st artistically satisfying pieces in the show is a rapier made of solid white silver in Dresden around 1608. It is easy to imagine the sensuous pleasure of slipping your hand over the hilt, which is engraved with an abstract design that suggests rippling water flowing from a massive pommel in the form of a silver cockleshell. And like two entwined silver snakes, the looping hand guard attached to the hilt wraps around your hand as if it were a living thing.
Swords made for aristocrats were very different from those lower on the social ladder. A ruler had an entourage and an army to fight his duels. But if weapons such as the jewel-encrusted golden rapier made for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II were of no practical use, don’t think that all swords decorated with precious metals using complex decorative techniques were only for show.
Rapiers were worn close to the body so that they could be drawn in an instant. And once drawn, a duel became a kind of performance, a deadly sport involving elegant footwork, lightning speed, and co-ordination of the eye and arm.
No wonder young men swaggered around town armed to the hilt and drinking, boasting, playing cards, cheating, arguing over girls and drawing their swords at the slightest provocation. Benvenuto Cellini claims to have killed four men with his sword, and in 1606 Caravaggio was run out of Rome after killing a young man in a brawl.
In London, the carnage became so alarming that harsh penalties were imposed for sword-fighting. There was particular concern about the increasing length of blades. Anything that measured over 130cm made a mockery of a fair fight because such weapons could be used to spear an opponent wielding a sword of normal size. In 1599, the fencing master George Silver published his attack on the rapier, which he considered an effete, cowardly weapon suited only to foreign (that is, Italian) fops and assassins, not Englishmen.
The Noble Art of the Sword has been timed to coincide with the Olympics. On selected Saturdays there will be demonstrations in historic fencing techniques as well as swashbuckling films, so do consider taking older children. And the compulsively readable catalogue is packed with new and mostly unpublished material.
'The Noble Art of the Sword’ runs from Thursday until Sept 16. Richard Dorment is a trustee of the Wallace Collection