Lethal Masterpieces

Since he first learned to make them, weapons have been among man's most prized possessions. Over the ages, crafts men, armorers and artists lavished their labor to make them both functional and beautiful, from the gold-encrusted swords of kings to magnificently engraved crossbows for the attendant men-at-arms. But in the long history of weaponry, nothing quite matches the superb decoration of firearms developed during the Renaissance when physics and art, ballistics and sculpture were united under the guidance of such artistic geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci.

The wealth of invention and artistry in the history of firearms is handsomely pictured and chronicled (see color opposite) in One Hundred Great Guns, due to be published next month by Walker & Co. ($19.95). The 384-page volume was written by Manhattan Gun Connoisseur Merrill Lindsay and illustrated by Bruce Pendleton, who spent two years photographing the finest in firearms in museums and private collections around the world.

From Father to Son. Though primitive cannons were probably being used by the Moors against the Spanish as early as 1247, for centuries firearms were considered ineffective and extremely hazardous weapons. But by the 16th century, they had become far more accurate, and increasingly in demand by the nobility for such upper-class pastimes as hunting, dueling, warfare and ceremonial show.

The manufacture of firearms was an exacting, highly skilled craft, and most great gunmakers were often jewelers or watchmakers, even scientists. It was a French goldsmith who invented one of the first true flintlocks; and although he was never a professional gunmaker, Leonardo da Vinci designed one of the first wheel locks. The makers of the best firearms took tremendous pride in their craft, signed their names to weapons along with dates, proverbs and poetry, and passed on their skills from father to son, sometimes over centuries.

The purchasers of the most precise weapons were the ruling elite, and they demanded decoration to suit their status. Emperor Charles V (1500-58), who often donned work clothes to fiddle with gunmaking himself, once paid $33,000 for a matched set of two pistols, a rifle and bird gun. Weapons that took only a few weeks to manufacture were subjected to months, often years, of or namentation, with several craftsmen combining their skills. Two Munich gunmakers, for example, used bone, ivory, chiseled steel and beaten gold to decorate a combined wheel lock and matchlock for Maximilian of Bavaria around 1600, with baroque swirls and scores of delicately detailed figures from classical mythology.

From Pious to Pornographic. Other craftsmen turned to such materials as silver inlays, precious stones, mother-of-pearl and exotic hardwoods to produce intricate designs and motifs that ranged from the pious to the pornographic, often decorating the hidden inside pieces of the guns with motifs to match designs on the outside. Like Europe's great furniture makers, the best gunmakers also turned out pattern books of designs, which were slavishly copied by other craftsmen for decades. In the 1740s, for instance, Russian court gunsmiths were still using 1670 French designs to ornament a pair of gold-plated six-shooters.

Though often precision-made, the most ornately decorated firearms and accouterments were usually intended for showing rather than shooting. The intricate hunting horn carved for Henry II of France by the atelier of Benvenuto Cellini probably never sounded a note. One of the most frequent uses of ornate firearms was as presentation pieces--gifts from one noble to another. Often, however, they were ordered by one person for himself, like the superb set of boxed pistols commissioned by Napoleon from Nicolas Noel Boutet, the last of the great artist gunmakers. The tradition of presentation pieces was recognized even by Heinrich Himmler, who gave an autographed, flat-engraved pistol to Nazi General Karl Wolff.

By the 19th century, gun decorating was a waning craft, the decorators either imitating past designs or, like France's Perrin LePage, turning to garish Victorian colors and quasi-Islamic motifs. Mass production of arms dealt an almost fatal blow to the craft. Today, though some individuals still pay thousands of dollars for hand-decorated guns the craft is rapidly dying out, and within a few decades may well be all but extinct, as gun design reverts more and more to the pure, unadorned functionalism of the caveman's first chipped flintstone knife.

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