Crafts: Lethal Masterpieces

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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 Noël 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.