To drink from the sadness of "Anjou", or what?
Or look into the regiment out of boredom?
Whether it's a battle in the field
Knead the dirt with your hooves!
No, peace is not my salvation.
The spirit grows decrepit and the mustache withers.
On a horse! And rather into battle!
I am essentially a cuirassier!
Yuri Bondarenko. Cuirassier
Military affairs at the turn of the eras. It is hardly surprising how often horsemen with pistols in their hands flicker on the canvases of Flemish painters, from which they shoot each other from a variety of positions almost point-blank. After all, what time was it then? At first, the Flemings took part in the war between Spain and Holland, in which France and England also intervened, and later Flanders also joined the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and then helped Spain to fight France for 11 years. As a result of all this, military actions sometimes unfolded almost right before the artists' eyes, and the Flemish battle painting was ahead of the Dutch by as much as half a century. And if the Flemings mainly wrote battles on land, then the Dutch - at sea. It is interesting that even then the war was considered by Flemish artists as a tragedy, and the great Rubens somehow said about Flanders: "Flanders was a place of hostilities and a theater where tragedy is played out." But it is natural that, no matter how much the artists hated the horrors of war, they portrayed them in different ways, bringing their vision, their reflection of real events into its visualization.
Peter Möhlener (1602-1654), for example, often painted pictures that were called "Cavalry Attack" and in them he showed different vicissitudes of the battles of horsemen at arms of the first half of the 17th century with each other. And on one of them we see a rather amusing scene of a duel between two horsemen, not men at arms, but armed with wheel pistols, one of whom is trying to defend himself with a broken sword, and the other is to hit him on the head with the handle of his pistol and at the same time grab his scarf with his hand.
What's so interesting about it? And the fact that yes, indeed, cavalry pistols, due to their great length and heavy grip, were used by riders as a strike weapon as well. But the fact that a spherical "apple" was made on them specifically for this purpose, which served as a pommel for a mace, does not receive confirmation on paintings. That is, yes, they beat me on the head in the heat of battle with pistols. But the same canvases show that the tops of the pistol grips have very different shapes. And that it is not always a ball. But when this pommel really has a spherical shape, as in the samples that have survived to this day, it turns out that inside these "balls" are usually empty, that is, light, and usually serve as cases for spare flints or pieces of pyrite.
This can be confirmed by the painting "Attack of the Cavalry", signed by Palamedes Stevarts and dated 1631. On it we already see two wheeled pistols - one on the ground, the other in the hand of one of the combatants, but … not one of them has a "ball" at the end of the handle. It's just that the handles expand towards the end for the convenience of holding them, which was typical for pistols of that time, and it was this expansion that the cavalrymen used as a striking part, and so the shape of the handle could be very different. The spherical shape was by no means fundamental!
It is believed that the first Flemish battle painter was Sebastian Vranks (1573-1647), who was the first in the art of Northern Europe to turn battle scenes into a separate genre. However, why surprise, because he was an officer of the civil militia of Antwerp and saw all this around him. And the fact that about half of Vranks's known works are war scenes is quite logical. And by the way, it was with him that the same Peter Möhlener and many other famous Flemish painters, such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Hendrik van Balen, studied with him, and Jan Bruegel the Elder (son of Peter Bruegel the Elder) often helped and often co-authored it. individual canvases. He also raised several students, among whom Frans Snyders was considered the best.
Vranks's paintings are reminiscent of Bruegel's, especially those in which he depicted the life of contemporary Holland. But battle canvases, again, are an excellent illustrative material for the historian. Here, for example, his famous painting "The Battle of Lekkerbetye in the Vuchta on February 5, 1600" which is in a private collection. First of all, let's find out what kind of battle it was that aroused such interest in this artist. In fact, it was … a collective duel that took place on February 5, 1600 on the wasteland between the city gallows (such a "living" trifle of the era) and the mill. The Flemish took part in the duel, fighting with mercenaries - French and Brabant, in the amount of 22 people on each side, with typical weapons of that time. The instigators of the duel were the French aristocrat de Bre and the Flemish lieutenant Lekkerbettier. Well, his main reason was the contempt of the French marquis for the Flemish nobles. By the way, the lieutenant's full name was Gerard Abrahams van Hohlingen, and Lekkerbetye was his nickname, which meant both "bastard" and "mean" (in the sense of origin). That is, the Flemings did not consider giving such shameful nicknames offensive to their warriors, the main thing is that they fought well!
