Notes · History of ArtUK · A-Levels

Theme: War in art and architecture

War is one of the three themes of Paper 1 Section B, studied across different cultures, periods and media through named works. This topic traces the great and opposed uses of art in relation to conflict: the glorification of war, the ruler and the hero (Assyrian reliefs, Trajan's Column, David); the counter-tradition of horror and protest (Callot, Goya, Dix, Picasso's Guernica); the commemoration of the dead through the war memorial (Lutyens's Cenotaph, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial); and the role of propaganda and photography in modern war. The aim is a comparative understanding of how art both serves and resists war, built on secure knowledge of specific works.

5 sections~25 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0777 / 12

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge of works representing war across cultures, periods and mediaAO2 · Analyse and compare how war is represented and used, developing a critical response

Operators:compareanalysetracecontextualiseinterpretevaluate

basic level

AS-Level requires knowledge of the theme in a more limited range of examples.

higher level

The full A-Level requires the theme traced comparatively across cultures, periods and media with named works and secure analysis.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Theme: War in art and architecture

War as a theme across cultures and periods#

FoundationPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (War)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

War in art across the periods

Fig. 1War in art across the periods - from the glorifying reliefs and columns of the ancient world, through the protest tradition of Callot and Goya, to the twentieth-century memorial and Picasso's Guernica.

War has been a subject of art since the earliest civilisations, and the theme asks you to trace, across cultures, periods and media, the strikingly different things art has done with it. Because war is at once a matter of state power, of collective memory, of suffering and of belief, the art it has produced ranges from the most public and celebratory to the most private and anguished. Studying war as a theme means holding this range in mind and comparing specific, well-chosen works to bring out how, and why, the representation of conflict has differed so profoundly - which is exactly the comparative approach the examination rewards.

The single most useful orientation is the great opposition between art that glorifies war and art that protests against it. On one side stands a long tradition, running from the ancient world through the Renaissance and beyond, in which art celebrates victory, magnifies the ruler and the hero, and presents war as noble, just or glorious - the art of triumph, commissioned by the powerful to project their might. On the other stands a counter-tradition, gathering force from the seventeenth century onward, in which art exposes war's cruelty, chaos and suffering - the art of protest and mourning, made to horrify rather than to celebrate. Much of the theme can be organised around this axis, and setting a triumphal work against a protesting one is a powerful comparative move.

Between and beside these two poles lies the vast field of commemoration, for one of art's oldest functions in relation to war is to remember - the dead, the fallen, the great deeds and the losses. The war memorial, the monument, the tomb and the history painting all serve memory, and how a society chooses to remember its wars is deeply revealing: whether it raises a triumphal arch to a victory or an abstract wall to name its dead tells you much about its values. Commemoration can shade toward glorification (the victory monument) or toward mourning (the memorial to loss), and the modern history of the war memorial is in large part a shift from the one to the other.

War art must also be read through function and patronage more insistently than almost any other theme, because so much of it was made to do a job for power. A relief glorifying a king's conquests, a column narrating an emperor's campaign, a state portrait of a victorious general, a propaganda poster and a government-commissioned war memorial are all instruments as much as images - they were made to overawe, to justify, to mobilise or to console. Asking who made a war image, for whom, and to what end is therefore central: the same battle can be glorified, mourned or used to recruit, depending on who commissions the picture and why.

Finally, the theme spans every medium and reaches into the modern age of mechanical images. War has been represented in relief sculpture and painting, in the monument and in architecture, and, since the nineteenth century, in photography and film, which transformed how war is seen by bringing its reality before mass audiences. The coming of the camera, and of total war in the twentieth century, changed the theme decisively, and a strong treatment ranges from the ancient relief to the modern memorial and the war photograph. The sections that follow supply the main strands - glorification, protest, commemoration, and propaganda and photography - and the named works on which comparison can be built.

Worked example

Mapping opposed uses of war art

Show how three works embody three different uses of art in relation to war.

Glorification
Trajan's Column in Rome (completed 113 CE) spirals a continuous relief of the emperor's Dacian campaigns up a triumphal column - war narrated as imperial achievement, to celebrate and to overawe.
Protest
Goya's 'Third of May 1808' (painted 1814) confronts the viewer with the terror of civilians shot by a faceless firing squad - war exposed as atrocity and mourned, not celebrated.
Commemoration
Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) inscribes the names of the dead on a plain black wall - war remembered as collective loss, with no victory and no hero.
Compare
The three show war glorified, war protested and war mourned - three opposed uses of art, revealed by setting them side by side.

