Battle painting

Battle painting (Ukrainian batalnyi zhanr, from French bataille, “battle”) comprises works that depict the events of war and the life of an army — fighting, campaigns, the routine of the baggage train. It belongs above all to painting and, to a lesser degree, to sculpture and graphic art. An artist who specialises in the subject is called a battle painter.

The boundaries of the genre are fluid. It is often treated as a special section of history painting; it also overlaps with scenes of everyday life (army and navy routine), with portraiture (images of commanders) and with landscape, while sea battles bring it close to marine painting. Images of battle are known from the art of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome; in the Middle Ages they occur mainly in manuscript illumination. As a genre, battle painting took shape in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Ukrainian art, battle scenes appear among the miniatures of the Kyiv Psalter (1397). The first image of a non-iconic character is considered to be the fight of horsemen and foot soldiers in the scene The Kiss of Judas in the Dormition iconostasis in Lviv, painted in 1638 by Mykola Petrakhnovych. In the nineteenth century, in V. Ovsiichuk’s assessment, the genre did not develop actively, but at the end of the century interest in the Cossack past revived in the work of Serhii Vasylkivskyi and Mykola Ivasiuk. Among twentieth-century masters of battle scenes is Mykola Samokysh (The Entry of Bohdan Khmelnytsky into Kyiv in 1648, 1929; The Fight of Maksym Kryvonis with Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, 1932).