Introduction

Rubens was undoubtedly the most famous and influential Southern Netherlandish painter when it came to heroic or allegorical paintings of themes relating to the Eighty Years' War. Yet there was a second tradition of painting in the Southern Netherlands, one that has received less attention, which depicted the acts of war in a more factual rather than an evocative manner. [1] Rubens was well acquainted with this other tradition, as he collaborated with one of its main exponents, Pieter Snayers, in a series (which was never completed) intended to exalt the martial deeds of Henry IV of France during the French civil war. As is clear in one piece from this series, The battle of Arques (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) (fig. 1), [2] Rubens himself executed the foreground with a monumental representation of the military hero. Snayers took care of the less individualized armed conflict depicted in the background landscape. Battle scenes of this type, which were first introduced by Snayers' master, Sebastiaen Vrancx, were developed by his pupil into vast panoramic scenes of war. Snayers in his turn passed on this Southern Netherlandish tradition to his own pupil, Adam-Frans van der Meulen (born in Brussels, 1632, died in Paris, 1690) through whom such battle scenes eventually became popular at the French court of Louis XIV. [3] In the Northern Netherlands, they had been a source of inspiration at an early stage of their development. [4]

Where the Northern Netherlandish exponents of this genre are concerned, the large dose of fiction in their representations of the Eighty Years' War - however much one might expect the opposite from the supposed realistic nature of their art - has already been demonstrated before. [5] The present article will show that the same may be said of this more neglected pictorial tradition of the battle piece in the Southern Netherlands. Thus the sense of national identity - on both sides - which was so strengthened by the war and then officially sanctioned by the recognition of the United Provinces as an independent state, in the Peace of Münster, was eventually translated into a pictorial culture that was a good deal more homogeneous than may at first appear. The following pages set out to support this view systematically, by looking successively at the historical and artistic aspects of the topic.

The first part will take a critical look at the role of history - especially military history - as an explanatory context for the battle piece, and conversely, appraise the value of this genre of paintings as a historical source. The results of this examination will lead to a discussion of the internal artistic and fictional logic within the genre of the battle piece, in which the artistic sources of this genre, its significance and its development will all be dwelt upon. A brief concluding section will highlight the moral content of the battle piece: the lessons of the past are encapsulated in the didactic message of the image. Given the limited space of this article, only a few select examples must suffice by way of illustration. The emphasis will be on the oeuvre of Sebastiaen Vrancx and to a lesser extent on that of Pieter Snayers, [6] as they focused more systematically than most on the battle piece, and had a widespread and lasting influence on other practitioners of the genre. Pieter Meulener and the more obscure artist Jacques van der Wijen were among those who emulated Vrancx and Snayers, while others, such as Robert van den Hoecke, made handsome paintings that, while executed in a more personal style, were more limited in terms of artistic resonance. [7]



I The historical position of the battle piece in the Southern Netherlands

The relative scarcity of battle pieces in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) - certainly in comparison with the vast quantities of landscapes and still lifes that were turned out - has attracted comment before. [8] Whatever the war's impact on other areas of life, it did not boost the development of the battle piece as might perhaps be expected. The historical reason that is usually given for this is that after the tumultuous years following the first outbreak of iconoclastic fury in 1566, the war gradually mutated into a conflict of limited military activity, characterized by isolated sieges of towns with only minor skirmishes in the countryside in between. According to this version of events, the sieges served as tests of strength between the superior fire-power of the artillery and modern techniques of fortification, while the skirmishes were sporadic confrontations between irregular troops from opposing sides who were out on plundering expeditions, and rarely went beyond the border region between the Spanish Netherlands and the Provinces. All this, it is said, was reflected in the battle pieces, most of which took either the sieges or the skirmishes as their theme. [9]

On further investigation, however, the supposed parallel between military actions and battle pieces does not hold up. The rise of this genre in the painting of the Southern Netherlands far from paralleled the course of the conflict, nor did its artistic flowering echo the intensity of the turmoil. Whereas it is fair to say that the military operations had their strongest impact - both on the geography of the region and its social fabric - during the first half of the Eighty Years' War, the painted battle piece did not appear as a separate and systematically developed artistic genre until around 1600. Before that, while war was depicted in graphic art, it only occasionally found its way into paintings. Not so long ago it was still a popular view that certain paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder addressed specific themes related to the war: his Suicide of Saul (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) was interpreted as an allusion to Alva's military expedition over the Alps, while the soldiers in the background of Brueghel's Massacre of the innocents (Hampton Court) were said to represent the Spanish military presence in the Netherlands. [10] More recently, however, such notions have been viewed with considerable scepticism.