Result: Three works are placed as glorification, protest and commemoration, demonstrating the comparative, use-mapping approach the theme requires.

Typical mistakes

Treating all war art as one thing rather than distinguishing the opposed traditions of glorification, protest and commemoration.
Listing famous war images without comparing them thematically or asking what each was made to do.

Active revision

List five works treating war from different periods, cultures and media, and for each state in one sentence whether it glorifies, protests or commemorates; then pick two opposites to contrast.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Glorifying war: triumph, the ruler and the hero#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (War: glorification)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

How war is glorified

Fig. 2The recurring means by which art glorifies war - magnifying the ruler and hero, ordered might, the enduring monument, the ennobling cause and heroic classical form.

For most of history, and in most cultures, the dominant use of war in art was to glorify it - to celebrate victory and to magnify the power of the ruler or state who commissioned the work. Because art was made for the powerful, and the powerful made war, the earliest and grandest images of conflict are overwhelmingly triumphal: they present war as a demonstration of might, order and legitimate authority, and the ruler as a conquering hero. Understanding this triumphal tradition, and the visual means by which it works, is the foundation for understanding the protest tradition that later rose against it.

The ancient world supplies the archetypes. The Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth to seventh centuries BCE (such as the celebrated lion hunts and battle scenes carved for the royal palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh, now largely in the British Museum) lined the walls of the king's palace with images of the ruler triumphant in war and the hunt, overwhelming his enemies and beasts - a relentless projection of royal power to overawe all who entered. Roman art perfected the triumphal monument: Trajan's Column (113 CE) narrates the emperor's Dacian wars in a continuous spiral relief, and the triumphal arch (such as the Arch of Titus) framed the victorious return of the army. These works served the state, and their function was to celebrate conquest and legitimise power.

The visual means of glorification are consistent across periods and worth naming, because they recur. War is glorified through the magnification of the victor (made larger, higher, more central than the defeated); through order and discipline (the serried ranks of a well-drilled army against a chaotic enemy); through scale and permanence (the colossal monument, the triumphal column and arch built to last); through the borrowing of classical and heroic form (the general posed like an ancient god or hero); and through the suppression of suffering (the enemy's pain generalised or absent, the victory clean). Reading a triumphal image means identifying these devices and seeing how they turn the brutal fact of war into a spectacle of glory.

The tradition continued into the modern era, above all in the service of the nation-state and its wars. Jacques-Louis David gave Revolutionary and Napoleonic France its heroic images, from the stern martial virtue of the 'Oath of the Horatii' (1784) to the idealised 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps' (1801-05), in which the general is transfigured into a serene, commanding hero on a rearing horse - a masterpiece of political image-making. The equestrian portrait, the battle painting and the victory monument all continued to glorify war and its leaders, and the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes would take this propaganda function to new extremes, a point pursued in the final section.

For analysis, a glorifying work should be read critically as a construction, decoding how it turns war into glory and to whose benefit. Ask what the work wants its audience to feel and believe - awe at the ruler, pride in the nation, the justice of the cause, the naturalness of victory - and how its scale, composition, heroic form and suppression of suffering achieve that. Glorification is never innocent: it is one of the principal ways power has represented and justified its wars, and setting it against the protest tradition brings out sharply what it leaves out and what it is for.

Worked example

Decoding a heroic image of war

Analyse how David's 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps' (1801-05) glorifies its subject.

The pose and composition
Napoleon sits calm and erect on a rearing, wind-swept horse, one arm raised to point the way forward, dominating a strong diagonal that sweeps up the canvas - poise amid drama.
Idealisation over fact
The scene is idealised, not documentary: the real crossing was made on a mule in poor weather, but David presents a serene, commanding hero, suppressing hardship in favour of majesty.
Heroic borrowing
The equestrian format and the names of earlier conquerors carved on the rocks associate Napoleon with the great commanders of history, ennobling him by classical and historical reference.
The function
Commissioned in the service of Napoleon's image, the painting projects the leader as a serene, invincible hero and legitimises his power - war and conquest made glorious.

Result: The portrait is decoded as a construction of heroic majesty through pose, idealisation and heroic reference - glorification read as political image-making.

Typical mistakes

Taking a triumphal image as a neutral record of events rather than a constructed celebration serving its patron.
Missing how glorification works precisely by suppressing the suffering and chaos of war.

