D’Aleccio’s fortifications : faithful representation or artistic imagination?

Abstract

The pre-nineteenth century chroniclers and war artists had only their eyes and brushes and pens to capture, record and convey the details and narrative of battle. The skills required to portray the complexities and pictorial challenges of the battlefield – be it in the form of Egyptian tomb paintings, Sumerian steles, Assyrian bas reliefs, Greek temple paintings, Roman mosaics, or the tapestries, frescoes, and oil paintings of the Renaissance and later artistic periods – placed special demands on an artist’s abilities and ingenuity that were not exerted by other pictorial subject matters; difficulties which increased considerably with the changing nature and growing scale of competing armies and the new technologies of warfare along the centuries. As the small scale wars of antiquity, fought at close quarters with swords, lances, and cavalry charges gave way to gunpowder weaponry and large professional standing armies, the scale of the battlefield expanded and the emphasis shifted from the heroic deeds of elite warriors to the mass formation of huge disciplined bodies of men fighting as automata in a large war machine. The introduction of firearms, and the resultant ‘exchange of musketry volleys and artillery across open country’ increased not only the distance between the belligerents but also, as a result, the compositional difficulties for the artists in their attempts to capture the military action on paper or canvas. By the mid-sixteenth century, artists in Italy had developed an approach to the portrayal of battle scenes which ‘elevated painterly qualities over narratives that simply described specific historical moments’ in the fighting, inspired by the northern artists like the German painter Albrecht Altdorfer and his The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) who first experimented with this technique. Termed as the ‘battles without heroes’, these compositions were intended to capture the reality of fighting as well as the geography of the battlefield. This descriptive form of depiction eventually led to a formal convention described as the ‘mapping of battle’ before spilling over into the more ‘naturalistic’ representations of battles found in the seventeenth-century paintings of Adam Francois Van der Meulen and other painters. 4 Among the formal devices that became the staple convention in the depiction of such scenes was the bird’s eye view. This form of representation made the viewer an ‘omniscient observer of the event’ and allowed for the portrayal of accurate panoramas of the battlefields.