The fact that the war raging in the Netherlands was seldom depicted in paintings during the first half of the conflict is less odd than it may at first appear. It is obvious that the war had a ruinous effect on the economy; these circumstances were scarcely a fertile seedbed for artistic production in general, or for the production of durable cultural artefacts such as paintings in particular. The painted battle piece could not develop until the market for durable art had recovered. Letters dating from 1624 that passed between Southern Netherlandish art dealers about orders for a series of battle pieces by Sebastiaen Vrancx reveal, for instance, that each canvas cost about two-thirds of a skilled worker's annual pay, the whole series comprising six paintings. [11] So the market for such works of art obviously consisted largely of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. During the Twelve Years' Truce, paintings are found in the estates of Antwerp burghers that contain figures by or after Vrancx with titles such as A painting of a convoy, Battle and A marching army. [12] Perhaps the prosperous citizens who purchased such pieces had suffered from the Spanish or French Fury, or from the siege of Antwerp, but at that time these events were decades in the past. If there was any question of an echo of a turbulent age here, it was certainly a very delayed echo. Furthermore, the events depicted were often insignificant from a military point of view. This is well illustrated by the enormous popularity of paintings - and there are literally scores of near-identical pictures of this scene [13] - of the supremely trivial Battle of Leckerbeetje and Breauté (fig. 2), [14] fought between Spanish and Netherlandish cavalry platoons in the Vughterheide district outside 's-Hertogenbosch in 1600.

Although pictorial images are undoubtedly a potential source of indirect information on technical military matters, [15] it will be clear from the above that battle pieces are of dubious value as historical sources. The following example will demonstrate the need for caution. Vrancx painted several representations of a historical event from the Eighty Years' War that have only recently been identified. Until then, three paintings and a drawing by Vrancx were known, which all appeared to be variations on the same theme of the plundering of an unspecified village. They are to be found in a private Belgian collection (fig. 3), [16] in the Kunstmuseum of Düsseldorf (fig. 4), [17] in the Louvre and in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. [18] Upon careful inspection it appears that the same church ruin appears in the background of each one, with the same farmstead in the middle distance. While the battle piece continued to be classified as belonging to the genre of the "village plundering," however - and many art historians still uphold this view - nothing was made of these resemblances. Such pieces were intended to convey the general state of a rural population suffering from the onslaught of the marauding troops, it was thought, and not to capture any particular moment of wartime history. [19] It was only when Viktor E. Wauters, a man with a keen interest in local history, discovered that the picture in the Belgian collection depicted the church of Wommelgem, a village near Antwerp that was sacked by the troops of the Dutch Republic on 26 May 1589, and that the outline of the churchyard wall corresponded to old plans, [20] that the problem of historical accuracy became at all relevant. It is clear that the different relative positions of the church and the farmstead as depicted in these pieces are incompatible with the topographical situation, even when one takes the differing vantage-points into account. But this does not necessarily make the pieces "ahistorical."

When we look at sixteenth-century paintings from a late twentieth-century vantage-point, there is a danger of seeing a clear-cut distinction between the representation of historical events and ahistorical battle scenes, where in fact the dividing-line is far more blurred. Some have even stressed the anecdotal quality of certain battle scenes deemed "ahistorical" to such an extent as to refer to them as "genre" pieces. [21] But we should beware of allowing ourselves to be unduly influenced, in assessing the value of such works of art as historical source material, by present-day ways of looking at the photojournalism of contemporary war correspondents. Television, in particular, has elevated this photographic realism to the norm by which we are accustomed to judge the rendering of contemporary wartime events. [22]

Today's viewer expects "contemporary" reports to be relayed "live," as it were, from a hotbed of armed conflict, and may be taken aback to learn that many of these paintings were produced long after the historical events they depict. In the case of The sacking of Wommelgem, the period that elapsed - depending on which of the versions are being considered - ran to twenty or thirty years. [23] But this is only strange to someone who has become accustomed to seeing historical accuracy and eye-witness testimony as closely connected. When we adopt a more sixteenth-century point of view, however, and consider conditions on the contemporary art market, the time lapse is far less strange. Buyers for expensive paintings of this kind could not be found until economic conditions had improved with the waning fury of battle, and once a market had been created, there was every reason to exploit the demand by devising variations on a popular theme. Furthermore, in the sixteenth-century literature of art history it was deemed not only acceptable but eminently praiseworthy for an artist to embellish a history painting with inventions of his own, provided it did not mean misrepresenting the essence of the narrative. [24]



