The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Albrecht Altdorfer · the Alexanderschlacht · the one panel, as it now stands, scored as one work · oil on panel, upright, about 158 by 120 centimetres · signed and dated 1529 · painted for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria as one of a set of history pictures for the ducal residence in Munich · Alte Pinakothek, Munich, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections
Mode
History painting turned into a cosmic landscape; the battle picture set inside the world landscape and the heavens
Mythos
Sun against moon, day against night, West against East; the hero overtaking the fleeing king; history as a sequence of world powers
Phase
The moment of decision at Issus, 333 BC: Alexander with couched lance at the centre of the throng, Darius fleeing in a chariot drawn by white horses
Presentation
Oil on panel, about 158 by 120 centimetres, upright; battle in the lower half, the curved earth, the sea and the sky in the upper; an inscribed tablet hanging from a cord in the sky; signed and dated 1529
Register
Grandeur and dread in one key, warm and dense in the throng, cool and blue in the distance, lit by one sun
Scale
Two kings, thousands of horsemen and foot soldiers, the known world and the heavens
Governing Proposition
A ducal commission for a matched set of history pictures asks for a famous battle, and the painter gives the battle the lower half of an upright panel and gives the upper half to the curve of the earth, the sea and a sky where the sun and the moon stand opposed. The wager of the panel is that history is a motion of the world and the heavens, made of multitudes, in which the decisive man is a small figure the eye must search for, and that an ancient victory can be painted as the battle of the painter’s own year.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The panel is oil on wood, upright, about 158 by 120 centimetres, signed and dated 1529, and it hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Its lower half is a battle. An immense mass of horsemen and foot soldiers, numbering in the thousands, in the armour and costume of the sixteenth century, fills the ground and pours across a plain toward the right. Lances and banners stand up out of the mass like a forest. No figure in the near ground is singled out, and no face draws the eye. The first thing the picture gives is number.
Then the eye searches. At the centre of the throng, Alexander rides in armour with a couched lance, driving after Darius, who flees in a chariot drawn by white horses. That is the decision of the day, and it is a small thing in the field, found only by looking for it. Around it the mass goes on in every direction. Below at the right, on the shore, stand a town and a fortress. Above the battle the land opens into a landscape of mountains and water, and the landscape keeps opening.
It opens into the world. The eastern Mediterranean is seen from an impossible height, sea, islands, coasts and mountains, with the curvature of the earth visible at the horizon, which stands well above the centre of the panel. Over it is an enormous sky. At the right the sun breaks through a rent in banked cloud and its light spills over the sea; at the upper left a pale crescent moon stands opposite; the clouds swirl between them. And in that sky, hanging from a cord, is a large tablet with a fringed cloth and a Latin inscription giving the victory and the numbers of the Persian dead. Battle below, world and heaven above: the picture is read upward.
Movement II
The panel was painted for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, as one of a set of history pictures of famous battles and heroines for the ducal residence in Munich, made by several painters working to a common format. Its subject is Alexander the Great’s defeat of Darius III at Issus, in 333 BC. The painter was Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburg, who lived from about 1480 to 1538 and was a painter, a printmaker and an architect to his city. The other pictures of the set are context for this one and are not part of the work scored here.
What the commission inherited was the history picture of the German Renaissance and the battle print: a narrative of figures, a horizon low or moderate, the deed in front where it can be read. The common format fixed the panel’s shape, and the companion pictures show what was expected of it. Beside that stood two other things the painter knew well: his own invention of the pure landscape, in which the land is the whole subject, and the world landscape of Patinir, a high view over a composite earth.
He turned the history picture into a cosmic landscape. The viewpoint was lifted until the earth curved; the deed was shrunk to a point within an ocean of figures; the upper half of the panel was given to the sky and the known world, and history was set inside geography and the heavens. No one had placed a historical battle inside a vision of the globe. The stake was a real one: a ducal commission for a matched set, in which a painter who gave half his panel to the sky and painted a hero the eye must search for risked the patron’s displeasure. The turn was made from elements already in play, and it stayed largely a single act; but it was made.
Movement III
The tablet hangs from nothing. It is a written count of the dead, suspended over the battle on a cord that is tied to no visible thing, its fringed cloth stirring in the same air as the clouds. It states in words what the image cannot count, and it states it as a number. Beneath it the picture shows thousands of men and no single death that matters. Together they are the picture’s two ways of knowing a slaughter, the count and the vision, and the panel holds them side by side. Neither weighs the slaughter. That is the limit of what the picture brings into the open, and it is part of what it shows.
What can be stated holds. The individual is drowned in history: the soldiers are indistinguishable, and the man on whom the day turns is a small figure in their midst. History is shown as a motion of the world and the heavens rather than as the deed of a hero, though a hero is at its centre. And the past is painted as the present. Alexander’s men wear the armour of 1529, the year the Ottoman army stood before Vienna, so that an ancient victory of West over East is seen as the battle of the painter’s own year, and time folds.