Active revision

Take a named triumphal work (a relief, column or heroic portrait) and analyse how its specific devices - scale, composition, heroic form - glorify war and project the power of its patron.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

The horror and protest tradition#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (War: protest)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The anti-war lineage

Fig. 3The protest tradition as a lineage: Callot's early print cycle leads to Goya's Disasters of War, to Dix's unflinching First World War prints, to Picasso's Guernica - each building on the last.

Against the long tradition of glorification there arose, and steadily gathered force, a counter-tradition in which art turns to expose the horror of war rather than to celebrate it - to show its cruelty, chaos, suffering and waste, and to protest and to mourn. This anti-war tradition is one of the most powerful strands of the theme, and it can be traced as a genuine lineage, in which later artists knew and built on the work of earlier ones. Understanding it as a developing tradition, running from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, lets you organise a comparison and see how the protest against war deepened over time.

The tradition has an early landmark in Jacques Callot's series of etchings 'The Miseries and Misfortunes of War' (1633), made in response to the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. In small, crowded prints, Callot showed not glorious battle but the hangings, pillage, torture and misery that war visits on ordinary people - an early, unflinching record of war's cruelty made possible partly by the reproducible medium of the print, which could circulate such images widely. Callot's series established a model: the print cycle as a vehicle for exposing war's human cost, a model Goya would take up and transform.

Francisco Goya is the towering figure of the protest tradition. His great painting 'The Third of May 1808' (1814) shows Spanish civilians being shot by an anonymous French firing squad: the victim flings out his arms in a pose recalling the Crucifixion, brilliantly lit against the dark, while the soldiers are a faceless, mechanical rank - the composition itself indicts the killers and mourns the killed. His series of etchings 'The Disasters of War' (made c.1810-1820, published only in 1863) records atrocity after atrocity with terrible directness and bitter captions, refusing any consolation or glory. Goya made war's horror the whole subject, and did so with an emotional and moral force that has never been surpassed.

The twentieth century, with its industrialised total wars, gave the tradition new urgency. Artists who had seen the trenches, such as the German Otto Dix, depicted the First World War's horror without mercy: his print portfolio 'Der Krieg' ('The War', 1924) and his great triptych of the same subject (1929-32) show the mud, corpses, gas and mutilation of the Western Front in unbearable detail, a furious repudiation of any heroic view of war. Above all, Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' (1937), painted in response to the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, became the century's supreme anti-war image: a huge monochrome canvas of a screaming horse, a bull, a mother with her dead child and a dismembered soldier, fusing Cubist fragmentation with the force of a modern history painting to protest the terror of aerial war on civilians.

For analysis, a protest work should be read for how it produces horror and moral force, and how it inverts the devices of glorification. Where triumphal art magnifies the victor, protest art centres the victim; where glorification suppresses suffering, protest exposes it; where the monument celebrates, the protest work accuses and mourns. Ask how the work uses composition, light, distortion and detail to confront the viewer with war's reality and to compel a moral response. Setting a work such as Goya's 'Third of May' or Picasso's 'Guernica' directly against a triumphal relief or heroic portrait is one of the most illuminating comparisons the theme offers.

Worked example

Analysing Goya's protest

Analyse how Goya's 'The Third of May 1808' (1814) protests against war.

Centre the victim
The composition places the illuminated civilian victim at its heart, arms flung wide, so that all attention and sympathy fall on the killed, not the killers.
Light and gesture
A harsh lantern-light picks out the victim in brilliant white, and his outflung arms echo the crucified Christ, casting him as an innocent martyr.
The faceless killers
The firing squad is a dark, anonymous, mechanical rank seen from behind, dehumanised into an instrument of killing - the opposite of the glorified hero.
The effect
By centring the victim, exposing the terror and indicting the faceless killers, Goya makes the painting an accusation and a mourning - war shown as atrocity, not glory.

Result: Goya's painting is analysed as a moral protest that inverts the devices of glorification, centring the victim and exposing war's horror - the protest tradition made visible.

Typical mistakes

Treating anti-war images as neutral records rather than as constructed, morally charged protests.
Overlooking how protest works deliberately invert the visual devices (magnifying the victim, exposing suffering) that glorification uses.

