Military art
Military art is art with a military subject matter, regardless of its style or medium. The battle scene is one of the oldest types of art in developed civilizations, as rulers have always been keen to celebrate their victories and intimidate potential opponents. The depiction of other aspects of warfare, especially the suffering of casualties and civilians, has taken much longer to develop. As well as portraits of military figures, depictions of anonymous soldiers on the battlefield have been very common; since the introduction of military uniforms such works often concentrate on showing the variety of these.
Naval scenes are very common, and battle scenes and "ship portraits" are mostly considered as a branch of marine art; the development of other large types of military equipment such as warplanes and tanks has led to new types of work portraying these, either in action or at rest. In 20th century wars official war artists were retained to depict the military in action; despite artists now being very close to the action the battle scene is mostly left to popular graphic media and the cinema. The term war art is sometimes used, mostly in relation to 20th century military art made during wartime.
History
Ancient world
Art depicting military themes has existed throughout history. The Battlefield Palette, a cosmetic palette from the Protodynastic Period of Egypt is incomplete, but shows prisoners being led away, and wild animals feasting on the dead. The Narmer Palette from the same period shows a military victory in a more symbolic style. The Stele of the Vultures, about 2,500 BC, is one of a number of Mesopotamian "victory stelae". Also around 2,500 BC, the earliest known depiction of a city being besieged is found in the tomb of Inti, an official from the 21st nome of Upper Egypt, who lived during the late Fifth Dynasty. The scene shows Egyptian soldiers scaling the walls of a near eastern fortress on ladders. Although the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC appears to have been inconclusive, reliefs erected by Ramesses II show him scattering his Hittite opponents with his chariot.Surviving Assyrian art mainly consists of large stone reliefs showing detailed scenes of either military campaigns or hunting; the Lachish reliefs are an example of the former. The ancient Greek Parthenon Marbles show lengthy parades of the city's volunteer cavalry force, and many Greek vases show scenes of combat. In Han dynasty China, a famous stone relief of c. 150–170 AD from the Wu family shrines shows a battle between cavalry forces in the Campaign against Dong Zhuo.
In Ancient Roman art the most elaborate Roman triumphal columns showed very long reliefs of military campaigns winding round the body of huge columns; among the most impressive are those of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The Alexander Mosaic is a large and dramatic battle scene showing Alexander the Great defeating Darius III of Persia; it is a floor mosaic excavated from Pompeii, probably copying a lost painting. Many Hellenistic and Roman sarcophagi showed crowded scenes of combat, sometimes mythological, and usually not relating to a particular battle; these were not necessarily used to bury people with military experience. Such scenes had a great influence on Renaissance battle scenes. By the Late Roman Empire the reverse of coins very often showed soldiers and carried an inscription praising 'our boys', no doubt in hope of delaying the next military revolt.
Medieval
Christian art produced for the church generally avoided battle scenes, although a rare Late Antique motif shows Christ dressed as a victorious emperor in general's dress, having conquered the devil, in Christ treading on the beasts and other iconographies. The violent tastes of the Anglo-Saxon elite managed to add the Harrowing of Hell, conceived as a raid on Satan's stronghold, led by Christ, to the standard group of scenes for a cycle on the Life of Christ. Soldier saints, shown in military dress, were extremely popular, as were images of the Archangel Michael stabbing Satan as a dragon with a cross with a spear-point at its base. Some illuminated manuscripts illustrated the many battles in the Old Testament.Secular works produced for secular patrons often show military themes, for example in illuminated manuscript copies of histories like the 15th century Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse, where most of the 112 miniatures show military scenes. The Siege of the Castle of Love, often found on Gothic ivory mirror-cases, showed knights attacking a castle defended by ladies, a metaphor from the literature of courtly love. The 11th century Bayeux Tapestry is a linear panoramic narrative of the events surrounding the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the only surviving example of a type of embroidered hanging with which rich Anglo-Saxons used to decorate their homes. In Islamic art the battle scene, often from a fictional work of epic poetry, was a frequent subject in Persian miniatures, and the high viewpoint they adopted made the scenes more easily comprehensible than many Western images.
Renaissance to Napoleonic Wars
saw a great increase in military art by the leading artists, battle paintings often featuring near-contemporary scenes such as the huge set of three canvases of The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, and the abortive Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo and Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci, which were intended to be placed opposite each other in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, but neither of which were completed. For Renaissance artists with their new skills in depicting the human figure, battle scenes allowed them to demonstrate all their skills in depicting complicated poses; Michelangelo choose a moment when a group of soldiers was surprised bathing, and almost all the figures are nude. Leonardo's battle was a cavalry one, the central section of which was very widely seen before being destroyed, and hugely influential: it "exerted a fundamental change on the whole idea of battle painting, an influence that lasted through the Late Renaissance and the Baroque up until the heroic machines of the Napoleonic painters and even the battle compositions of Delacroix", according to the art historian Frederick Hartt.All of these depicted frankly minor actions where Florence had defeated neighbouring cities, but important battles from distant history were equally popular. Andrea Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar shows the Roman triumphal parade of Julius Caesar, though concentrating on the booty rather than the army following it; the print series Triumphs of Maximilian shows both, leading up to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor riding on a huge carriage. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge by Giulio Romano brought a huge and "seminal" battle scene into the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Palace. The unusual The Battle of Alexander at Issus by Albrecht Altdorfer managed to make one of the most highly regarded Renaissance battle scenes, despite, or perhaps because of, having a vertical format, which was dictated by the planned setting; it was commissioned as one of a set of eight battle paintings by various artists. "It was the most detailed and panoramic battle picture of its day", and its aerial viewpoint was to be very widely followed over the next centuries, though rarely to such dramatic effect.
