Pia Francesca Cuneo, ed. Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe.

Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xii + 266 pp. 34 b/w pls. index, bibl. $113. ISBN: 90-04-11588-9.

War is all hell and it has been for centuries, and there is no doubt that the "killing fields" of LaBiccocia, Pavia, Lutzen, Malplaquet--or Meggido or Stalingrad, for that matter--have been just as hellish, and as beautiful as the artistic endeavors--photographic (and now cinemagraphic) as well as the traditional means of oil and canvas, sculpture, and tapestry--that have long sought to capture the hellish, wonderful, enduring, alluring appeal of war. Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles attempts to explore and explain this phenomenon, focusing "on the main issue of exploring the relationship between art and warfare in the early modern period, and thus ultimately probing the relationship between art and history" (6). It fails.

The first point on which it fails is that it is a collection of essays dealing with a wide variety of subjects and largely intent on analyzing the specific work of art at hand, and is not really able to integrate them into the thesis which the stated purpose seems to outline. The second shortcoming of the book is often painfully highlighted when one considers the book's further elaboration o fits effort. "In looking at images of warfare and understanding how they function, the historian needs to know about the methods and techniques of warfare, and about the political constellations of the individual historic moment, but also about the role of the patron as well as the artist, of iconography, visual tradition and culture, of the image's medium, viewing context and intended audience" (7). No one can deny that all of the contributing scholars are exceptionally versed in everything after the "but." However, there are significant "gaffes" in some of the submissions that even mere "buffs" of the period would not make, and some contributors seem to be unclear on how warfare in early modern Europe worked. Finally it is troubling that of the editor and eight contributors, seven are professors of art history, none list any background in military history, and none of them have, in the words of "the Bard"--"trailed the puissant pike"--that is, experienced military service or, if they have, none thought it important enough to include in their abbreviated brief biographies in the book.

This leads us into one of the main problems of any work in this area. Warfare since the eighteenth century (when the combatants sought almost, as it were, to make war "incognito") has generally moved away from the endemic and systemic nature it had in the seventeenth century and before. Even the massive "total wars" of the twentieth century were more restrained than those of the early modern period, and at their worst represented relatively short, and localized, periods of "Hell" while in previous periods it was everywhere and at all times. Historians, insulated in academia in our modern period, are in a sense the most removed of an already quite removed civilization as far as military matters are concerned. Therefore, the question that keeps coming back to this reviewer is how can we assume to ourselves the conceit that we "really know" what is in the minds of our subjects so far removed in time and place from us, and we in time and place from both the "hell" and "beauty" of war. Rest assured, it is far more likely that any of the artists covered may actually have been in, or seen "their battle" or at least "a battle" and were, without doubt, "up-close and personal" viewers of war, and war's effects. All too often one gets the suspicion that the scholars' own twentieth-century mentalite intrudes and the view of public images published by the rulers as mere instruments of duplicity and chicanery of the powerful over the powerless has colored their interpretations of works of art produced in the past.

But having said that, it must be noted that the sum of the parts is often greater than the whole. None of the essays is deficient or lacking in its exposition of its own subject. All are masterful and well-done. One of the best was Andrew Morrall's "Soldiers and Gypsies: Outsiders and their Families in Early Sixteenth-Century German Art." Both in his skillful juxtaposing of the images of the gypsy and the gypsy's women, and the Landsknecht and Landsknecht's woman he shows how both communities, something of outcasts, nevertheless possessed an allure and a cachet that many at the time found appealing. Gypsy caravan or Landsknecht's camp, both were "themes" or fixtures in the popular imagination that saw in them a relief, even if only in fancy, from the intense social system and structures of the day. One dearly wishes Dr. Morall would pursue this line of inquiry further.

Also excellent is Julie Anne Plax's "Seventeenth-Century French Images of Warfare" because she is one of the only authors in the book who sought to portray war as a "group activity"--that is, war as a process rather than an event tied to an individual. As such she does excellent work in showing some part of the "awful majesty" of war and its allure to the individual as being part of a great effort, and as a participant in the great events of the state. Granted, few of the people who were at the Siege of Tournai ever saw Adam Frans Vander Meulen's work of that name, but many saw the prints and broadsheets made from the painting, and were struck by the grandeur and movement of the event.

Both Larry Silver's "Shining Armor: Emperor Maximilian, Chivalry, and War" and Pia F. Cuneo's "Images of Warfare as Political Legitimization: Jorg Breu The Elder's Rondels for Maximilian I's Hunting Lodge at Lermos" are made somewhat problematic, not by their scholarship of the subjects, which is masterful, but by the picaresque history of Maximilian, whose life, when juxtaposed with his efforts at self-glorification and legitimization, creates an almost "opera bouffe" satire. Maximilian was, on the whole, a magnificent failure, and one wonders how his contemporaries could really credit any of his attempts as more than pure fancy. This is a question of efficacy only, in that it is undoubtable that legitimization and self-glorification were the motives, but it is a moot point as to who believed them. The very nature of warfare being endemic and systemic would render the sort of "big lie" propaganda that works in the twentieth century, because of out distance from events, worthless in an age which could see "the chamois hunter's" Landsknechts fleeing down the road as fast as their pluderhosen-clad legs could carry them. Mr. Silver also has a tendency to overvalue the tournament in the Renaissance as a martial training ground rather than a mere "preening field" among a knightly aristocratic class whose battlefield utility had been reduced by both Swiss and Landsknechts to the status of mere ornamental gentlemen.

Guy Wilson's "Military Science, History and Art" is highly interesting as to the changing nature of the depiction of battle. Using a number of well-known subjects, such as the Battle of Anghiari, and Machiavelli's The Art of War and some lesserknown ones, he makes a good case for a transition from the "tournament" and "mounted" element of war toward a more scientific and "infantry" oriented combat. In a telling part he notes how the "picture" of Anghiari's individual combatants gives way to the "plan" of Machiavelli's formations. This is important for he here annotates one of the chief changes in war, namely that it was becoming a "work or art"--that is, "art" as in both "artifice" and "artificial"--a thing unto itself with rules that could be studied, recorded, and ordered.

The rest of the works deal less with armies or battles and more with individuals and the interpretations of the icons that bedeck our museums. These are all important, for as the events of the past recede from us in time and memory, these are all that we have to hang on to, to help us to understand those events, and they therefore need (and deserve!) all of the explanation, exploration, consideration, and recapitulation that we can summon. And it is with museums that we must end.

OTTO SCHMIDT

Independent Scholar