These are meanings, not a mood, and they are great ones. They are given as vision rather than set out. The panel does not distinguish triumph from catastrophe, and its truth about history is a truth of scale more than of the human condition: it shows a view of time in which past and present and end are one, and holds that view rather than uncovering it. Whether the picture celebrates or appals is a question it leaves open, and the question has stayed open for almost five centuries.
Movement IV
The sky is the picture’s height. The sun bursts through banked cloud at the right and its light runs out over the sea; the crescent moon stands pale at the upper left; between them the clouds wheel as if the heavens themselves were the battle. Day stands against night, West against East, light against darkness, and the earthly battle below is their image. The pairing organises the whole upper half and directs the eye, and it gives the panorama its apocalyptic air. Whether the four world empires of the Book of Daniel, Alexander’s the third, stand behind it is argued rather than settled; the opposition of sun and moon needs no gloss.
The upright format is the instrument of this. It lets earth and heaven stand one over the other, so that the eye climbs from the press of horsemen at the foot, through the forest of lances, past Alexander and the fleeing chariot, to the town on the shore, the curve of the Mediterranean world and the sun breaking through: one panel that is a ladder from men to heaven. Only painting holds the minute and the immense in one field at one finish, so that the eye goes from a horseman’s plume to the far coasts without a change of focus. A narrative, or a moving camera, would take apart what the panel holds at once.
The making carries the claim. Thousands of figures are individuated in armour, plume, harness and colour; the lances are one rhythmic mass and particular shafts at once; the light of the one sun is carried across water, cloud, armour and coast in one key; the passage from the warm, dense foreground to the cool blue distance has no break. The sky’s swirl is painted with a freedom that looks forward by centuries, while the battle is painted like a miniature. The costs are plain at close view: horses and men repeat in type and stand stiff in movement, and the figure drawing is below Dürer’s. One seam shows, where the sixteenth century crowd meets the visionary sky, at the town and camp on the right above all.
Movement V
The panel stayed in the Wittelsbach collection from its making. In 1800 Napoleon’s forces carried it to France, and it came back after 1815; it is now one of the central works of the Alte Pinakothek. For centuries before that it was a ducal picture, seen by few. Its form is whole and legible: the battle, the two kings, the tablet, the curved world, the sun and the moon all survive. Whether the panel was cut down at its edges, and how much sky was lost if so, is not settled here; the sun’s breach, the moon and the curve of the earth are there.
In its own field it moved little. The painters of the Danube School ended with their generation; the Reformation and the turn toward Italy carried German painting elsewhere; and a panel in a ducal residence redirected little in its decade. Its reach came late and largely outside painting, as a kinship of temper with the later landscape of the sublime rather than as a line of pictures descending from it. Bruegel’s world landscapes stand beside it rather than after it: The Tower of Babel (8.9) sets history and hubris in a world seen from above with a fuller disclosure and a wider reach, and The Hunters in the Snow (8.7) stands level with it. Dürer’s Melencolia I and Knight, Death and the Devil (8.8 each) stand a tenth above it on the strength of their reach.
The twentieth century found it in the study of history. Reinhart Koselleck opened Vergangene Zukunft (1979) with it, as the image of a time in which past, present and end were one, and the question it puts to the historian has kept it in argument since: whether it pictures 1529 and the Turks or eternity, whether the sun is Alexander’s or God’s, how its geography was built and from what maps, what its inscriptions do. In Munich the chariot is still fleeing toward the edge of the panel, the hero is still a small figure the eye must find, and the sun is still breaking through over a world seen whole.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction, since the panel has no text but its tablet. The large members cannot go: Alexander and Darius, the one point of decision in a mass that otherwise has none; the mass itself, whose numberlessness is the claim that history is made of multitudes swept along; the tablet, which states in words the reckoning the image cannot count; the curved earth, which puts the battle on the scale of the world; the sun and the moon, which make it a cosmic event. What yields is extent within the mass. The multitude is required, but not any given hundred of it, and a battle of half the figures would say the same; the town and camp at the right, and some distant ranges, are rich rather than needed. A battle crowd is additive by nature, and that holds the axis at 8.3.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds. The individual is drowned in history: the soldiers are indistinguishable, and the decisive man is found only by searching; the tablet counts the dead while the picture shows no single death that matters. History is shown as the motion of the world and the heavens, not as the deed of a hero, though a hero is at its centre. And the past is painted as the present: Alexander’s men wear the armour of 1529, the year the Ottoman army stood before Vienna, and time folds. These are meanings, not a mood. Held at 8.2, below the gate, because they are given as vision rather than articulated: the picture does not weigh the slaughter it counts, and its truth about history is one of scale more than of human condition.