News that 480 Taliban prisoners have escaped in time for this year's "fighting season" in Afghanistan is hardly something to be taken lightly. But the fact that this war has a fighting season is a strange reminder of the dark side of springtime. For centuries, before mechanised conflict, the seasonal nature of war was a familiar fact, recorded in famous works of art.
Paolo Uccello's early 15th-century painting The Battle of San Romano is a joyous depiction of war. It captures the brilliant colours and dramatic display of medieval chivalry in a bouncing carnival of tubular armoured bodies, hovering banners and prancing horses. In modern terms it is a lie, as any glorification of battle must be. But it is historically simplistic to dismiss the culture of chivalry, with its treatment of war as a beautiful game, as cynical. They simply saw things differently in those days. Uccello weaves a spell of martial spectacle. The way he does it is to root war in the landscape of Tuscan spring and early summer.
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