War and Military

Battles, soldiers, sieges and their aftermath in art, from ancient victory reliefs to war photography.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for War and Military are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Warfare has been recorded in art since rulers first carved their victories in stone. Reliefs from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh show the Assyrian siege of Lachish (c. 700 BC) stage by stage. Paolo Uccello's The Battle of San Romano panels (1430s) turn a Florentine skirmish into a pageant of lances and rocking-horse steeds, and Albrecht Altdorfer's The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) lifts the viewpoint to take in armies, mountains and the curve of the earth.

Photography changed the record. Roger Fenton's The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) shows a Crimean road strewn with cannonballs, and Timothy O'Sullivan's A Harvest of Death (1863) lays out the dead at Gettysburg. Paul Nash painted a shattered Western Front landscape as We Are Making a New World (1918). Joe Rosenthal's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) became one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the century.