Jacques Callot's Les Miseres et les malheurs de la guerre - Coda

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Images:

1. self-portrait as a war correspondent in The Siege of Breda (1628. detail; a couple of "miseres de la guerre" can already be seen in the background);

2. The Fair at Imprunetta near Florence, Italy (1622);

3. A humorous caprice (c. 1617);

4. scene # 4 of Les Miseres: "Their brutal spirit prompts them to thefts in the wayside inn, which they cover with the fine name of booty. These disturbers of the peace deliberately quarrel in order to avoid paying their host, and even steal his pots and pans. When they have been properly primed with food and drink, they become prone to help themselves to other people's property.";

5. scene # 11: "These damned, infamous robbers, hanging like miserable fruit from the tree, prove in the end that horrible crime and evil purpose is itself an instrument of shame and vengeance, and that it is the destiny of vicious men to undergo sooner or later divine justice." (a similar scene happened in Kirscheidt a year later, in 1634; the Swedish army hanged the population);

6. scene # 17: "When the soldiers have committed so much damage, their enemies the peasants finally ambush them and kill them, stripping them to their shirts. Thus they revenge themselves on these miserable men for their lost property, for which the soldiers alone are to blame." (All translations: David Kunzle.)

Jacques Callot's Les Miseres et les malheurs de la guerre

The year: 1633. The Thirty Years War was raging on. Jacques Callot was the right man to report it.
One of the first reporter-artists (if not the first one) Jacques Callot did many engraving cycles. The first one was Thirty Views of Rome, done a couple of years after he arrived in said city. Many more reportages would follow (Caprices of Various Figures, 1617, The Gypsies, 1621, Gobbi [Hunchbacks: these were Callot's shot at caricature drawing], 1622, The Siege of Breda, 1628). The latter is an impressive cycle of six huge prints recounting the events in a double-tiered strip. Other sieges would follow (Isle of Ré and La Rochelle, 1629 - 31).

Here's a site dedicated to Jacques Callot:

http://www.jacquescallot.com/

Baroque art was protean enough to favor sequentiality. If we add Caravaggio's Realism to the mix we get Jacques Callot's great Les Miseres et les malheurs de la guerre. Callot's drawings were incredibly complex, his lines were supple. His biggest prints, like The Fair at Imprunetta (1622) deny Scott McCloud's assertion that "there's no such thing as a sequence of one!" (Understanding Comics, 20). If the viewer gets lost in all the little, and yet, perfectly clear details, time and space are abolished as separate entities.
Callot's version of war in Les Miseres is not the usual glorification of the winners (in that case it would have been a mediocre piece of propaganda). The exception is the last scene, in which king Louis is incensed. Known once as La vita del soldato Callot narrates the enlistment of the troops and the battle but also what happened afterwards, when mercenaries plundered the war-ravaged region. Civilians were murdereded and raped, but Callot also shows us how they get their revenge killing the brutal soldiers. Punishment abounds: by hanging (Callot's most famous image is "The Hangman's Tree"), by firing-squad, by fire, with a wheel. After the war is over, maimed beggars seek help in front of an hospital. Some "children of the god Mars" even die in the streets. In the end, the true villain is war. Or, what's the same thing, the hubris and greed of a few...

You may see the Miseres, here (repros are far from great though):

http://www.jacquescallot.com/miseres.html

Image:

from the Various Figures series (c. 1617): Callot shows an Italian peddler selling his prints.