![]() ![]() The painting of battles now had a dual objective: to fix an embellished recollection of a glorious moment in the collective memory and to construct a national epic around a few key figures. However, in parallel, the tone of artworks became increasingly political and painting was placed at the service of the national epic and of ideology. Marked by the wars of the French Revolution, the campaigns of Napoleon and the Crimean War, the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century would maintain a strong interest in the painting of battles, which would take on a new dimension: artworks were unanimous in showing, on canvas, the increasingly destructive power of firearms. Other, later works would also denounce the burning, sacking and bombardment of towns and villages. ![]() PAINTINGS OF MEDIEVAL BATTLEFIELDS SERIESMeanwhile, a series of etchings by Jacques Callot entitled The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1633), was a means of the artist denouncing the ravages of the Thirty Years War in his native Lorraine. In his Massacre of the Innocents, Brueghel the Elder transposed this biblical theme onto a Flemish village in order to condemn the cruelty of the Spanish occupation and the barbarous acts perpetrated by the marauding soldiers. Painting to denounce the misdeeds of war: an increasingly politically committed art Others, on the initiative of the artists themselves, began to depict the suffering of civilians in order to denounce it more effectively. ![]() Some works depicted more intimate, individual scenes, focussing on the cruel fate of prisoners condemned to solitude and oblivion. While battles dominated the pictorial production of the early modern period, other themes were also present. But the battle also includes nameless figures who pay him a heavy tribute: death is omnipresent in the imagination of war. These paintings, like so many other commissioned works, often depicted a great commander or ruler: Charles Le Brun, for instance, in his picture Louis XIV on Campaign, chose to represent the king and his army in ancient dress to make the monarch a hero worthy of antiquity. Through compositions in which cavalry and infantry, weapons and horses clashed with extreme violence, they tried to lay down on canvas the intensity and movement of the assaults. ![]() Most artists, however, sought to recount the battle through the use of multiple images in chronological order, in paintings which echoed each other in the form of diptychs, triptychs or entire cycles: these include Bernard Van Orley’s work The Battle of Pavia (1530) and Jan Vermeyen’s depictions of The Conquest of Tunis by the Army of Charles V (1554). Some artists opted for a panoramic view of a battle (such as Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529), while others preferred to focus on a specific episode within its course (such as Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano: The Counter-Attack of Micheletto da Cotignola, 1435). Whether drawing inspiration from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Gospel (as in the case of Raphael, Tiepolo and Rubens) or from more contemporary conflicts (as in the cases of Tintoretto, with his Victory of the Venetians over the Hungarians and the Conquest of Zadar, and Leonardo da Vinci among others), the Grand Masters of the Early Modern period sought to paint war by painting the battle, in order better to tell its story. Widely present in Greco-Roman art in the form of reliefs or frescos, but abandoned during the Middle Ages in favour of less secular subjects, war returned in force to European art during the Renaissance, particularly in painting. ![]()
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