Peace is the mother of the arts; war is their worst enemy. So speaks the voice of popular wisdom, and all the poets. But must we repeat it blindly? It is always dangerous to accept ready-made ideas, and this one is no exception. Particularly since certain aspects of it correspond very poorly with contemporary conceptions of art.

Our era has passionately developed a theory which holds that the artist bears witness to his times. Can such testimony ever be more moving than when it concerns the terrible drama of war? Did Goya leave anything to surpass the Tres de Mayo? And how often has it been said that Guernica outstrips everything created by the protean genius of Picasso? Peace leads the artist to disperse his talent in pleasant, decorative works, or in intellectual exercises whose refinement and sophistication finally inspire nothing more than boredom. Today we have some very fine examples of that. On the contrary, war confronts the artist with primary realities, which are always brutal: physical and moral suffering, death, sudden comebacks and heroism. Tragedy obliges one to speak loud and clear.

Let no one believe that in writing these lines I am praising war. I have personally lived through it. Or that the pleasure of paradox has led me to sophism. Far from simply condemning war, Hegel showed no hesitation in envisioning it as a mainspring of the dialectic of history, and even as a decisive moment in moral progress. Which leads one to a historical reflection too easily banished by our modern taboos. For my part, I simply believe that on the threshold of a celebration such as this one, it is fitting to cast aside all preconceived ideas, whether from Hegel or from Greenpeace.

Let us state the problem precisely. War and peace directly and indirectly affect mentalities, on the one hand, and the economy, on the other. Artistic creation is necessarily and profoundly shaken up; yet it remains unpredictable, and its reactions are extremely diverse. The phenomenon has never been given close scrutiny. The last World War is still too near for anyone to have risked presenting a complete and impartial summary of its consequences on the arts. The few studies carried out for the war of 1914-18 and its incidence on artistic creation have remained fragmentary. For earlier centuries we have nothing comparable to the famous study by Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951), which analyses a perfect case of violent economic, demographic and moral rupture. Now, the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia offer a privileged example for study, and such a large field of investigation, in terms of both time and geography, as to make the plague of Florence seem no more than a laboratory experiment. One ought to be able to grasp the mechanism in its concrete reality, directly amidst the dense and continuous fabric of creation. And with all the tranquil objectivity allowed by three and a half centuries of distance.



A complex problematic

Yet let us not expect a prompt and easy analysis. The Thirty Years' War was international, involving most countries in Europe and therefore touching many different artistic centres of unequal importance, often with very different stylistic practices. Extending over several decades, the war obliges us to account for generational changes, with all they naturally entail in terms of genre development and revolutions in taste. Above all, one must be wary of the simplistic attitude that would arbitrarily isolate this episode and examine it in vitro. This would be to forget that the unfolding of facts can be determined by other causes, which often force one to moderate or modify the interpretation. Let us recall at least three basic givens which must not be under-estimated: the heritage of the wars of religion, the fear of Islam and the rivalry between France and Spain. It would be dangerous to analyse art during the Thirty Years' War and the effects of the Peace of Westphalia without keeping in mind these circumstances, which go far beyond the chronological limits of the war and subsequent peace.

The Thirty Years' War was of a religious nature; but it unfolded at a time when Europe had already been deeply shaken by the wars of religion. These wars, in many places, had been of unprecedented violence. Let us take the example of France. Except in its eastern territories, which were in direct contact with the Empire, France escaped the disasters of the Thirty Years' War. But perhaps this is because it had just undergone comparable or even more severe disasters. From 1559 to 1598 a terrible civil war fuelled by religious passions had ravaged almost the entire country. A constant concern to ensure the peace, from the seventeenth century to our own day, has succeeded in blurring this drama, to the point of making believe that it is all summed up by the St. Bartholomew massacres and a few battles with the future Henri IV crying "Rally to my white plume!" A comfortable legend; but the truth is quite different. A country left in ruins (although Paris, after a siege upheld to the extreme limit of resistance, was able to escape pillage and destruction); populations massacred with all imaginable barbarity; a decimated nobility; a destroyed economy; untold numbers of families tumbling irremediably from richness to poverty: the balance sheet is frightening. Let us add that at least two-thirds of the artistic heritage left by the middle ages and the first half of the sixteenth century was irrevocably destroyed by the iconoclastic rage. 1562 was "l'année terrible" of French art, wrote Jean Lafond; and Louis Réau declared it "plus calamiteuse que 1789 sous la Terreur révolutionnaire". Almost all the French "primitives" disappeared, as well as an incalculable quantity of stained-glass windows and religious statuary; and civil works, from portraits to mythologies, suffered no less. Calvin himself trembled, and from Geneva he attempted to calm the passions. Most artistic centres in the provinces were utterly ruined, and in the course of the seventeenth century very few could be brought back to life. The tradition was therefore wiped out, the very models had disappeared. The great difference between France and Italy dates precisely from this period: henceforth artistic creation would be concentrated in Paris, whereas it had often been more brilliant in the provinces. Just think of the cathedrals of Laon or Bourges, the chateaux of the Loire valley, Fouquet or the Master of Moulins.

