It is a rare book on early modern Netherlandish art that opens with a denunciation of US human rights abuses and military policies. Prof. Kunzle immediately warns the reader of his partisan stance. (One can only imagine what he might have added to this preface after the US invasion of Iraq.) Clearly, the author’s declared political views have driven much of his research. A major focus of the book concerns civilian suffering at the hands of the military, and a major portion of the images were generated, Kunzle asserts, by the ‘experience and hatred of war.’ The iconography of military cruelty presented here stretches from Bruegel to Rubens and beyond. But the first illustration is a poster protesting the war in Vietnam.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses works by Bruegel, Heemskerck, Cornelis van Haarlem, Goltzius, and many others, showing their connections to sixteenth-century literature and to the Dutch Revolt. Kunzle focuses on depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents and on related scenes of ambush and plunder. For the most part he interprets these representations as reflecting and expressing popular concerns – and the artists’ own concerns – about military practices, though at one point he adds the caveat that it would be ‘rash’ to claim that the works ‘were viewed in terms of contemporary military behavior.’ Part II shifts to the seventeenth century. Against the background of the Thirty Years War and Eighty Years War, Kunzle treats battle pictures and scenes of pillage, banditry, and guardrooms by Flemish and Dutch artists. He concludes this section with a chapter on Rubens’s contributions to the ‘artistic propaganda machine.’ Disputing mainstream historians’ identification of Rubens as a ‘man of peace,’ Kunzle interprets the paintings in light of the causes and powers that the artist served. After surveying the political utility that Rubens’s patrons found in his religious and allegorical subjects, not to mention his rape scenes and hunts, the author concludes that this ‘lackey of Spain’ shared his patrons’ blindness to common human suffering. The chapters of Part III cluster loosely under the rubric of the ironically named ‘good soldier,’ often taken as equivalent to the ‘courtier’ in the book’s title. Following a chapter on patriotic siege prints, the author moves to depictions in art and literature of the Continence of Scipio – a subject prized as a political model and particularly useful for presenting military might as generous rather than heartless. He then treats Dutch civic guard portraits, interpreting them as reassuring myths of bourgeois power. His final chapter focuses on Gerard ter Borch’s paintings with military themes.
Such a brief and necessarily over-simplified summary hardly does justice to this long (627 text pages) and profusely illustrated (321 plates) text, with its unexpected juxtapositions and sidebars. Such breadth of coverage of military-related themes gives occasion for many insights. For example, we find an excursus on the seductive still lifes with military paraphernalia that are often inserted into guardroom pictures, a sub-genre that has received little attention heretofore. Kunzle makes perceptive comments on the compromised visual enjoyment offered by such objects: the viewer is placed in a position of complicity with the plundering soldiers. In the chapter on siege prints, he observes that these works, in their ‘scientific’ precision, are as representative of Dutch culture as Rubens’s history paintings are of Flemish culture. He sets these prints in the context of actual siege practice and of current publishing, concluding that such prints were appreciated not only for their technical accuracy but also for their legitimization of war. They offered a patriotically motivated ‘redemption,’ as it were, of the soldier and of war itself. Clearly an impressive amount of research went into this particular subject as well as into much else in the book. At the very least, the book offers a mine of information in English that will be new to most readers.
However, those readers will also be disturbed by the sloppiness of the book’s writing, proofing, and production. The need for professional editing is evident throughout. Someone should have spotted the typos and insisted on tightening the argumentation. The text is long-winded, sometimes reading like a first draft. The captions to the illustrations, though highly useful when short, are often unwieldy in length, yet omit such information as collection and size. The list of illustrations contains inaccuracies, as does more than one footnote. More problematic, to my mind, is the author’s tendency to prefer iconographic descriptions over pointed analyses of the works he treats, a failure to discuss the nature of the images as political or socio-cultural constructions. Too often the text simply juxtaposes discussions of historical occurrences with descriptions of paintings, as if the images passively illustrated the history. Readers might also have welcomed a more self-conscious examination of the author’s interpretive approach, that is, a probing of the ideological positions that underlie his contribution to the social history of art. The author states his allegiance to seeing art as a ‘mirror and tool of political consciousness,’ yet in many instances the complicated relationships among artists, their art, their audience, and contemporary politics need to be scrutinized with greater care.
More specifically, I must mention the final chapter on paintings with military themes by Gerard ter Borch, a subject on which I have published earlier (see below). Kunzle intelligently groups the pictures into four categories. His key painting for the category of carousing soldiers, however, has recently been firmly attributed to Caspar Netscher after the discovery of a signature (Soldiers Carousing in an Inn, 1658, Philadelphia, Johnson Collection). The sections on courting and letter-writing military figures – instances of the soldier as ‘courtier’ – include valuable commentary on the trumpeter’s role in the military and on the instrument itself. But they also include statements that are merely asserted rather than argued or supported. These are not the only instances of unsupported speculation. Discussing Ter Borch’s politics, Kunzle suggests that the artist domesticated the soldier in part as a reaction to the disorder caused by local political tensions. Shortly thereafter, he posits a motivation for the supposed weaknesses and evident hieraticism in Ter Borch’s 1667 group portrait of the Deventer Town Council, imagining a thinly veiled attack on the institution and the characters of its members. (One is reminded of how Hals’s late Regents portraits were once interpreted). His discussions of the artist and of these works seldom lack nuance or complexity, but too frequently they make claims that seem less than well-founded.
Despite these reservations, I find a lot to admire in a book driven by such passion. As Kunzle remarks at one point, ‘Van Mander would not have approved of the book we write here.’ By that he refers to Van Mander’s avowed non-partisanship, the political neutrality he espoused in his writing. Many early twenty-first-century readers will most definitely value this politically inspired book by David Kunzle, not least for the partisan clarity of his judgments.
Alison M. Kettering
Note: For further discussion of military themes in the art of Gerard ter Borch, see my ‘Gerard ter Borch’s Military Men: Masculinity Transformed,’ in The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, A.K. Wheelock, Jr. and A. Seeff, eds. (symposium, Center for Renaissance and Baroque Art, U. of Maryland, 1993), Newark, DE, 2000, 100-119 (please note errata: the first two illustration captions are reversed). Also ‘ ‘War Painting’ in the Netherlands after the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück,’ in: Proceedings of the Colloquium,1648:L’art, la guerre et la paix en Europe, Paris, Louvre, November 20-21, l998, Paris, 1999, 513-539.