Art of War. Sun Tzu

were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were fighting for our lives as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.”

(Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard)

      For centuries, battles were just one of the many motives the multi-faceted artist chose to depict. His motivation was usually of a purely aesthetic nature or on occasion, financial when he was commissioned to create such a painting. This started to change around the time of the American Revolution, when artists such as John Trumbull or Emanuel Leutze (painter of the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware; situated in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), started to focus more on or even specialise in war-related art. This is not surprising, since this development can be retraced in the world of art in general. While there have always been outstanding artists that worked in multiple fields and never settled on one subject, a certain trend started to evolve roughly after the Renaissance. Artists chose one thematic field which they adhered to for the majority of their creative life. In war-related art this development continued as such. Apart from the “civilian” artists that chose to make the wars of their country the subject of their art, even governments started to appoint official war artists, who partly served in the army themselves, and commissioned them to document conflicts. From there it was only a short step to armies developing specific art programmes and the “embedded artist” – an artist-soldier, whose impressions of war and conflict were at the same time absolutely subjective but also unadulterated. In the same way, the function of the war photographer rose to prominence. It is in this context that the term “documentary” can truly be applied to war-related art. Not that the impressions captured by war artists and photographers are beyond bias or distortion, but even if they just chronicle one person’s subjective war experience, they already transcend centuries of war paintings in terms of realistic, documentary quality. However, this truthfulness heralded at the same time the end of war art in its then current form. Artists who fought in World War I did not come back with impressions of noble warriors assaulting enemy positions, recklessly brave cavalry charges or cunning manoeuvres. Instead they showed the horror of losing friends to gas attacks or being crushed by tanks and the gruelling experience of trench warfare, being under constant artillery fire. In a way, this World War brought about the end of glorification of war in art.

      The Art of Modern Warfare

      Nevertheless, war painting has not completely ceased to exist, although today people trust photos for documentation, glorification is neither presentable nor feasible and criticism is the main purpose of war-related art. Embedded artists still exist and continue to share their war experience artistically with those who are willing to view and listen. The “art of war” has changed as well. First the Cold War in the second half of the 20th century and then the asymmetrical War on Terror in the early 21th century have further twisted the face of conflict – although the motives for war have stayed largely the same: ethnic hatred, economic interests, intervention and misguided religious fervour. Technological advances have rendered much of what was previously true in warfare null and void. What then, remains true from the original Art of War? This: “[War] is a matter of life and death […]”

      Chronology

      Amazonomachy, fragment of a floor-mosaic in Daphne (a suburb of ancient Antioch), 2nd half of the 4th century BCE.

      Marble and limestone, 154 × 384 cm.

      Musée du Louvre, Paris.

      Photographer: Wikimedia Commons user Clio20.

      Mythological Battles

      Amazonomachy, detail of a red-figure vase that is attributed to the Eritrea Painter, c. 420 BCE.

      Terracotta, 20.5 × 49.5 cm.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

      Photographer: Marie-Lan Nguyen.

      The Trojan War

      (c. 1194–1184 BCE)

      Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans […]

(Iliad, Book I)

      Thus endeth the Trojan War; together with its sequel, the dispersion of the heroes, victors as well as vanquished. The account here given of it has been unavoidably brief and imperfect; for in a work intended to follow consecutively the real history of the Greeks. No greater space can be allotted even to the most splendid gem of their legendary period. Indeed, although it would be easy to fill a large volume with the separate incidents which have been introduced into the “Trojan cycle,” the misfortune is that they are for the most part so contradictory as to exclude all possibility of weaving them into one connected narrative. No one who has not studied the original documents can imagine the extent to which this discrepancy proceeds; it covers almost every portion and fragment of the tale. But though much may have been thus omitted of what the reader might expect to find in an account of the Trojan war, its genuine character has been studiously preserved, without either exaggeration or abatement. The real Trojan war is that which was recounted by Homer and the old epic poets, and continued by all the lyric and tragic composers. They preserved its well-defined object, at once righteous and romantic, the recovery of the daughter of Zeus and sister of the Dioskuri – its mixed agencies, divine, heroic and human. The enterprise was one comprehending all the members of the Hellenic body, of which each individually might be proud, and in which, nevertheless, those feelings of jealous and narrow patriotism, so lamentably prevalent in many of the towns, were as much as possible excluded. It supplied them with a grand and inexhaustible object of common sympathy, common faith, and common admiration; and when occasions arose for bringing together a Pan-Hellenic force against the barbarians, the precedent of the Homeric expedition was one upon which the elevated minds of Greece could dwell with the certainty of rousing an unanimous impulse.

      Of such events the genuine Trojan war of the old epic was for the most part composed. Though literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend and nothing more. If we are asked whether it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth, whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Eos, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war; if we are asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records indeed, the Homeric epic in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity would probably never have come into existence. Whoever therefore ventures to dissect Homer, Arktinus and Lesches, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions.

(adapted from: History of Greece by G. Grote)

      The Fall of Troy, detail of an Attic red-figure vase from the Brygos Painter, c. 420 BCE.

      Terracotta, 13.5 × 42 × 33.2 cm.

      Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photographer: Marie-Lan Nguyen.

      Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Battle of the Amazons, c. 1598–1600.

      Oil on panel, 37 × 48 cm.

      Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten, Schloss Sanssouci Bildergalerie, Potsdam.

      Battle of the Amazons

      The