As Etienne Pasquier wrote: "Qui auroit dormi quarante ans penseroit voir non la France, ains un cadavre de la France" ("One who had slept forty years would think he saw not France, but a cadaver of France"). An intelligently managed and relatively rapid reconstruction of the kingdom began after its reconquest by Henri IV. But it was only from 1625 that the kingdom's economy began to give clear signs of recovery. If France did not enter the Thirty Years' War until 1633, it is because before then, the country had terrible wounds to heal.

And France was not the only land to suffer under the wars of religion. It suffices to recall the disasters that battered the Low Countries, the devastation of August 1566. In many states, the Protestants had to flee Catholic intolerance; in others, the Catholics had to escape Protestant violence. The ebb and flow of emigrations had begun long before the Thirty Years' War. With all its consequence on economic and artistic life.

Another point must not be passed over in silence. At the very moment when the struggle raged fiercest between Protestants and Catholics, another threat obsessed all of Europe: Islam. The Ottoman empire was at the height of its power. The debacle inflicted upon it at Lepanto, incessantly celebrated as one of the greatest naval feats of all times, had in no way abolished Turkish power in the Mediterranean, and it was still possible for the sultan to push his troops toward Vienna. It was clearly in the emperor's interest to recall that the veritable enemy of all Christian was the Turk; and the same was true for the king of Spain, threatened on his territory by Moorish revolts and in his dependencies of Naples and Sicily by the Turkish forces and Barbary pirates on the African coast. The pope saw the idea of a crusade as a possibility of unifying the Churches. Tasso's great epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, gave this dream a poetic presence which is not negligible. In all the Catholic countries, even those hostile to Spain, at least a part of public opinion hoped for an end to internal divisions and the abandonment of the wars of religion for the holy war.

Let us be careful then. A painting that evokes a battle, the siege of a city, or a duel between mounted warriors with cadavers littering the soil, can denounce the misfortunes of a time when the fields are no longer sown with grain but with the dead. The same painting, if it shows a crescent moon on a banner or a few turbaned horsemen, will serve on the contrary to celebrate the heroism of Christians defending their country and their faith against a horde of pillagers and assassins. Such is the ambiguity of an image: a detail is enough to change its entire meaning. And experience proves that more than one good mind has fallen into the trap.

Let us add a third remark. The evident cause of the Thirty Years' War is the partition of the Empire between Protestants and Catholics. But the political forces at play are such that this conflict was quickly overlaid with the rivalry of the Most Christian King and the Most Catholic King, which was no longer of a religious order. The question was whether Spain would finally succeed in imposing a preponderance over Europe that France had rejected for more than a century. The day when cardinal Richelieu, so prompt to repress the Protestant revolts of Montpellier and La Rochelle, entered into open alliance with the Swedes, it became manifest that the Franco-Spanish rivalry had become the major issue. Once peace had been re-established by the Congress of Münster, the military operations would continue for over a decade. It is at this date, when the struggle against Spanish domination became decisive, that French national identity is said to have crystallised, in the awareness of a unity superior to the personal opinions and local particularisms which other European countries have always had such difficulty understanding. But in many minds, this national sentiment still ran up against the scruples of faith and the interests of the Catholic church.