The center of the composition of Vranks's painting was Lekkerbetyer and de Bre, dressed in typical cuirassiers' armor, similar to knightly armor. According to history, Lekkerbetyer was killed with a pistol shot at the very beginning of the duel, but despite this, the Flemings won a complete victory, killing 19 French. The Marquis de Bré fled from the battlefield, but was caught and also killed.
Vranks was a very multifaceted and versatile artist, as evidenced by his exceptionally multi-figured densely, which he co-authored with Jan Brueghel the Younger "Consequences of the Battle", which is in one of the private collections. And what, and who is just not here. The captured banner and the boots, muskets and hats scattered on the ground, the naked corpses of the dead, the groaning wounded, they take off their boots and strip them to the skin, while others are pinned with a blow to the throat and back. A knight's spear (which means that the spearmen are still in use!) And plate “pipes” for arms, cuirasses and the iron shield of a Randoshier lie right there. A white horse is caught in the distance, and a prisoner at arms is escorted, apparently a noble man, since he was not killed immediately. In a word, all the attributes of the era, human characters and actions - everything is presented at a glance. Visibly, figuratively and very clearly.
Some of his plots are pretty, shall we say, amazing. For example, this applies to several canvases devoted to such narrow topics (and therefore not so narrow for that time, is it?), As attacks on horsemen at arms and infantrymen on the train and - robbers on peaceful travelers on the high road!
On this canvas, again, we see an exceptionally multifaceted action. On a plain stretching beyond the horizon, again with several gallows on a hill in the distance, a caravan is moving along the road, and the front carts clearly tried to get into a circle, but clearly did not have time, peaceful travelers, taking advantage of the commotion, women and children, run into the forest. The attack on the carts is carried out in a complex way: on the left, the musketeers are firing at it from close range, while from the side of the road the first to jump, firing on the move, are pistoliers and carabinieri, and from behind… spearmen with long knightly spears. Well, and on the hill to the right, a shepherd drives away a flock of sheep from sin.
The most interesting thing is that this plot later became very widespread among the canvases of his students and followers. The truth of life, apparently, was just that.
By the way, it was Vranks who began to paint canvases depicting battles on the ground, paying great attention to the topographic accuracy of the depicted scene, and then this style was adopted and developed by another artist of the same era - Peter Snyers (1592-1667). He developed the technique of depicting his teacher, highlighting three planes on the canvas - front, middle and far. The foreground is always a few key figures, such as the commander overseeing the battle. But here we can see the wounded, and alarmists, and deserters, and anyone else - even so. In the central part, the actual collision itself was depicted, but the last third of the picture is a landscape that turns into a distant calm sky. And although the artist himself did not participate in any of the battles, most of his paintings by Snyers were official orders of the high command of the Habsburg army, which would not have happened if they had reproduced the paintings of these battles inaccurately!
And it is not for nothing that the Vienna Military History Museum has a whole "Piccolomini series" of 12 large-format canvases written by him between 1639 and 1651, which illustrate all the main moments of the campaigns of the famous imperial field marshal Ottavio Piccolomini, who fought in Lorraine and France in the last years of the Thirty Years war.
In this characteristic manner he painted many canvases, but one of them is perhaps the most significant in terms of studying the tactical formations of cavalry and infantry from the early 17th century. This is the painting "The Battle of Kirholm", which took place in 1605. It is known about her that she was ordered for the Polish-Lithuanian king Sigismund III, through his agent at the court of Brussels, Archduke Albert VII. Then she was brought to France and sold at auction in 1673. This work was first mentioned in the inventories of the Sassenage castle in 1820, where it is found to this day.
We got acquainted (and this is the most important thing) with only a very small part of battle canvases depicting the battles of horsemen of the 17th century, and the battles of the Thirty Years' War, but in fact there are many times more of them. Samples of weapons, armor, ammunition, yellow leather caftans - all this is repeated by different artists in different variations, but there is only one conclusion: this is exactly what happened then, and we see on these canvases something very close to modern photography. Well, looking into the Dresden Armory, the Vienna Armory of the Hovburg Palace and the Arsenal in Graz, you can also be convinced that the artists painted these armor and weapons from nature.