Especially in Northern Europe, small groups of soldiers became a popular subject for paintings and especially prints by many artists, including Urs Graf, who is unusual in that he was a professional Swiss mercenary for many years. These works began to present a less heroic view of soldiers, who often represented a considerable threat to civilian populations even in peacetime, though the extravagant costumes of the Landsknecht are often treated as glamorous. For Peter Paret, from the Renaissance "the glorification of the temporal leader and of his political system – which had of course also been present in medieval art – replaces the Christian faith as a determining interpretive force" in military art.
Naval painting became conventionalized in 17th century Dutch Golden Age painting, and from then on artists tended to specialize in it or not attempt it; apart from anything else "Marine artists have always dealt with a particularly demanding class of patron", as J. M. W. Turner found when the "Sailor King" William IV of the United Kingdom rejected his version of The Battle of Trafalgar because of inaccuracy. Hendrick Vroom was the earliest real specialist, followed by the father and son team of Willem van de Velde, who emigrated to London in 1673, and effectively founded the English tradition of naval painting, "producing a stunning visual record of the Anglo-Dutch naval wars, which set the conventions of maritime battle painting for the next 150 years". Vroom had also worked for English patrons, designing a large set of tapestries of the defeat of the Spanish Armada which was destroyed when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in 1834.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw depictions of battles mostly adopting a bird's eye view, as though from a hill nearby; this made them less interesting to paint, and the major artists now tended to avoid them. A very different view of warfare is seen in Les Grandes Misères de la guerre, a set of twelve etchings produced by Jacques Callot during the Thirty Years War which follows a group of soldiers ravaging the countryside before eventually being rounded up by their own side and executed. Also in the first half of the 17th century, a branch of genre painting in Dutch Golden Age painting specialized in guardroom scenes of rather disorderly soldiers, not often in battle, but ransacking farmhouses or sitting around in a camp guardroom. The paintings of Salvator Rosa, essentially landscapes, often showed groups variously described as bandits or soldiers lurking in the countryside of Southern Italy. The Surrender of Breda by Velázquez shows a crowded scene as the two sides meet peacefully to surrender the town; a theme more often copied in naval painting than land-based military art.
File:John Singleton Copley 001.jpg|thumb|left|The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781, 1784, by John Singleton Copley
From at least the late 15th century, sets of tapestries became the grandest medium for "official military art"; the Portuguese Pastrana Tapestries were an early example. A set produced for the Duke of Marlborough showing his victories was varied for different clients, and even sold to one of his opponents, Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, after reworking the general's faces and other details.
In the mid-18th century, a number of artists, especially in Britain, sought to revive military art with large works centered on a heroic incident that would once again bring the genre to the fore in history painting, as it had been in the Renaissance. The standard contemporary battle scene tended to be grouped in the lowly category of topographical painting, covering maps and views of country houses. The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West, The Death of Captain James Cook by Johann Zoffany, The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 and The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley are leading examples of the new type, which ignored complaints about the unsuitability of modern dress for heroic subjects. However, such works had more immediate influence in France than in Britain.
File:An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging.jpg|thumb|upright|The Charging Chasseur, 1812 by Théodore Géricault.
In the Napoleonic era, France added Romanticism to its style and began to portray individual soldiers with more character. Battle paintings were increasingly produced for large public buildings, and grew larger than ever before. Baron Gros painted mostly glorifications of Napoleon and his victories, but his 1808 painting of the Battle of Eylau does not neglect the suffering of the dead and wounded on the frozen battlefield. In contrast, Goya's large paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, perhaps consciously conceived as a riposte to Gros, and his related series of 82 etchings, The Disasters of War, emphasized the brutality of the French forces during the Peninsular War in Spain. British depictions of the Napoleonic Wars continued the late 18th century patterns, often on a larger scale, with the death of Admiral Horatio Nelson quickly producing large works by Arthur William Devis and West. J. M. W. Turner was among the artists who produced scenes of Nelson's victories, with The Battle of Trafalgar. The British Institution ran competitions for sketches of art commemorating British victories, the winning entries being then commissioned.
In this period the uniform print, concentrating on a detailed depiction of the uniform of one or more standing figures, typically hand-coloured, also became very popular across Europe. Like other prints these were typically published in book form, but also sold individually. In Britain the 87 prints of The Loyal Volunteers of London by Thomas Rowlandson, published by Rudolph Ackermann, mark the start of the classic period. Though Rowlandson usually satirized his subjects to some degree, here the soldiers were "represented as they, and particularly their colonels who paid for their uniforms, preferred to see themselves", which remained the usual depiction in such prints. A set of prints by Carle Vernet of the splendid uniforms of La Grande Armée de 1812 showed most foot-soldiers in pairs in camp, in a variety of relaxed poses that showed one from the front and the other from behind. A rare oil painting by a leading artist that treats soldiers in the spirit of the uniform print is Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons painted in 1793 by George Stubbs for their Colonel in Chief, the future George IV of the United Kingdom. Other paintings of single soldiers were more dramatic, like Théodore Géricault's The Charging Chasseur.