Thus the student of the Thirty Years' War and the Treaty of Westphalia finds a somewhat skewed perspective. The ideological outlines are not clear. Between the religious convictions, the economic interests and the political imperatives, the play of forces appears complex and indecisive, varying with the actors and the moments. The propaganda efforts reflect this; thus the role of the artist is difficult to pin down. We must expect from the outset that it will be impossible to analyse these matters in the modern terms of "political involvement" and "the ivory tower".



Artists in the upheaval

For a moment we will set aside the complexity of the situation, placing ourselves frankly before the obvious. What do we see at first gaze? That the Thirty Years' War was a catastrophic event for artists, that their lives and careers were drastically disrupted.

An example can illustrate the extent of the disaster: the example of Lorraine. At the time it was a territory of the Empire, even though Duke Charles III, since the close of the sixteenth century, had taken some distance from the Diet, and though a not-inconsequential piece of the duchy, the Barrois mouvant, paid homage to the king of France. Despite a few stirrings from the Protestants B particularly in the Three Bishoprics, under French dominion B Lorraine was not affected by the devastation of the wars of religion, and it even escaped the beginnings of the Thirty Years' War. The long reign of an enlightened duke, Charles III, known as "the Great", followed by a refined and prudent son, Henri II, made this a rich, flourishing land, whose prosperity was remarked by all the travellers, along with a taste for festivals and entertainment, present even deep in the countryside. The arts had developed brilliantly, thanks to ducal patronage. Painting and engraving attained illustrious heights with Jacques Bellange, who was active from 1595 to 1616. Then came an exceptional group of artists: in the period around 1620-30, this artistic centre was able to nourish the work of painters as Claude Deruet, Jean Leclerc, Jacques Callot and Georges de La Tour, without mentioning the sculptor Siméon Drouin and a dozen other more or less minor figures.

The political intrigues of a new duke, Charles IV, a wily and underhanded spirit, suddenly cast Lorraine into the heart of the Thirty Years' War, in the period around 1630-35. Henceforth the armies would clash in this land: the Swedes, the Spanish, the Lorraines faithful to their duke in exile in Luxembourg, and the French occupying the country but unable to control its entire territory. Lorraine was spared nothing: systematic destruction, pillage, fire, great epidemics of the plague, widespread impoverishment, paralysis of commerce, famine pushed all the way to cannibalism, collective hallucinations. What became of the artists amidst this upheaval?

Some had the luck to die before the events ruined the country: Jean Leclerc in October 1633, then Callot in March 1635. Deruet had gained the friendship of Louis XIII and found subsistence thanks to the French court. Georges de La Tour did the same: after the burning of the fortified site of Lunéville, where he lived and which was suddenly reduced to a few remaining dwellings, he took the road to Paris and sought to sell his paintings there. But he did not settle: he had amassed a large fortune and returned to Lorraine to live the life of a local notable, apparently thanks to the produce of his fields and to a few paintings acquired very dearly by the occupying French, or sent back to the capital.

But Claude Lorrain, who had come back from Italy to Nancy around 1625/26, no doubt to test the lay of the land, gave up any idea of a permanent return and decided to pursue his career in Rome despite his attachment to his homeland. Charles Mellin took a similar course, trying his luck in Naples, while Nicolas de La Fleur succeed in establishing himself in Paris. The next generation was no longer even interested in living in Nancy; Collignon, born in 1610, moved on to Augsburg in 1631, then settled in Rome and passed his life between that city and Paris. Israel Sylvestre, born in 1621, fled Nancy as early as 1634/35, became one of the important producers of ink prints in Paris and died in the galleries of the Louvre. Charles Dauphin, born around 1620, was to become part of Vouet's workshop and to spend his entire career at the court of Turin, while Nicolas de Bar, born around 1632 and married in Rome, never sought to leave the Eternal City. The brother François and Claude Spierre, born in 1639 and 1642 respectively, would come to do their apprenticeship in Paris, for "il n'y avoit point de peintre pour lors à Nancy"; they too settled in Rome. Only with the reign of the good king Stanislas in the eighteenth century would Lorraine once again boast artists of any stature.