II. The battle scene as an artistic genre in the Southern Netherlands

When we come to consider the battle scene from the artistic point of view, we are indebted to the writings of Jan Briels. [25] Briels' excellent account of the early development of the battle scene points up the great importance of the Brueghelian tradition for themes such as attacks on travellers and marauding raids on country villages. Vrancx will have been well-acquainted with this tradition, as he often worked with Jan Brueghel the Elder, who was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. [26] Together they added new variants to the genre, such as ambushes on army convoys. Vrancx also took Northern Netherlandish sources as his inspiration, such as, for instance, the poses in the well-known Wapenhandelinghe of 1607 illustrated by Jacques de Gheyn. [27] Particularly interesting is the oil sketch Musketeers firing at officer's command in the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna (fig. 5). [28] Not only is Vrancx' hand recognizable in the painterly execution of this piece, but the sketch was made over an account drawn up in handwriting identifiable as that of Vrancx from archival documents he is known to have written. [29] Such recycling is often assumed to be the record of a spontaneous inspiration, a quick sketch of a scene jotted down from life on whatever paper happened to be lying about. Yet this sketch too displays the poses from the Wapenhandelinge. More literal still are the quotes in a drawing with similar motifs that was recently attributed to Vrancx and sold at auction. [30] Conversely, Vrancx's oeuvre inspired artists such as Esaias van de Velde, one of the most influential masters in this field. [31] Vrancx continued to deal with this theme when it had lost much of its impetus in the Northern Netherlands. [32] In some respects his influence on Northern artists could be detected for decades. For instance, there is a striking resemblance between the composition of Vrancx's Battle of Nieuwpoort, identified as such by the author in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville (fig. 6) [33] and the treatment of the same theme in a tapestry now in the Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis in Brussels, which was very likely commissioned by Jonkheer Severin de Goluchows and woven in 1647-1648 by Maximiliaan van der Gucht (died 1689) in Delft. [34]

That the artistic borrowings between Vrancx and his fellow-artists from the Northern Netherlands flowed in both directions had much to do with Vrancx's distinctive qualities as an artist. In this respect, a number of sources illuminate the significance of pictures of military scenes to Vrancx's contemporaries. First, types of battle scenes in general, and cavalry battles in particular, are included in a fairly theoretical part of Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck, entitled "The foundations of the noble and free art of painting" as examples of compositions. Van Mander discusses the disposition of groups of figures, sometimes in combination with exacting techniques such as foreshortening. [35] Both Vrancx and Snayers had a mastery of the techniques needed for their complex battle and cavalry scenes, brimming with human figures, that will have commanded much admiration. The correspondence between art dealers referred to above reveals that it was their labour-intensive nature that made Vrancx's battle pieces so expensive. [36] The wealth of detail in The siege of Ostend as seen from the Spanish camp (fig. 7), [37] for instance, attests to far more hours of painstaking work than do renderings of the same theme by lesser artists. Vrancx's paintings were purchased by a small select circle of true devotees - people, it seems fair to assume, who had enough artistic sense to appreciate such quality and enough money to pay for it. [38]

Vrancx's military scenes commanded the admiration of no-one less than Rubens; witness the presence of Vrancx's Battle of King Sebastian of Portugal in Rubens' own collection. [39] Rubens had tried his hand at small-scale battle pieces in his youth, but later claimed that his talents were more suited to monumental art. [40] He probably admired the minute treatment of detail in Vrancx's art, as he did the small-scale pieces produced by his friend Jan Brueghel the Elder. [41]

The captions beneath the portraits of Snayers and Vrancx in the Iconographia highlight a difference of scale in their battle scenes similar to that between Rubens' and Brueghel's work: Snayers is described as a painter of battles (proeliorum) and Vrancx as a painter of small-scale battles (proeliorum minorum). [42] This scale-based classification is analogous to that which was recently proposed for contemporary marine pieces from the Northern Netherlands. [43] It is arguably far more valid, given the contemporary context, than a classification that distinguishes renderings of historical battle scenes from other military subjects. It is worth adding that the same titles turn up again and again from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in contemporary descriptions of pictures of military scenes, suggesting the existence of a more or less fixed repertoire. All this is worlds apart from the classification of this genre in present-day art historical textbooks. One of the pieces in Jan Vermeyens' series depicting Charles V's Tunis campaign, for instance, was entitled in its day Army on the march. [44] Antwerp inventories of deceased persons' estates contain paintings by Vrancx that are also called Army on the march. It is a title reminiscent of a chapter heading from a contemporary military handbook, or the name of part of a game of tin soldiers - an essential mode of instruction for many sixteenth-century princes, used to teach them the art of warfare, which would be one of their main occupations. The same themes turned up constantly, translated into paintings in the pieces commissioned from Adam-Frans van der Meulen by Louis XIV. [45] This view of armed conflict was hence part of what Michael Baxandall has called the "period eye" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [46]

