Visualizing the Fight Book Tradition: Collected Martial Knowledge in the Thun-Hohenstein Album
Chassica Kirchhoff
Abstract The Thun-Hohenstein album, long-known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch , is a bound collection of 112 drawings that visualize armoured figures at rest and in combat, well empty armours arrayed pieces. gathers span period from 1470s to around 1590. While most images were executed Augsburg during 1540s, album’s three oldest date late-fifteenth century. Two these works, which form codicological interlude between first second quires, find parallels illustrations contemporaneous martial treatises. This article traces pictorial lineages atextual through comparative analyses fight books produced German-speaking lands, considers how representational strategies deployed treatises inflected ways book painters their audiences visualized body. exploration situates manuscript one derives, Peter Falkner’s Art Knightly Defense now Vienna, within painters’ workshops would later give rise Thun album. Finally, this study transmission representation knowledge late fifteenth- early sixteenth-century contributed depictions bodies populate
Acta Periodica Duellatorum