One would have little difficulty describing analogous tragedies in all the parts of the Empire affected by the war. Of course one must refrain from systematic generalisations: the theatre of operations often shifted over thirty years, massacres and plagues did not reign everywhere and always. One must also avoid anachronism, and not imagine the situation of modern wars with their massive destruction and equally rapid reconstruction. The atrocities were even more horrible in the seventeenth century, the devastation less, and the worst no doubt came from the sequels of poverty, famine and epidemic that accompanied the fighting. When the social and demographic balance was too profoundly shaken, several generations were then necessary to bring the normal economic circuits back to life. Where art was concerned, the catastrophe extended even to the cities which had been able to hold out against the sieges, and to the regions more or less spared from fire and pillage.

The disaster stemmed first of all from the disappearence of the clientele indispensable for the very life of the artist. The great princes, and the nobility as a whole, were more concerned with maintaining troops, buying horses and arms, than with decorating their palaces and city dwellings. Most of them were seriously indebted to bankers, particularly since earnings from land holdings diminished, when they did not disappear entirely. The wealthy burghers fled the war zones, abandoning their inheritance and revenues to live frugally in some safe region; and before the poverty of the refugees, the ruin of the peasants and the rising ranks of mendicants, charity seemed more urgent than sumptuary expenses. Rather it was the small clientele and the inexpensive products B pious images, family portraits, prints, even house painting B that allowed artists to survive. Sébastien Zamet, heir to one of the largest fortunes of the times, had been named bishop, duke and peer of Langres in 1615. Under other circumstances he would undoubtedly have maintained a small court of artists and embellished his ancient cathedral. But Langres, a frontier town, would suffer doubly, both from the proximity of the armies and from the plague. His enormous fortune proved insufficient to succour the refugees who flooded into the town and the outlying region B the dying, the sick, the hungry of all conditions. Well established though they were in Langres, the painters of the city, Tassel father and son, were compelled to go and beg a few major commissions in the neighbouring capital of Dijon, or even to offer repetitively produced series in the rare fairs that subsisted here and there. Jean Tassel and his wife, in the company of other merchants, were then captured on the road to Nogent-le-Roy by the greedy troops of the duke of Lorraine, and taken prisoner to Luxembourg, whence they did not return before having paid a ransom of five hundred pistoles. Does it really come as any surprise that such a talented painter should have left so many mediocre little paintings?

In this crisis situation, each protected the crumbs that still fell to him. The local guilds, where they subsisted, clung to their privileges and closed themselves tightly off to strangers. They returned to the strict application of medieval statutes, demanding the acquisition of local titles, several years of compagnonnage, and the presentation of a costly masterpiece, while reserving preference for the sons of masters. At the same time came denunciations of the outsiders flooding in from all around, who played on their relations or their prestige to carve out a place for themselves, and robbed the city's artists of the remains of their clientele. A painter such as Stoskopff, for example, could not entirely escape this kind of rejection. From a Strasbourg family, he had succeeded in placing himself as an apprentice in Hanau, with Daniel Soreau. In 1622 he sought to establish himself in Frankfurt, but was refused the right to settle in the city and to open a workshop there. He had to go to Paris, where to be sure the guild of painters and sculptors had closed ranks against the invasion, but was nonetheless unable to oppose the ancient institution of the enclos privilégiés which remained open to provincial and foreign artists: this was the great moment when Saint-Germain-des-Près became a branch office of Flanders. In 1641, Stoskopff felt his reputation secure enough to return to his native city. It would appear that the local guild, zur Steltz, accorded him the dispensation of a masterpiece, but only on the condition that he open no workshop and train no apprentice. His support from the Council of XV, which governed the city, was not able to silence the protest from the local painters who called for his withdrawal. Such that when peace returned and Count Johannes of Nassau-Idstein regained the properties he had been forced to flee after the defeat of the Protestants at Nördlingen, and had put his finances and chateau back in order, Stoskopff accepted his invitation, leaving Strasbourg to enter the count's service in 1656.

Stoskopff was a recognised artist at the height of an international career. What would conditions have been like for beginners who could boast of nothing but their ambitions? The corollary of this disappearence of clientele and closure of ranks by the guilds was the exile of the young artists. Whether sons of artists or called by a vocation, almost all of them left this land without a future, as soon as they possibly could. Some went to Paris where they enjoyed juridical protection in the privileged zones, as well as the perspective of finding support from compatriots who often had already been settled there for many years. But by far the greater number B even among Protestants B were attracted by Italy.

