DOCUMENTATION | Exhibitions: 1648 - War and Peace in Europe | |
Essay Volumes > Tome II: Art and culture |
THOMAS DACOSTA KAUFMANN War and Peace, Art and Destruction, Myth and Reality: Considerations of the Thirty Years' War in Relation to Art in (Central) Europe |
The arts flourish in peace, and suffer in war. This is a theme common to both literature and art in many ages: it was frequently expressed by artists and writers alike during the course of the Thirty Years' War. [1] The historical reality of the third through fifth decades of the seventeenth century in Europe, especially in its geographical center, provides a comparatively bleak picture, too. Beside human losses, man's creations, although never perhaps ultimately as important, also then became victims of war. The destruction of Magdeburg, the looting of Heidelberg, the sack of the Prague Hradčany are well known examples of the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. [2] The depredations of the epoch are mirrored in the prints of Jacques Callot, some of the most famous images associated with the catastrophes of the period, that vividly depict war in all its unrelieved horror.
Contemporaneous accounts of the period also support the impression that the era of the Thirty Years' War was one in which art declined, above all in Central Europe. Some memorable lines of Joachim von Sandrart, the artist-historian whose earlier career was itself shaped in response to the possiblities offered by hard times, speak to this effect. Sandrart writes in his Teutsche Academie of 1675:
Queen Germania saw her palaces and churches decorated with magnificent pictures go up in flames time and again; whilst her eyes were so blidnded by smoke and tears that she no longer had the power or will to attend to art, from which it appeared to us that she wanted to take refuge in one long, eternal night's sleep. So art was forgotten, and its practitioners were overcome by poverty and contempt, to such an extent...that they were forced to take up alms or the beggar's staff instead of the brush, whilst the gently born could not bring themselves to apprentice their children to such despicable people. [3]
In the face of such vivid accounts, the hard evidence which they reflect, and the judgement of many historians, it may seem something of a paradox to realize that the period of the Thirty Years' War was nevertheless one of the greatest epochs in the history of European art. In many countries of Europe, including those of the major belligerants, many of the most outstanding artists not only in local histories but arguably in the entire history of humankind flourished just at this time. To mention but the plastic [bildende] arts, these include Velázquez and Zurbarán in Spain, Bernini in Rome, where the Frenchman Poussin was also active, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens in Flanders (and elsewhere), and Rembrandt, Hals, and a host of others in Holland.
Furthermore, lest we think that the most important artists found themselves far from the battlefield, or even deliberately remained far from the fray, it might be remembered, that war was raging, for example, on the borders of Holland and Flanders, both long-standing, vital centers for the arts, at a time when works continued to be produced in abundance. In the south a large number of painters' workshops remained active even after the death of Rubens and Van Dyck well into the 1640's (and beyond), and the Statthalter, the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Leopold Wilhelm could thus establish a large collection; in the north, an art market flourished. [4] The lesson of Lorraine is also particularly instructive here. While Callot, a native of the duchy, depicted horrors of the sort that were all too often visited on his war-ravaged land, and Claude Gelée (Claude Lorrain) went to Rome, Georges de la Tour remained at home, leaving little trace of the conflict in the quiet pictures that he continued to produce throughout the period. [5]
The apparent paradox that the arts might flourish even in times of war may in fact be encountered in many places and eras. In Japan, the period of the feudal barons (often known as Daimyo [6]), as in India that of the Mogul rulers, were eras of armed conflict, but also great ones for the arts. A good comparision might indeed be established between seventeenth-century Japan and Germany. In both lands lords fought each other in fierce struggles for survival, while they also cultivated the arts, employing them for self-expression, for representation. Closer to the area, if not the time in which the Thirty Years' War was fought, twentieth-century Europe has seen great art produced during times of wide-spread destruction, incomparably greater than that ever possibly caused by war in the seventeenth century: one thinks of Picasso, who spent the Second World War working away undisturbed in Paris.
A more nuanced view of the relation between war and peace, art and destruction in seventeenth-century Europe therefore seems in order. A clearer distinction is needed between the myth of decline and the European reality, hard as it was in some places. Not to deny the widespread, devastating effects on population in many areas of Central Europe in particular, the established opinion that the Thirty Years' War was at best a time of artistic decline might in the end even seem to be not simply a matter of historical fact, but also the result of longstanding artistic and literary descriptions, and the historiographic tradition related to them.
Other papers and aspects of this collection and exhibition study the role of arts in the conflicts of the time, the representation of warfare, and the theme of peace. Monuments to war and peace are also elsewhere taken into account. The present paper however takes up the crux of the question of art in regard to the Thirty Years