Customer Reviews

Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (History of Warfare, V. 9)

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I ordered this book from the library without knowing anything other than the title or publisher, but the series it is from is usually very interesting.

The contents are -

Part I - The Impact of War on Art

Introduction (quoted above) - Pia F. Cuneo - 10pp

Military Science, History and Art - Guy Wilson - 22pp

Warfare and Artistic Production in the German Lands during the Thirty Years' War - Sigrun Haude - 25pp

Part II - Images of War: Supporting Dominant Ideologies

Shining Armor [sic]: Emperor Maxililian, Chivalry, and War - Larry Silver - 26pp

Images of Warfare as Political legitimization: Jorg breu the Elder's Rondels for Maximilian I's Hunting Lodge atLermos (ca.1516) - Pia F. Cuneo - 20pp

Gorgio Vasari's and Niccolo Machiavelli's Medicean Emblems of War and Peace in the Portrait of Duke Alessandro de Medici - Liana De Girolami Cheney - 24pp

Seventeenth-Century French Images of Warfare - Julie Anne Plax - 24pp

Part III - Images of War: Constructing Alternative Identities

Soldiers and Gypsies: Outsiders and their Families in Early Sixteenth Century German Art - Andrew Morrall - 22pp

Remembering Amalek and Nebuchadnezzar: Biblical Warfareand Symbolic Violence in two images in Italian renaissance Yiddish Books of Customs - Diane Wolfthal - 32pp

Battling Fortune in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Cellini and the changing faces of Fortuna - Gwendolyn Trottein - 22pp

There are 24 pages of illustrations.

This series is named a "History of Warfare", not a History of Art and History. So, if you are primarily interested in warfare, then leave now.

The editor in her introduction tells us that the book presents us with "a number of studies in which the relationship between image and history, between art and warfare, is constantly renegotiated on a case by case basis. This enterprise is particularly compelling in the case of warfare imagery because it is the very function of such imagery visually and actively to solicit the viewer's response in terms of lookin at, and thus knowing about, a particular and specific past event. These images then do make a definite and even quite self-conscious reference to the past, but it is our job as historians to make critical sense of those references, how they function and whose interests they serve. Such a critical view precludes any simplistic notions about the art of warfare as merely illustrative - of the course of history, the display of art, or the performance of the historian.

The essays in this volume cover a broad range of materials, considering different media, audiences, chronologies, modes of production, and geographical locations, while employing various historical methodologies. Indeed the strength of this volume lies in its diversity. Yet it remainsfocused on the main issue of exploring the relationship between art and warfare in the early modern period, and thus ultimately of probing the relationship between art and history. What emerges from these studies is an undrstanding of the richly complex nature of this relationship. Instead of art passively relecting historical realities, or remaining grandly aloof from politics, these studies reveal how the realities of battle and politics, as well as those of the amking and viewing of art, mutually contaminate and influence one another in differing and complicated ways in each individual instance. 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 wellas the artist, of iconography, visual tradition and culture, of the image's medium, viewing context and intended audience. Diverse though they are, the essays in this volume all demonstrate the cognitive rewards of blending historical and art historical methodologies in investigating materials that are both assumed and allowed to be complicated and complex".