Dagger Drezden
Blade of cast damask steel, straight, complex profile, double-edged, tapering to the point. The blade has an armor-piercing thickening in the last third. The handle is cast. The top is rounded, decorated with symmetrical mascarons and stylized portraits in antique clothes, enclosed in stylized medallions. The handle is oval in cross-section, decorated with masks framed with floral ornament. The crosshair is straight, made in the form of two arms outstretched towards each other and forming the owner’s monogram in the form of the letter «V». The surface of the scabbard is completely decorated with images of military fittings, antique armor, flowers and ears, mascarons. At the bottom of the scabbard is the image of the god of war Mars. On the upper part of the scabbard, in a stylized niche, there is a figure of an antique warrior with a curved sword and a long hammer. The scabbard ends with a massive ball, the surface of which is decorated with floral ornaments and mascarons. In this work, the authors turned to such a trend in art as «historicism», taking as the basis of the work a dagger kept in the collection of the Dresden State Museum of Art. Historicism collects in itself all the richness of the styles of world art, doing it carefully, almost documentarily, copying the original, transforming its true scale, preserving proportional ornamental — decorative relationships. In the presented dagger, we see an appeal to the ancient tradition that was so popular in the Renaissance. Modern gunsmiths not only copied the museum item, but also added their own reading to this story, thus making this dagger an author’s single work.
Material: Cast damask, silver.
Techniques of execution: Forging, polishing, investment casting, soldering, mounting, engraving, embossing, patina.
Overall size: 595 mm
Length without scabbard: 546 mm
Stick length: 178 mm
Blade length: 368 mm
Blade width: 24-10 mm
Blade thickness: 12-8-10 mm
Scabbard length: 415 mm