Page 76 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

76 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

An author can surely entertain such two contradicting visions of war simultaneously.
On the other hand, it goes without saying, that this is Swift’s case, who was not interest-
ed in studying the relationship between military conflicts and civil populations in depth,
because he dismissed both prospects, i.e. the aberrations of the cowardly Yahus, namely
animals in human image, who used to live in the land of the Huyhnhnm, but he would
rather point his arrows towards the profession of arms, which he used to define sarcasti-
cally as “the most honorable [profession] of all, because a soldier is a Yahu hired to kill
cold-bloodedly as many of those of his kind as possible without having ever been at-
tacked by them.” As regards the point of view considered herein, Callot’s work is more
2
educational. Callot was an engraver from Lorraine, who used to lived between the 15
th
and 16 centuries and had the time and possibility to document the middle stages of the
th
Thirty Years’ War. A person in his place could comprehend the milestones of a process,
which changed the numbers of the representation of the war, by attaching [them] onto a
story through internal flows, or a story concerning exclusively soldiers, a catalogue of
“collateral” consequences of the same war as the one summarized in an etching dated
the end of the 16 century, in which Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (Italian, 1634-1718) was
th
in charge of illustrating the fire in a city, the carnage suffered by its inhabitants and the
rape of a girl. In this work, he diligently placed [the scene] in a less serious ancient time,
by dressing victims and torturers in roman togas, tunics and body armors, and he also
named [this work] “A soldier observes what he does”, underscoring the umbilical cord,
which keeps to two prospects mentioned herein together. 3
Callot dealt with war as a theme significantly in a gigantic engraving dated 1628 –
obtained by joining of six tables – Siege of Breda, in which he celebrated the capture
of the city by the Spanish General, Ambrogio Spinola. He was an interesting case of
Genoese banker, who transformed himself into a military entrepreneur and commander
in lead, whose purpose was to protect his financial interests directly. The interesting
thing is that Callot got inspired by the drawing of the fortress-city of Breda planned by
a military engineer. In other words, he started off from the representation of war which
underscored the technological and “rational” side thereof, in order to arrive at a histori-
cal narration and a perspective view, which located Spinola, the “hero,” in the first place,
as was rightly the case. Callot used the engraving also to illustrate a series of episodes
from the military life, which was a subject that developed on two lines in the follow-
ing years. On one hand, Exercises militaires, thirteen prints published in 1635 after his
death, which comprised of reduced and simplified recording to a certain extent. From
another point of view, it was also the completion of a famous handbook published in

2 Ivi, p. 437.
3 The art collection of Cassa di risparmio in Bologna. Le incisioni [Engravings], I, Giuseppe Maria
Mitelli, edited by Franca Varignana, Bologna, Cassa di risparmio in Bologna, 1978, table 150. An-
other interesting raid by Mitelli into warfare is offered by table 143, dated 1692, called Frutti di
guerra [Fruits of war] and is illustrated by a vignette: «Europe is on fire and in flames, and let mis-
haps affect those, who long for the war.” But, in this case, Mitelli the “pacifist” moves further within
the military world despite his “ecumenical” title and morals: the “mishaps” concern five veterans
of five different armies, who have left wars with various losses (one solider lost a leg, the ensign’s
head is broken, etc.)