![]() ![]() 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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