There has been a good deal of confusion about the relationship between Vrancx's development of the battle piece and Pieter Snayers' continuation of it. Much of this confusion can be traced back to a hypothesis formulated by F.-C. Legrand, who saw certain paintings as providing evidence of collaboration between master and pupil. Collaboration was as common in this as in other genres - Snayers with Rubens (see fig. 1) and Vrancx with Jan Brueghel the Elder being two cases already mentioned - but in this case the evidence is unconvincing. [47] The paintings that Legrand attributes to Vrancx and Snayers jointly do not in fact bear the signs of Vrancx's distinctive hand. [48] Furthermore, Vrancx's dated oeuvre show that he painted in the same enamel-like style all his life, [49] and never gravitated towards a looser brushstroke in the manner of Snayers. The only works bearing Vrancx's signature which do display loose strokes of this kind, such as The plundering of a village in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, [50] should therefore rather be reattributed to Snayers. [51]

As has recently been demonstrated, however, [52] the studio practice of master and pupil, as reflected in the technical structure of their paintings, was very similar. Moreover, the compositional solutions adopted by Vrancx and Snayers, for both their cavalry skirmishes and battle scenes, are very similar. Vrancx's compositional scheme in The siege of Ostend as seen from the Spanish camp from 1618 (fig. 7) was later taken over by Snayers: the anecdotal foreground a mass of figures, with a bird's-eye view of the besieged town in the background. [53] In The battle of Nieuwpoort from the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville (fig. 6), which was painted by Vrancx in the 1630s, the combination of individualized staffage in the foreground and the huge but anonymous scenes of armed conflict in the middle distance resembles Archduchess Isabella surveys the siege of Breda (fig. 8). [54] Such examples show that even Vrancx's later work is more closely related than previously believed to that of his pupil Snayers.



III Depictions of war and peace: moral messages

The excesses of war make a perfect point of departure for explicit moralizing about human behaviour. Numerous Southern Netherlandish battle scenes have a moral message that overshadows the descriptive realism of the scene portrayed. One fine example is a drawing that Vrancx produced in the 1630s (fig. 9). [55] The verse caption in Vrancx's own hand - he was a rhetorician as well as a painter - make the moral import plain. Drawing and caption are memento mori approaches to war. Death appears as the most awesome of soldiers, who comments: "No man so bold nor beast so swift / But Death will catch and vanquish him." [56]

The figure of an invincible Death also turns up in depictions of the cavalry battle in the Northern Netherlands, discussed elsewhere in this volume. Both in his introduction to the Jonstich versaem der violieren of 1619, [57] and in a heraldic rebus that could be attributed to him, [58] Vrancx conveys explicitly his longing for peace and his disgust of the war with its destruction of art. Here he echoes the thoughts of most other artists and his countrymen in general, notwithstanding - or perhaps even by virtue of - his activities as a painter of military scenes.

Characteristically, Vrancx - who as a captain of the militia was quite familiar with the reality of the guardroom - portrays it as a monkey-house (fig. 10). [59] This satirical representation quite belies the bellicose nature that was ascribed to him on the basis of his membership of the civic guard. [60] Another, similar, piece [61] - and possibly its companion-piece - shows press gangs and other dubious activities such as card games, in which soldiers are again depicted as monkeys. These works may be dated to the 1630s on the basis of style, that is to say, roughly contemporaneous with David Teniers the Younger's 1633 painting of soldiers as monkeys in a guardroom, [62] but later than the first guardroom scenes in the Northern Netherlands. [63] Whether Vrancx belonged to the part of the population who presented themselves in public life as Catholics (which is very likely, considering the official posts that he held) [64] or whether he sympathized with the revolt, all these expressive works of art and writings demonstrate that he probably sided with those who detested the war for ethical reasons. So he may well have endorsed the caption to the print that was published in the Northern Netherlands after The battle of Leckerbeetje and Breauté (fig. 2), [65] the invention with which he himself initiated this type of battle piece: "Hooge Moet, Selde Goet," or, roughly, "Hot for combat, doom is nigh."

FOOTNOTES