Friday, July 8, 2011

Why war has spring in its step | Art and design

 

The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello
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Detail from The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello at the National Gallery. Photograph: National Gallery/Corbis

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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