It is quite difficult to separate what should be ascribed to the renown of Italian art, what to the growing ease of communications and what to the misfortunes of Europe. Not everything can be attributed to the war. Parisians like Vouet and Blanchard, though very well established in their native land, felt the need to complete their training in Italy, as did artists like Schönfeld or Sandrart. But it is certain that the ultramontane voyage held particular importance for artists born north of the Alps, and that their number grew sharply in the Italian towns during the second third of the seventeenth century. This not only in Rome, but also in Venice B the obligatory stopover for all those arriving from the Empire B and in Naples, then the wealthiest and most populous city. The Bent had its own life and its well-defined rites, the Lorraines occupied a place in the papal city all out of proportion to the importance of a duchy in crisis, and the Bamboccianti were probably the first example of a Roman artistic movement of which no major actor B excepting Cerquozzi B was Italian.

We cannot discuss the role of "melting pot" which, at least in the field of painting, has always characterised the Italian lands. But need we insist on the particular circumstances? If Rome was such a great international artistic centre at that time, was it not at least in part because, in Europe aflame, it represented the haven of peace that artists required? In his weighty volume on the painters of the Southern Netherlands, Didier Bodart needed sixty-five pages to enumerate the painters and engravers of Liège and Flanders who had sojourned in Rome in the seventeenth century, and whose traces he had been able to uncover. It would not perhaps be absurd to ask if the first consequence of the international phenomenon of the Thirty Years' War was not to bring the international aspect of the great, fecund and peaceful artistic centre that was Rome in the seventeenth century to its acme.



An inadequate language

The surprising thing is that these artists, more or less refugees, more or less apprehensive for their family or their country, and often awaiting no more than a ray of hope to regain their homeland, so rarely expressed their fears. And that those who remained amidst the tragedies and were witness to so many horrors did not say very much more.

A refusal of reality? A flight into fiction? Such behaviour is frequent among artists. And in many cases it is certain that the reflex came into play. Or rather, that it kept the artists from challenging a constrictive language inherited from a prestigious century, designating a precise field for art, one extremely ill-adapted to the circumstances.

Great painting, by tradition, is either religious, mythological or allegorical. Its language allows it to express the most diverse sentiments, from joy to anxiety, from the beautiful to the horrible; but thorough a play of fiction where the principle of distance B attained, as in Racine's drama, by temporal as well as spatial remove B appears as the very precondition of all poetry. Thereby eliminating any direct testimony. Thus, from Raphael to Guido Reni, the abominable scandal of carnage must pass by way of the "Massacre of the Innocents" theme: a transposition which elevates the painter's meditation to the level of the universal, but in the same movement, prohibits all personal anecdote or testimony.

Mannerism did little more than refine on these classic themes and exacerbate their expression. On the contrary, Caravaggio had sought to turn the problem around, to transpose images debilitated by repetition into the most directly present time. Yet the fact of draping St. Matthew and St. Paul in contemporary B or near-contemporary B garments, or of representing the Virgin as a woman of Trastevere, may well have reawakened the myth, but still underscored its power at the expense of actuality. Goya's Tres de Mayo is not an ancient episode transcribed in the costumes of 1814: it is an event of 1808 treated in its historical particularity. This stance is precisely the opposite of that taken by Caravaggio's poetics. The great vogue of the latter, from 1610 onwards, would not in any way help to speak of the tragedies of the war.

To be sure, seventeenth-century painting leaves room for the chronicle, or more precisely, for the celebration of great events. But generally they are evoked after some delay, and by artists who were not witness to them. Here again, the visual language imposes its laws. One can opt for the representation of the historical fact itself: but at the risk of attracting a shower of criticism, particularly when the witnesses are still living. When Velázquez was asked, around 1634, to represent the Surrender of Breda (1625) (fig. 1), he took care to inform himself as to the configuration of the site and to procure the portrait of Spínola. The result is a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of visual art. For the rest, one can hardly see it as anything more than a masterful variation on the theme of the princely interview, whose model, in this case, seems to have been drawn from an illustration of the Bible. No veracity, no emotion. One can say as much of another canvas in the Salón de los Reinos at Buen Retiro, the Recovery of Bahía from the Dutch in 1625. It is perhaps Maino's highest claim to glory, but it's a piece that does not escape the ancient rhetorical rules. A piece whose tripartite juxtaposition, in its very frankness, allows the author to offer one of the most touching scenes ever represented in painting, in the group of the wounded man set up in the foreground. Yet one may doubt whether this variation on Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene or The Descent from the Cross reflects the brutality of sea battles and the atmosphere of Brazil. Velázquez and Maino remained utter strangers to the theatre of war: and the war changed nothing of their poetics.

