Warfare and Art

Art historians know how to trace forms and genres, showing the way images and objects tell the story or dramatize a message, but often enough they neglect broader contexts. Theodore K. Rabb, recently retired from the department of history at Princeton, is an art historian who describes works of art in historical contexts in such a way that a reader can understand the circumstances of their creation as well as appreciate the timelessness that used to be called beauty. This is not a coffee-table book, for all its excellent reproductions (almost one hundred color plates); and, although explanations and demonstrations are carefully set forth, there is nothing of the textbook about The Artist and the Warrior. Professor Rabb’s genial style is never condescending—and there’s not a word of jargon in the book.

The story—from the Assyrians to modern film—is illuminated by themes that are followed down the ages. These themes appear as oppositional pairs: tradition and transformation, honor and brutality, glory and pity, patronage and the independence of artists. The persistence of the idea of the heroic warrior is demonstrated by thorough descriptions of gestures and forms. For instance the bronze sculpture of Marcus Aurelius on horseback became the model for representing the conquering hero. Most bronze works were melted down during the Middle Ages, but this one escaped, Rabb tells us in a fascinating aside, because it was thought to be of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. From the time Michelangelo placed him at the focal point of the Campidoglio, the mounted Marcus Aurelius became the prototype for equestrian statues such as Donatello’s Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio’s Colleoni in Venice. Rabb surprises us with another example of the survival of this form: Velásquez paints the son of the Spanish king, Baltasar Carlos, a youngster about eight years old, galloping on his energetic pony, a child commander with a baton in his right hand.

The last masterpiece in this genre is David’s huge painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps over the Great Bernard Pass. The horse rears, nostrils aflare; the heroic warrior, in dress uniform, looks toward us as soldiers in the background push a cannon up the steep grade. Here, and throughout this wonderful book, Rabb notes details from the studio—Napoleon’s valet modeled the horseman since the great commander refused to pose—and invites us to consider in plate after plate the significance of transformations of traditional representations.

Another persistent Roman model has been the Augustus of Prima Porta, a marble copy of the bronze original. The emperor wears body armor, raises his right arm in a gesture (ad locutio) familiar to his contemporaries as a sign of authority and to us, in a variant form, as the fascist salute. Columns and arches are also discussed in this chapter.

There is a chapter on representations of warfare in feudal Japan, another on a medieval scroll and the Bayeux tapestry depicting warriors in different styles of both armor and military tactics. Every chapter offers the double perspective provided by the history of art and the history of warfare. The accounts are the more provocative, I have found, when the works of art are familiar. Perhaps readers for whom the history of warfare is primary would have the opposite response, with paintings and sculpture illuminating the art of war.

The most important transformation of traditional warfare came with gunpowder in the late fourteenth century, but Rabb explains that because the technology of metalwork was not very advanced, many decades passed before rifles and cannon could be so manufactured that they could be aimed and controlled. Smoke and noise meant that these weapons were terrifying, “but for more than a century they made neither the knight nor the archer obsolete.”

In time, however, gunpowder meant the end of hand-to-hand combat because the enemy could be targeted at a distance. The casualties were now far, far greater with the result that the glorification of...