with two volumes. The Dresden copy in SLUB Dresden (Mscr.Dresd.C.93 and C.94) is written in German and its volumes have 244 and 328 folios. The Munich copy in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Cod.icon. 393) is Latin, and its volumes have 309 and 303 folios. The Vienna copy in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Cod. 10825 and 10826) carries both German and Latin text, and its volumes have 270 and 343 folios. The contents are divided into 16 books. Besides fencing with the longsword, the dusack and the rapier, and fighting with the dagger and wrestling, they include books on pole weapons, on peasant weapons such as the scythe, flail and sickle, on fighting with the war axe, on judicial duels, on fencing in armour and on fighting on horseback. The Munich version adds a section on tournaments.

Origin

Mair worked on the compendium with the workshop of Jörg Breu the Younger and hired two Augsburg fencers as models for the illustrations. The making took at least four years and cost extraordinary sums. It was based on Mair's collection of more than a dozen older fencing manuscripts. These included a copy of Talhoffer, the texts of Wilhalm, Sollinger and Erhart, Medel's gloss on Liechtenauer, Pseudo-Gladiatoria, the Marxbrüder charters and Breu's sketchbook. The Latin copy was bought around 1567 by the Bavarian duke Albrecht V for about 800 gulden. The sources describe the fate of Mair's library differently. According to Wiktenauer it was auctioned after Mair's execution in 1579, bought by the Fuggers, and ended up in the Augsburg University Library. Yet three copies of the compendium are kept in Dresden, Munich and Vienna. We have not been able to document how the Dresden and Vienna copies reached their present places.

Authorship

Mair had the work made as commissioner and compiler, and a hired workshop made the illustrations. The sources do not date the individual copies consistently. Wiktenauer places the origin in the fifteen-forties, but for the Vienna version gives the fifteen-forties once and the fifteen-fifties elsewhere. Other sources say the compendium was made only after 1542, the Dresden copy dates to 1550 and the Vienna one to 1542 to 1550. The manuscript Reichsstadt „Schätze“ Nr. 82 is related to the compendium, but is not a copy of it. In 1549 Mair bought an unfinished treatise by Antonio Rast and finished it in 1553. The year 1553 therefore belongs to this separate manuscript, not to the making of the compendium.

People and martial arts

• Paulus Hector MairAuthor
• Jörg Breu the YoungerIllustrator

Details

Form

Manuscript