The art of war

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

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A BATTLE is a difficult subject for an artist.

Most of the greatest portrayals of warfare focus instead on a single incident that lends itself to powerful immediacy, such as the executions of the defeated in Francisco Goya's Third of May 1808, the aftermath of a mustard-gas attack in the First World War in John Singer Sargent's Gassed (1919) and, most famously of all, the slaughter of civilians in Pablo Picasso's Guernica. Battles pose a very different challenge. They usually have a vast cast. Each one is a narrative, so unless working to a formula such as the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story in a sequence of images, the artist must ideally choose a scene that conveys a battle’s ultimate significance, as well as providing a dynamic sense of combat. In addition, unless an artist is willing potentially to risk his life—as some were—most paintings have to be based on secondhand sources.

All these challenges must have been present in Paolo Uccello’s mind when he embarked on the most famous depiction of a battle in Italian Renaissance art. Fought over eight hours on June 1, 1432, the Battle of San Romano in the valley of the Arno was a victory for the Florentines over the combined forces of Lucca, Siena and Milan in a dispute over access to the port at Pisa.