“Watch me attack!”: Violence and Visual Culture in Premodern Wars
2 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Mark K Erdmann, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Dr Mark K Erdmann, University of Melbourne
Dr John Gagné, University of Sydney
Shiqiu Liu, University of Melbourne
The framing of war can be as fraught as its unfolding. This panel will focus on several pre-modern East Asian and European art works that were born of and grapple with war and ultimately served to demonstrate the worth of the violence which forged them. Subjects to be considered include early 17th-century paintings of Japan’s 12th-century civil wars and the role of these images in negotiating warrior identity in peacetime; a biographical handscroll of a defected general and its unique perspective on the Mongol invasions of the 13th century; and the decorated banners around which European Renaissance soldiers rallied and died. The panelists will discuss how actions, violence, emotions and identities were manipulated through an interaction of visual and textual materials, and how soldiers and veterans found justification and closure through the creation of symbols and memorials. Moreover, the panel will seek to reconcile the notion of ‘winners writing history’ with the reality that war creates trauma for all involved. These retellings of the warriors and witnesses are not just records of historical episodes but also provide precious lessons on the ‘eternal recurrence’ of war in human history.
Heike Revisited: Seventeenth-Century Paintings of the Genpei War and The Kabukimono Generation
Dr Mark K Erdmann, University of Melbourne
War is a state that is difficult to leave behind. In 1616 and after over a century of civil war on the Japanese archipelago, the Tokugawa clan emerged as the undisputed victor of these conflicts and ushered in a quarter-millennium of peace. The pax-Tokugawa was not, however, inevitable. In its initial decades, a critical paradox loomed: the identity of samurai, the ruling hereditary class, were proudly defined by their martial skills, but their monopoly on violence required an extreme reigning in to ensure future stability. This paper will explore one by-product of this paradox: a sudden boom in paintings depicting the twelfth-century Genpei war. This subject, popularized in the war chronicle The Tale of Heike, paralleled the moment as it too saw the rise of a new military government and return of stability. Critically, the stories of this war and its heroes also spoke to a lost generation of young men known as kabukimono. Struggling to find a place in a world where the stories of their father’s battle exploits could never be relived, these images of warriors from a by-gone era served to demonstrate a new ideal of soldier-gentleman for peacetime.
Vows, Death, and the Immortal Flag in Premodern Europe
Dr John Gagné, University of Sydney
The twenty-first century reminds us that flags are elemental in the visual culture of conflict: they are wielded both by resisters (such as protesters or terrorists) and by defenders of norms (governments, NGOs, and religious organizations). But even if our own day now wages ‘quantum war’ – i.e., conflict mediated through the visually saturated infosphere – flags as tools and tokens of hot wars have all but vanished. This paper rewinds the clock several centuries to investigate an era in European history (roughly 1350-1650) when flags and banners performed crucial representational, moral, and emotional work on battlefields. It outlines the strategic function these semaphores performed, but more urgently, it interrogates their mystical qualities, particularly the history of corporate and individual commitments to die for a flag and explores the interlocking idea of self-sacrifice for one’s cause. This was a world in which the human could perish, but the flag had to survive. How did banners become such numinous objects, imbued with these elemental qualities? I explore how the materiality of flags invited such mystical projections, and how the life-and-death stakes of warfare made them tutelary fetish objects – that is, charismatic tokens of oaths, devotion, and protection.
Who are the Mongols? — Visual Representation of the Mongol Armies in the War
Shiqiu Liu, University of Melbourne
The Mongols’ brutality shook the world when their armies swept across Asia in the thirteenth century. Although there are many documents on the Mongol conquest, visual depiction on the actual Mongol wars is rare. This paper will present three works on real events of the Mongol attacks. The most familiar Japanese scroll M?ko Sh?rai Ekotoba (the Mongol invasion of Japan) reveals with progress the different attitudes of the ethnic-diverse invasion army towards the war. Two pages from the Diez albums on the ‘Fall of Baghdad’ shows the Muslims were not hesitating to demonstrate the military strength of the Mongols to reflect their own engagement. The third painting created in China further complicates the understanding on the components of the Mongol army. A defection depicted here without modification and a transformation of the protagonist’s identity speak directly about the contemporaneous perception of the Mongols both as their opponent and as one of their members. The three Asian works, when viewed together, stimulate further thoughts on who were taken as the ‘Mongols’ in these wars, and the answer will expand our understanding on the complicated nature of medieval wars and the people involved in it.
Biographies
Dr Mark K Erdmann, University of Melbourne
Mark K Erdmann is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Melbourne. Erdmann specializes in Japanese pre-modern architecture and the intersection of space, painting, carpentry, and power. His research focuses on castles, warrior residences, palaces, as well as the Jesuit mission in Japan and their impact on visual culture. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2016 and Masters from the University of London, SOAS in 2001. He is currently working on a book titled Performing Hegemony: Oda Nobunaga and Azuchi Castle in Context. Erdmann is a core member of the Azuchi Screens Research Network, a group of scholars and artists attempting to discover the fate of a lost painting of Azuchi Castle gifted by Oda Nobunaga to Pope Gregory XIII via the Jesuits in 1585.
Dr John Gagné, University of Sydney
John Gagné is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney. Much of his research explores dysfunction in premodernity: in systems, politics, media, and materials. His work has recently been supported by fellowships from the Villa I Tatti (2016-17) and the Australian Research Council (2017-22). His book, Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars appeared with Harvard University Press in 2021. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond. His current research includes projects on the history of document loss in the age of paper; on medieval prosthetics; and on the materiality of flags and banners.
Shiqiu Liu, University of Melbourne
Shiqiu Liu is a PhD candidate now in the University of Melbourne and her current research is on art works produced under the cultural exchanges stimulated by the Mongol rule of Eurasia in the fourteenth century, focusing especially on art made by professional artisans for the ethnically non-Chinese or believers of foreign religions during this period. She is interested in pre-modern artistic exchanges through cultural communications between China and other places, especially areas around East and Central Asia.