Search

IT was a perfectly peaceful late summer evening in downtown Manhattan, but a few steps off the sidewalk on Broome Street, two swordsmen tilted heavy Spanish rapiers at each other. Each keenly focused on the other's three-foot-long steel blade. After a circular, predatory dance, they clashed, laying into each other with a great clanking as furious overhead chops led to slices toward the torso. This is the scene three nights each week in a modest, first-floor dance rehearsal studio where the Martinez Academy of Arms holds group classes for about two dozen regular students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An 18th-century Italian terra-cotta lion as big as the ones guarding the New York Public Library. An Elizabethan rapier still sharp enough for battle. A bronze rhinoceros bearing a celestial sphere clock from 1800. A 2000 B.C. Bactrian stone idol. An 18th-century Italian portrait of the French painter Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun in pietre dure, copied from her self-portrait at the Uffizi Gallery. An intense blue Tiffany dragonfly lamp. A bronze bull that Elaine de Kooning sculptured in 1972. These are a few of the showstoppers at the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which continues through Thursday. The quality is as high as ever and the fair has never shown a wider range of works. (Two-thirds of the 61 dealers are not American.) Like the Winter Antiques Show, this fair encourages dealers to save prized pieces for months, to reveal them here first. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]