Active revision

Analyse Goya's 'Third of May 1808' or Picasso's 'Guernica' for how composition, light and distortion produce horror, then contrast it with a triumphal work.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Commemoration and the war memorial#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (War: commemoration)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Types of war memorial

Fig. 4Types of war memorial, from triumph to mourning: the triumphal arch and column, the heroic figurative monument, the abstract cenotaph, and the modern memorial of names.

One of the oldest and most important functions of art in relation to war is commemoration - the preservation of memory - and the war memorial is its great modern form, extending the theme firmly into sculpture and architecture. How a society chooses to remember its wars, and what form it gives to that remembrance, is profoundly revealing of its values, and the memorial is therefore rich material for analysis. The key is that the form of a memorial is an argument about the meaning of the war it commemorates: whether it celebrates a victory or mourns a loss, honours leaders or the ordinary dead, asserts a cause or simply names the fallen.

The oldest tradition of commemoration is triumphal, and it shades into glorification. The triumphal arch and the victory column - from the Roman Arch of Titus and Trajan's Column to Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe in Paris (commissioned 1806, completed 1836) - commemorate war by celebrating victory and the power of the state, and typically carry heroic figurative sculpture and inscriptions of names and battles. This kind of monument remembers war as achievement and glory, and it dominated public commemoration for centuries, giving the victorious state a permanent, imposing assertion of its might at the heart of the city.

The catastrophe of the First World War transformed commemoration, because the sheer scale of the slaughter and the absence of victory in any glorious sense demanded new forms - memorials to mourn mass death rather than to celebrate triumph. Edwin Lutyens's Cenotaph in Whitehall, London (1920), is the great example: an austere, abstract 'empty tomb' of pure geometry, bearing no figurative sculpture, no triumphal imagery and only the words 'The Glorious Dead', it commemorates the fallen through restraint, absence and dignified abstraction rather than heroic display. Alongside it, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier gave the anonymous mass dead a single, universal focus. These forms remember war as collective loss and sacrifice, not as victory.

The later twentieth century pushed commemoration further toward the naming of the individual dead and away from any heroic or even redemptive frame. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982) is the landmark: a long, low wall of polished black granite, sunk into the earth, inscribed with the names of all the American dead in the order they fell, reflecting the visitor's own face among the names. It has no statue, no flag, no assertion that the war was just or victorious - it simply names the dead and lets the living mourn them. Radically abstract and initially controversial, it became one of the most moving and influential memorials ever made, and marks the modern memorial's turn to the individual name and to mourning without triumph.

For analysis, a war memorial should be read as an argument in form about how a war is to be remembered. Ask what the memorial honours (victory, leaders, the cause, or the ordinary dead and the fact of loss); whether it is figurative or abstract, triumphal or mournful, assertive or reticent; how it uses scale, material, site and the relation to the visitor's body to shape the experience of remembrance; and what view of the war its form implies. Comparing a triumphal arch with Lutyens's abstract Cenotaph or Lin's wall of names dramatises the great modern shift in how the West has chosen to remember its wars - from glory to grief.

Worked example

Analysing an abstract memorial

Analyse how Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) commemorates war.

The form
A long, low wall of polished black granite is set into the earth, its two arms meeting at an angle, growing from ground level to head height and back - abstract, quiet and without a single figure.
The names
The wall is inscribed with the names of the American dead in the order they died; the individual is honoured by name, and the mass of names conveys the scale of loss.
The visitor's part
The polished surface reflects the visitor's own face among the names, and the sunken path draws the living down among the dead - commemoration becomes a personal, bodily encounter.
The argument
With no statue, flag or claim of victory or justice, the memorial remembers the war purely as loss to be mourned - a deliberate rejection of the triumphal tradition.

Result: Lin's memorial is analysed as an abstract argument in form - mourning the individual dead without triumph - the modern memorial's turn from glory to grief.

Typical mistakes

Treating all war memorials as the same rather than distinguishing triumphal celebration from the modern memorial of mourning and loss.
Overlooking how abstraction, restraint and the naming of the dead carry meaning as deliberate alternatives to heroic figurative display.

Active revision

Compare a triumphal arch or column with an abstract modern memorial (the Cenotaph or Maya Lin's wall), analysing what view of war each form commemorates.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Propaganda, photography and modern war#

AdvancedPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (War: the modern image)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Glorification versus protest

Fig. 5The theme's central opposition: art that glorifies war (celebrating victory, magnifying the ruler, suppressing suffering) versus art that protests it (exposing horror, centring the victim, mourning).

