Albrecht Altdorfer - The Battle of Alexander

Albrecht Altdorfer
The Battle of Alexander
1529
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The Instability of the World

This is the Battle of Issus which resulted in the defeat of Darius II of Persia by Alexander of Macedon.  This is the victory of the western world over the eastern world.  In its time, this resonated like the inverse victory of the Ottomans over the Byzantine Empire and the taking of Constantinople, then renamed Istanbul, a disaster that Altdorfer's contemporaries continued to dream of avenging. 

The picture is of modest size – slightly more than a meter wide – yet gives the impression of being immense because of the profusion of details.  Seen from a distance, each warrior blends into the vast armies, with the exception of the protagonists, one fleeing the other.  Perhaps some ambitious scholar has counted the combatants, who can in many cases be distinguished from one another by their arms and headgear – plumed helmets for the Macedonians, turbans for the Persians – but even without counting it seems certain that at least a thousand are individually depicted.  

We find ourselves before an extremely extensive landscape, which we view from a great height.  There is no ordinary foreground, where objects would be notably enlarged: the painter has positioned us in a sort of hot air balloon ahead of its time.  We contemplate the scene below as it extends into a far distance that is yet minutely delineated – the encampments at the entrance to the city spread out on the right, then a strait between mountains that ultimately mingle with the clouds.  The sun appears to be descending into a sort of tunnel: its departing brightness picks out highlights among the soldiers all the way up to the foreground, while an even, golden light continues to bathe the entire battle, a light whose source seems to be elsewhere, even from the opposite direction, as if the rising of this same sun next day is already perceptible.   

Albrecht Altdorfer
The Battle of Alexander (detail)
1529
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The Curve of the Horizon

Beyond the right-hand scenery – temples, ruins, mountains – the landscape extends toward an uneven horizon that, beneath the solar tunnel, presents an outline that is clearly curved.  This fact is aligned with a transformation in world-view.  Since antiquity, some had hypothesized that the world was round, but this remained no more than a theory.  It was only now that the first circumnavigation had been accomplished.  The discovery of America coincided closely with the fall of Constantinople.   Ancient and contemporary history are superimposed here by Altdorfer (regardless of the fact that the victorious side in the battle is reversed).  Echoing the sun as it sets into an abyss on the right, the Islamic moon, in its own tunnel, rises at top left. 

The Heart of War

The multiplicity of combattants around the pursuit between the two monarchs who embody their armies is such that we can't always tell the two sides apart.  Lances, banners, bows, shields are compressed into a single mass of whirling layers.  These are human clouds reproducing on earth a storm in the heavens. 

Centered high above and suspended from some sort of rod in the sky, a large inscribed tablet describing the battle and inviting us to pick out the protagonists from the apparent chaos, appears to oscillate like the needle of a compass.  Whatever transpires will be determined and explained by the divine will.  Anchored to either side of the tablet, swathes of shimmering fabric crack in the wind.  Attached below is a fringed tassel from which hangs a vertical cord, seemingly immobile, with a ring tied to the end.  This marks the point of view we would need to inhabit for full comprehension of the action below, a species of magnifying glass hanging over history, promising to compensate for our remoteness, to protect us from confused despair and grant us the power to isolate from the mass each of these individuals.    

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)