Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in 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.