Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in the Early Modern Europe
Warfare, and the circumstances surrounding it, have often provided
important impulses for cultural production. This book explores the
relationship between warfare and image-making in the early modern
period. Rather than dealing with images simply as reproductions of
actual events, the volume demonstrates complex processes by which
political, national and social identities are negotiated and
fashioned in warfare imagery.
The book analyses three main issues: the impact of war on art, the
ways in which warfare imagery supports dominant ideologies, and the
manner in which such imagery also constructs alternative
identities. The essays offer a broad range of methodologies while
dealing with a wide array of
chronological, geographical and artistic materials. Historians and
art historians will find this volume particularly useful in its
nuanced examination of the relationship between art and history.
"All of the case studies are interesting and are based on meticulous research in primary sources. This reviewer enjoyed the volume (not least because it is itself a beautiful artifact), learned much from it, and, like the editor, hopes it will "inspire further forays into this intriguing field" (11) such forays are essential because of this volume's limitations. It works well as a detailed and richly textured study of cultural production in the sixteenth century and as an exploration of the relationship between art and history." D. J. B. Trim, Newbold College, Bracknell, "Sixteenth Century Journal"
Pia F. Cuneo, Ph.D. (1991) in Art History, Northwestern University. Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. She has published extensively on early modern German art including Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany (Brill, 1998).