Yet in Rome itself, around 1630, there appeared a movement which claimed to reject all rhetoric, to stick to the image of everyday life, to linger over the most humble spectacles: and this movement was born amidst the northerners gathered in Rome. One might have expected it to draw its inspiration from the contemporary tragedies, or at least from the disasters of northern Europe. Nothing of the sort. Very quickly it fell into the conventions of every realism: the old man, the old woman, the soldier and the prostitute, the small trades, the street urchins and the bandits. Hardly can one find a few canvases with allusions to what was happening far from Rome and the surrounding countryside; the "surprises", the "attacks", are those the brigands perpetrated on the deserted roads or on lonely farms within the states of the pope himself. Simple slices of life. Only Cerquozzi's paintings of the Masianello revolt in Naples can be held, not as documents, but at least as testimony close enough to the event so as not to betray it.

It is further down the hierarchy, at the level where the art is less codified, that one can seek traces of these immense tragedies whose memory has been preserved by the texts: the popular images, the ex-votos, the engravings. But these little pictures were not made to last, and very rare are those that remain to us. The prints quickly become repetitious: the horse is always rearing, only the general changes, or the general's head, or the inscription at the bottom of the paper. And one should not give too much credit to the scenes of battle or of burning cities, even when they claim to portray the truth. There are some of the sincerest testimonials; unfortunately, they most often have very little to do with art or veracity.



The refusal of inspiration

We must admit that if the Thirty Years' War left little mark on the arts, it is because artistic creation is most often detached from everyday life. In vain would one seek some trace of the tragedy of 1914-18 in the poetic work of Valéry: his art was situated on another plane. The fact is even more striking when the great models that can inspire the artists are offered by centres far removed from the tragedies, and when the clientele furnishing the artists' subsistence feels little concerned with their neighbours' misfortune.

After the Caravaggesque revolution, a uniquely Roman revolution which quickly spread throughout Europe, a reaction at once lively and deep sprang up quite rapidly against this grave and sombre art, oriented toward the analysis of the human heart. Rarely would European painting be so full of light, so gay, so inclined to celebrate nature, happiness and beauty. The most brilliant of the Italian masters at the time of the Thirty Years' War are Guido Reni and Pietro da Cortona, painters of feminine grace par excellence. In Paris, the finest are Vouet and Blanchard, who seek to revive the elegant art of the Renaissance and only see the world through poetical fictions. But is it not similar with Rubens and Van Dyck, the one accustomed to celebrate the pleasures of senses, the other, the elegant manners of the courts?

It may be objected that all these masters had established their domain and style long before the terrible years, and that they were not struck with the full brunt of the tragedy. But the same cannot be said for the German painters who left in exile. Schönfeld was no doubt the most brilliant of them all. He was born in 1609 in Biberach, to a family of goldsmiths, and had done his apprenticeship in Memmingen and Stuttgart. From his youth he had known the Swedish occupation. Protestant though he was, he travelled to Italy in 1633, and seems to have split his time between Rome and Naples for many years. He waited until 1651 to regain Germany. There is scarcely any more sensitive and agile art than his; nor any more troubled, lending an uncanny aspect to even the most inconsequential scenes. But when he evokes the Death of Mary Magdelene or Saint Rosalie, when he multiplies the versions of his Treasure-Seekers Amongst the Ruins, it is quite difficult to establish the least relation between his highly personal inspiration and the events of the Thirty Years' War.

