The Artist and the Warrior: Military History through the Eyes of the Masters by Theodore K. Rabb (review)

This darkly beautiful book considers representations of wars and warriors, from Assyrian stone carvings to contemporary war films. Densely illustrated with roiling images of battle, the book narrates what Rabb identifies as a normatively bifurcated history of war in art: war shown as triumphant and heroic, war shown as shameful and tragic. Rabb’s historical survey encompasses multiple genres, including stone carvings, equestrian statues, tapestries, columns, arches, mosaics, paintings, maps, etchings, drawings, photographs, and motion pictures. His text successfully and masterfully navigates between this general survey of war art, finely detailed readings of individual pieces (Trajan’s Column, Velazquez’s The Surrender of Breda, Titian’s Lepanto, Goya’s The Third of May), and considerations of the relation of technology, art, and warfare (including the invention of the stirrup and of gunpowder).

Even with the intermittent focus on the shifting normative framework for artistic representations of war, some opportunities to make theoretical connections were lost. Reference, for example, to Norbert Elias’s foundational work in figurational sociology, his two-volume The Civilizing Process, could have helped Rabb to explain the social and cultural processes undergirding the change, which he identifies as crucial, from the presentation of war as heroic toward its rendering as a matter of horror and loss. Still, the book in any case opens opportunities for readers and viewers to consider sobering constants (the foregrounding in artworks of splayed and upended bodies, horses, gear, vehicles, and weapons), as well as uncanny resonances across time (Titian’s Lepanto positions the defeated Turkish enemy at the feet of Phillip II in a manner shockingly reminiscent of some photographic images from Abu Ghraib). Rabb’s extremely learned and sobering book reminds us of the significant role of art in preventing us from forgetting either the havoc or the heroism of war.