Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but
pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as
well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his
treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes
about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be
represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.
Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."
Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment
of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle
scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes
or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of
these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of
war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who
take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently
because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity
because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle
scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_
picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic
appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle
pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a
public that likes them.
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