Left-Handed Dagger or "Main Gauche" (c. 1650): Art, History and Details

Left-Handed Dagger or "Main Gauche" (c. 1650) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

For parrying, rapiers were often made with accompanying daggers as a matched set, although the rapier shown here (1916.1810) does not originally belong to this dagger. Daggers such as this one have been misleadingly called "left-handed daggers" even though they could be held in either hand. The guard is richly decorated with chiseled and pierced arabesques, an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines.

Object facts

• Title: Left-Handed Dagger or "Main Gauche"
• Date: c. 1650
• Culture: Spain or Italy, Naples
• Type: Arms and Armor
• Technique: steel, pierced and chiseled
• Dimensions: Overall: 57.2 cm (22 1/2 in.); Blade: 44.4 cm (17 1/2 in.); Quillions: 25.4 cm (10 in.)
• Collection: MED - Arms & Armor
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.699

A detail from the museum

The main-gauche (French for "left hand") was used mainly to assist in defense by parrying enemy thrusts, while the dominant hand wielded a rapier.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of Arms and Armour. [Boston, Massachusetts]: [Frank Gair Macomber], 1900.
• Gilchrist, Helen Ives. A Catalogue of the Collection of Arms & Armor Presented to the Cleveland Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. John Long Severance; 1916-1923. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1924.
• Fliegel, Stephen N. Arms and Armor: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Museum, 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.