From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672.

David Kunzle. From Criminal To Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672.

History of Warfare 10. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xxxii + 662 pp. index. illus. bibl. $95. ISBN: 90-04-12369-5.

Johan Huizinga famously declared in his "Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century" that "few of our important paintings portray feats of arms on land." Were that true, then this massive book could never have been written. But David Kunzle, a UCLA professor noted for earlier writings about art and social criticism, studies both of the early history of the "comic book" (1973) and murals of Nicaragua (1995), has written an impassioned study of one of the most martial epochs of European history, when the Dutch Republic was forged in the crucible of its own Dutch Revolt, amid the ongoing agonies of the Thirty Years' War, and mired in its own colonialist destiny with further wars with both England and France.

Led by John Hale and Geoffrey Parker, historians have been teaching art historians how to see war for a couple of decades, though most art-historical studies have tended to focus more on earlier German or Italian imagery. It should also be said that Kunzle's imagery includes numerous images of biblical or mythological violence, such as the Massacre of the Innocents or the Rape of the Sabine Women, in addition to direct depictions of professional soldiers in action, so it considers the cultural valence of the soldier as much as any documentary or expressly contemporary valuation. As one might expect from his previous works, Kunzle's interpretations are personal as well as polemical, and in the preface he rails against "a worrying tendency which jibes with what may be a resurgent conservatism in art history generally ... to strip art of its political meaning" (xxvii). He frankly admits to projecting backwards modern, pacifist sensibilities. In our current era of an imperial, war-oriented presidency (the Iraq War has just begun as this review is being penned), perhaps this engagement is uniquely appropriate, but some readers will inevitably balk at the frankness of Kunzle's first-person responses to imagery of war and violence.

Published in Brill's History of Warfare series, this large and expensive book is lavishly produced and studded with illustrations ranging from the fourteenth through the main moment of the seventeenth century. The full span of "Netherlandish" regions is included, both Flanders and Holland, and graphic works, including siege maps (chap. 14) loom fully as large as painted ones. While one can regret the basic absence here of pertinent connections to Italian and German (21-24) sixteenth-century war imagery, best sketched by Hale, Kunzle's span of the Netherlandish visual culture of soldiers and violence is replete (the more so with all of the included religious images).

Throughout his text Kunzle fashions a consistent argument: that most of these pictures were made as protest against warfare. He sometimes caricatures those who hold opposing views (especially in his introduction) in the interest of advancing his own, and he castigates Hale for "reading the work as the patron wished it to be read, excluding a level of subversion surely intended by the artist to be recognized as such" (4). These are dangerous waters, and indeed there is scholarly merit in precisely such a reading, though one can equally cite situations where an artist (such as the Jorg Breu monograph by Pia Cuneo, also published by Brill) simultaneously complies with the decorum of a patronage and viewing situation while also subverting the surface assignment in subtle fashion. This is not a book for subtleties, however, but for polemics--ascribed to the artists by a polemical author. Indeed, it is almost an axiom here that any depiction of violence, even if in a theme from religion or mythology, is ipso facto relevant as a veiled critique of violence itself. While I do not wish to posit the opposite argument, it certainly would be a worthy hypothesis to entertain that our modern sensibilities have become the opposite of those of the sixteenth century, where public torture and societal violence could at the very least be tolerated in official ideology (see the recent study, also investigating art and religion in terms of violence, by Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel [1998] subtitled "Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe").

None of this vitiates this instructive and expansive compilation of imagery by Kunzle. Indeed, some parts of it have been advanced before by other scholars, chiefly the theme of "Peasants' Distress" in a notable dissertation by Jane Fishman, as well as a variety of studies of the Dutch representation of Spanish atrocities during their revolt. Some portions offer powerful and original or richer readings, e.g. Heemskerck as pacifist (chap. 7), Haarlem art of the late sixteenth century (chap. 9), and renewed attention to martial themes by such artists as Vrancx and Wouwermans (chap. 11). It is not a surprise to learn that guardroom pictures of soldiers (chap. 12) draw upon a full century of unsavory depictions of the infantry at leisure, especially in Germany, not adduced. But the categorical distinction in Kunzle's title, "Criminal to Courtier," itself does violence to the complex and shifting (see Rubens, chap. 13), perhaps also frequently ambivalent, depiction of war and violence in Netherlandish art and culture during the long seventeenth century.

LARRY SILVER

University of Pennsylvania