Another example. A painter like Sandrart was well aware of Germany's disasters. A Calvinist, born in 1606 in Frankfurt, he trained in Hanau with Soreau, travelled widely between Prague and Utrecht, and finally came to Rome in 1629. He only returned to Frankfurt in 1635, misled, no doubt, by the rumours of peace; but he left almost immediately for Amsterdam, before seeking his fortune in MunichY He certainly witnessed many dramatic events, glimpsed great misery. None of that passed into his work, which hardly touches on the ideas of tragedy or compassion. His Miraculous Intervention of Saint Gaetan during the Plague in Naples, a vast canvas held today in Munich, is more overladen than moving; yet it dates from 1670.

Whether Protestants or Catholics, it seems that all these painters were quick to rejoin the world of fiction, a world that eluded sickness, hunger, misfortune, where antique robes mingled with the dream of nudity, where the pressing concerns of tomorrow evaporated. There is little distance between Sandrart's decoration of the great salon of the castle of Schleissheim, from 1641 to 1643, with its twelve subtle variations on the Seasons, and Pietro da Cortona's Four Ages of Man at the Stufa in the Pitti Palace around 1640. The latter created some of his masterpieces there: but neither the Age of Bronze nor even the Age of Iron fail to be beautiful theatre pieces where each actor plays his role all the more gracefully for his lack of conviction. Fear, crime, and murder are reduced to the poetics of an excellent play. Is this the unconsciousness of Florence, far removed from the profound suffering of northern Europe? For his part, Sandrart uses a more realistic language. But little matter if the old peasant in the flower-strewn hat of the Month of August and the fat, mocking cook amidst the foodstuffs of the Month of February proceed from a different poetics: they are equally foreign to the period's anxieties.

Indeed, even if the artists of the time had deeply felt the horror of the wars, the distress of Germany, could they have exploited that vein? The problem of the clientele was more pressing than ever. And what prince, what art lover would have wished before his eyes the pillage of Frankfurt, or the countryside ravaged by bands of Croats or Swedes, or dead bodies abandoned in the snow, as they would later be painted by Gros or Boissard de Boisdenier? Accustomed as people of the time were to blood, pestilent boils, famine and death, who would have entertained the morbid fantasy of perpetuating these everyday realities on the walls of his home?

Let us add that the interests were so mixed and the alliances so transitory that one hesitated to fix in painting events which were often of such great moment, yet which in no case could be crowned with glory. As a chronicler, the painter was more often asked for effigies of the princes and warriors. We possess a great number of these, and the gallery would be monotonous indeed if this series of brutal ruffians and statesmen misshapen by all sorts of excesses did not offer some of the most extraordinary testimony to the realities of the epoch. One must not look here for great masterpieces, except in the fascinating portrait of Christian of Braunschweig, attributed to Paulus Moreelse (fig. 2). But in their monotony, and sometimes their naïveté, they betray despite themselves the mixture of fanaticism, cupidity and hardiness, often of generosity as well, that one only encounters in times of war. They render all that is most disconcerting in Grimmelshausen plausible: beyond the facts, a psychology that we now have great difficulty in reconstructing. In this sense, we can finally say that painting has borne witness.



The power of the exception

But this testimony is in a sense unconscious. Must one stop here, and conclude that the war, the sacrifices and the ruins left the painter indifferent, when they didn't push him to retreat into an artificial world? To do so would no doubt be to rest on the surface of things.

Let us return to Sebastien Stoskopff. We know little more of him than his still lifes, and indeed, they are what had established his notoriety and allowed him to make a living. A few remarks that have come down to us suggest that he was above all proud of reproducing nature so cleverly that people were fooled. Despite the commentary that is fashionable today, it would seem that he did not excessively refine on symbols, and disguise "mysterious" meanings beneath simple appearances. Yet one must recognise that all his paintings are permeated with gravity, if not sadness B old books, broken glasses, dead fish B that his rare flowers lack gaiety and perfume, and that several self-avowed Vanities took form under his brush. The greatest and most imposing canvas (fig. 3) we have from him includes a short poem which makes all equivocation impossible:

Kunst, Reichtum, Macht und Kühnheit stirbet,
Die Welt und all Ihr Thun verdirbet
Ein ewiges kommt nach dieser Zeit
Ihr thoren, flieht die Eitelkeit. (1641)