page_title: Military art
section_title: Renaissance to Napoleonic Wars
hierarchical_section_title: Military art / History / Renaissance to Napoleonic Wars
context_page_description: 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 away from 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.
context_section_description: Italian Renaissance painting 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 (c. 1445) by Paolo Uccello, and the abortive Battle of Cascina (1504–06) by Michelangelo and Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci (1503–06), 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 (1528–9) 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 JMW Turner found when the "Sailor King" William IV of England 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 intere
caption: The Death of Major Peirson, 1784, by John Singleton Copley
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