The rapiers they use to fence with were different from today's foils! They were actual swords that I imagine would nick you good :-) I mostly liked the article because of the controversy over who cut off his ear lobe, I'd always thought it was his entire ear, not whether he was mentally ill or not. I think he was mentally ill too but didn't want to get into ear cutting in the title :-)

I learned a little about him when I was taking a nineteenth century European history class that started with us having to write a paper about Romanticism by picking an eighteenth/nineteenth century "artist" and a piece of their art and analyzing it as to how well/why it "fit" the Romantic Era. I chose music/Schubert and his "Unfinished" Symphony (I was curious why it was unfinished :-) but most of the other students did artists and several did Van Gogh so I read up on him some.