The modern age transformed the theme of war through two developments: the rise of mass propaganda in the service of total war, and the coming of photography, which brought the reality of war before mass audiences for the first time. Both belong to the theme because both are ways of representing and using war, and both intensify the underlying question of the whole topic: is the image serving war or resisting it, glorifying or exposing? The modern war image is where glorification and protest confront each other most directly, and where the power of the image to move and to mislead is greatest.

Propaganda is the deliberate use of images to shape opinion and mobilise a population for war, and the twentieth century's total wars and totalitarian regimes made it a central instrument. The recruitment poster, the heroic depiction of one's own soldiers and the demonising caricature of the enemy all served to unite the home front, sustain morale and justify the war - a modern, mass continuation of the ancient glorifying tradition, now aimed not at overawing subjects but at mobilising citizens. Reading propaganda means decoding how it simplifies, idealises and demonises to persuade, and recognising it as the descendant of the triumphal monument in the age of mass media.

Photography changed everything by bringing the appearance of unmediated reality to the representation of war. From the earliest war photographs - Roger Fenton's images of the Crimean War (1855) and the photographs of the American Civil War dead - the camera seemed to show war as it really was, and this apparent truthfulness gave the war photograph enormous power, both to protest (by exposing horror) and, precisely because it looks like truth, to serve propaganda (a photograph can be posed, selected or captioned to mislead). Photographers such as Robert Capa, whose images of the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy landings became icons, made the photograph the characteristic modern form of war-witnessing, and the photograph's claim to truth is itself something to analyse critically.

The modern reality of war also fed directly back into painting and the fine arts, sharpening the protest tradition. Picasso's 'Guernica' (1937) is the supreme instance: it responds to a specifically modern horror - the aerial bombing of a defenceless town, an atrocity of mechanised total war - and it was made for a modern public setting, the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, to protest before the world. Modern war art, whether photograph or painting, confronts forms of violence (industrial slaughter, aerial bombing, the targeting of civilians) that the older glorifying tradition could not contain, and this is part of why the protest tradition became so dominant in the modern representation of war.

This brings the whole theme to its central, comparative point, which a strong answer draws together: across cultures, periods and media, art has both served war and resisted it, and the deepest analysis sets these opposed uses against each other. The triumphal relief and the recruitment poster glorify and mobilise; Goya's etchings, Dix's prints, Picasso's 'Guernica' and Lin's wall of names protest and mourn; and the war photograph can do either, depending on who makes and uses it. Asking of any war image whether it glorifies or protests, celebrates power or exposes suffering, serves war or resists it - and how its form achieves that - is the governing question of the theme, and comparing works across that divide is what a high-scoring treatment does.

Worked example

The theme's central comparison

Show how setting a glorifying and a protesting work against each other answers the theme's governing question.

The glorifying work
A triumphal relief or a recruitment poster celebrates victory and might, magnifies the ruler or the heroic soldier, demonises or omits the enemy, and suppresses suffering - the image serving war.
The protesting work
Picasso's 'Guernica' or Goya's 'Third of May' centres the civilian victim, exposes terror and mutilation, and refuses any glory or consolation - the image resisting war.
The shared power
Both harness the image's power to move an audience, and both are shaped by function and patronage - one commissioned to mobilise, the other made to accuse.
The governing question
Asking whether each image glorifies or protests, serves power or exposes suffering, and how its form achieves that, is the comparison the whole theme turns on.

Result: The two works are compared across the theme's central divide - serving versus resisting war - demonstrating the comparative analysis a high-scoring treatment requires.

Typical mistakes

Taking a war photograph as simple, unmediated truth, ignoring how posing, selection and captioning can make it serve propaganda.
Failing to bring the theme to its comparative point - whether an image serves or resists war - which is what distinguishes the strongest answers.

Active revision

Choose a propaganda poster and a protest work (or a war photograph), and analyse how each uses the image to serve or to resist war; then state the comparison the whole theme turns on.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

References & sources

Sources

Pearson Edexcel

Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art

Theme: War in art and architecture

5 sections~25 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Theme: War in art and architecture

Key points

Mapping opposed uses of war art

Key points

Decoding a heroic image of war

Key points

Analysing Goya's protest

Key points

Analysing an abstract memorial

Key points

The theme's central comparison

Sources

Theme: War in art and architecture

Key points

Mapping opposed uses of war art

Key points

Decoding a heroic image of war

Key points

Analysing Goya's protest

Key points

Analysing an abstract memorial

Key points

The theme's central comparison

Sources