Wordplay and Swordplay: Camillo Agrippa’s Challenge of Philosophy from the Spirit of Fencing

This essay examines the way in which the Milanese architect, engineer and mathema- tician Camillo Agrippa sought to establish the art of fencing as a science with reference to geometry in 1553. His treatise has been acknowledged as a milestone in the history of martial arts and its significance has also been recognised from an art-historical per- spective, but there is a diffuse understanding of the philosophical programme Agrippa pursued. The aim is therefore to show how Agrippa, as a philosophical outsider, devel- oped a method for the rational calculation of movement sequences with the help of a series of pictures that combines diagrammatic and mimetic strategies. He stages his approach in the frontispieces as a duel with philosophy and defends it in a philosophi- cal dialogue attached to the treatise. Agrippa's attack on philosophy is radical and goes as far as dismantling its disciplinary representatives in image and text. The calculated interplay of geometry, pictorial logic and text in Agrippa's work anticipates aspects of the later methodological revolution in philosophy through its principles of formalisa- tion, as carried out by Descartes in the seventeenth century.