Inventing the battlefield
Paintings of battles often tell us more about the political backdrop than about military successes or acts of war. What they actually reveal are changing understandings of history.
Barbara Basting
Barbara Basting worked as a cultural editor and currently heads the visual arts division in the City of Zurich’s Culture Department.
From a cultural history perspective, even artistically obsolete battle paintings can be interesting because they tell us about changing views of history. They also teach us about the rules governing the production of historical fiction and visual propaganda. We always need to consider what story is being presented, from whose perspective and for what purpose. Apparently dusty and boring historical scenes often tell us more than you might think at first glance.
Let us take the example of a well-known and popular depiction of the Battle of Sempach of 1386, painted in the 19th century by Zurich artist Ludwig Vogel (1788–1879) and entitled The Confederates with Winkelried’s Corpse. The painting played an important part in making the Battle of Sempach and Winkelried himself into national legends. Modern insights would suggest that this is in fact a historical misrepresentation, like the story of William Tell.
Nowadays, Vogel’s work is only featured in special exhibitions, not least due to its poor artistic quality. In the 19th century, however, it was presented at national exhibitions, discussed, and much replicated and adapted by the artist and his contemporaries.
This was possible because Vogel provided the emerging nation of Switzerland with a role model at just the right time in the shape of Winkelried – the martyr who sacrificed his life for the cause. Historical paintings are often about wish fulfilment.
Aesthetically speaking, Vogel was guided by the Nazarenes’ late Romantic, idealised conception of history. The group of artists to which he belonged during his formative years in Vienna and Rome sought to tease out role models from history to provide guidance in the present. Every effort was made to underscore the authenticity and importance of the selected motifs. For example, Ludwig Vogel would do this by studying historical chronicles. As a basis for his works he would go to armouries and sketch pieces of armour, as shown by his extensive estate at the Swiss National Museum.
However, the artificiality of the scene immediately jumps out at us, at least to modern-day sensibilities. There is not even a hint of visual humour to offset the exaggerated pathos. The theatrical poses of Vogel’s figures appear excessive and contrived. Vogel’s attention to detail is a double-edged sword. He uses it to highlight the general factual accuracy and authenticity of the depicted history, but paradoxically, his hyper-perfection achieves the exact opposite effect. The peacock-crested helmets of the fallen Habsburg soldiers, the polished halberds and the helmets and armour all look like props straight out of a museum display cabinet. Also, the carefully contrasting colours of the fighters’ suspiciously spotless tunics – a nod to the Nazarenes’ role model, Raphael – are too calculated. The whole scene is so picture-perfect and features so many Swiss crosses, it is more reminiscent of a fashion shoot than a bloody battlefield.
Vogel also struggles with anatomy: his Winkelried looks like a huge sleeping baby who is cuddling up to a teddy bear rather than enemy spears. Fittingly, the fallen fighters to the left and right on the edge of the scene look like carelessly discarded dolls.
Above all, though, the painter diverts attention away from the present with his idealistically distorted and kitschy historical collage. Let us compare it with a work by Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), which was painted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and captures wartime atrocities.
What would Vogel’s Winkelried have looked like if, as a young painter, he hadn’t looked towards Rome to re-invent the Middle Ages with his Nazarene friends, but looked to Paris instead? The French capital was an artistic hive of activity in the years after the Revolution. One of the reasons for this was that Napoleon used art for propaganda purposes far more confidently and purposefully than the Swiss, who were still grappling with their identity.
For example, in 1807, Napoleon launched a competition for a depiction of the battle in the Prussian town of Eylau. The winning entry was the monumental painting Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau (1808) by Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835). The painting still hangs in the Louvre in the wing where the major Academy exhibitions were traditionally held, but is overshadowed by its famous neighbours, in particular Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Gros’ successful re-writing of history hinged on not showing any injured French soldiers. It was about depicting Napoleon as a cross between the ‘gentle emperor’ from Antiquity and the stereotyped figure of a blessing Christ who even takes care of wounded enemies (in stark contradiction to witness accounts). This implies that this gracious ruler will be even more concerned about his own soldiers.
The egomaniac Napoleon liked Gros’ painting. He obviously overlooked the injured men and bodies in the foreground, and in particular the soldier bleeding to death in the bottom right, whose unsettling gaze rests on us and makes Napoleon’s rather other-worldly presence fade further into the background.
It is not only these sorts of visual cues that make Gros’ painting appear somewhat more authentic than Vogel’s tableau. The tonal colour palette, not to mention the snow-covered Russian victims dying in agony in the foreground, give a sense of the real debacle on the battlefield. Above all, these contradictions discreetly undermine the propaganda purpose of the painting. Attentive contemporaries noticed this straight away. However, such elements reveal that Gros was not entirely at ease in his role as celebrated painter.
The progressive unease with the nationalistic genre of battle painting became even more striking in the 19th century in the work of Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891). The French painter, who was popular with the bourgeoisie, painted one of his most famous works between 1861 and 1875, which is now also in storage: 1807, Friedland.
Even his contemporaries were annoyed by the excessive mimicry, which – as opposed to Vogel – was associated with a complete indifference to the scene being depicted. Emile Zola even derided Meissonier as the “official painter of Lilliput”. Considering the momentousness of the Napoleonic wars to European history, these details were just pointless embellishment, even at the time. Geimer calls them “traces with no particular message” that add nothing to the narrative, and are just dull and boring. Not necessarily what you expect from a battle scene.
From a media history perspective, however, Meissonier’s work is noteworthy because he took the aesthetic principle from the newly-emerging medium of photography, meant to objectively register and document, and applied the camera’s view to painting.
When the contemporary art critic Jules Claretie noted in 1873 that official battle painting was dead, he was right. It was replaced on the one hand by depictions that pushed the illusionist staging favoured by Vogel and Meissonier to the limits in the form of panoramas. They sought to place the onlooker at the heart of the action, like people can experience today in the Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne.
The fact that hyper-realistic forms of representation such as panoramas and photography have also been used to magnificent effect for reproductions, propaganda purposes, falsifications and all types of constructions of history, is another story. Vogel was definitely ahead of his time here, too, as Heinrich Thommen argued in the detailed study on Vogel’s work. Not long before he died, Vogel allowed Zurich photographer Johannes Ganz to photograph a series of his compositions, including a later version of his Winkelried from 1856, for a publication.