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is the work’s nature, and it recurs everywhere. The sky is one of the great heights of European painting: the sun bursting through a rent in banked cloud at the right, its light spilling over the sea, the pale crescent moon opposite, the clouds wheeling between as if the heavens were the battle. The curved horizon and the Mediterranean seen from above give the vertigo of a god’s view. Below, the forest of lances and the flood of horsemen give the sublime of number, terror and grandeur together. The tablet hanging from nothing has its own strangeness, a document suspended over the world. Held a step below the top by its single register: no tenderness or quiet stands against the grandeur, and the battle half works by accumulation rather than by any one moment of transport.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Myth is built, and built into the structure. The battle stands under the sun and the moon opposed in the sky: day against night, West against East, a cosmic struggle of light and darkness of which the earthly battle is the image. The pairing is not ornament; it organises the upper half and directs the whole. The hero overtaking the fleeing king is the oldest of victories. Whether the four world empires of the Book of Daniel, Alexander’s the third, stand behind the panorama is argued in the literature rather than settled; the apocalyptic air does not depend on it. The particulars stay particular: the chariot, the white horses, the fringed cloth, a town on a shore. Held at 8.7 because the archetype is carried by the sky and the composition more than by the figures, too small and too many to bear myth themselves.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the history picture of the German Renaissance and the battle print: a narrative of figures, a horizon low or moderate, the deed in front. The commission fixed the format, and the companion pictures of the set show what was expected. The turn: a history painting made into a cosmic landscape, the viewpoint lifted until the earth curves, the deed shrunk to a point within an ocean of figures, the upper half given to the sky and the known world. It draws on the painter’s own invention of pure landscape and on Patinir’s world landscape, but no one had set a historical battle inside a vision of the globe. The stake was real in a ducal commission for a matched set. Held below 9.0 because its elements were already in play and the departure stayed largely a single act.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The upright format is the instrument: it lets earth and heaven stand one over the other, the battle below and the cosmos above, so that the eye climbs from the press of men to the curve of the world to the sun, and the meaning is that climb. Only painting can hold the minute and the immense at once, every lance and every cloud given at the same finish, so that one looks from a horseman’s plume to the far coasts in a single field. The tablet, words hung in the image, sets the picture’s two ways of knowing, count and vision, side by side. A narrative, or a film’s moving camera, would separate what the panel holds at once. Held below the top because the scale is a cabinet history picture’s, and a print could carry much of the battle half.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, across almost five centuries, much of them in a ducal and then a public collection, with a reception that has grown. The twentieth century made the panel a crux for the historian’s question of time: Reinhart Koselleck opened Vergangene Zukunft (1979) with it, as an image of a history in which past, present and end were one. The open questions are real: whether it is a picture of 1529 and the Turks or of eternity; whether the sun is Alexander’s or God’s; how its geography is constructed and from what maps; what the inscriptions do; whether the painting celebrates or appals. Held at 8.6 because the scholarship is deep but concentrated, chiefly German and art historical, and because much of what the image yields on return is more of the same density rather than new meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is German painting of the 1520s and 1530s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a history picture could hold, the deed set inside the globe and the heavens, landscape claiming the main part of a commissioned narrative. The reach is narrower. The Danube School ended with its painters; the Reformation and the Italianate turn carried German painting elsewhere; the panel stayed in the ducal collection, seen by few, and redirected little in its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and largely outside the field, a kinship of temper with the later landscape of the sublime rather than a line of descendants, Bruegel’s world landscapes beside it rather than after it, and a large presence in twentieth century thought about history, Koselleck above all. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, to 8.0.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost five centuries. The form is whole and legible: every part that carries the meaning survives, the battle, the two rulers, the tablet, the curved world, the sun and the moon. Whether the panel was trimmed at its edges, above all at the top, is not settled here; if it was, a band of sky is lost, a modest charge to a work whose sky is half its argument. Presence: in the Wittelsbach collection from its making, carried to France by Napoleon’s forces in 1800 and returned after 1815, and now one of the central works of the Alte Pinakothek; a long ducal seclusion before the public collection weighs a little. The figure, 9.2, sits in the band for centuries with the form whole, held toward its lower end for the uncertainty at the edges and the centuries of limited view.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of oil on panel, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the picture’s claim depends on finish carried to the smallest unit across the whole field. Thousands of figures are individuated in armour, plume, harness and colour; the lances are drawn as one rhythmic mass and as particular shafts at once; the sun’s light is carried across water, cloud, armour and distant coast in one key; the passage from the warm, dense foreground to the cool blue distance is made without a break; the sky’s swirl is painted with a freedom that looks forward by centuries while the battle is painted like a miniature. The tablet’s lettering and cloth are exact. Costs are charged: horses and men are repetitive in type and stiff at close view, and the figure drawing is below Dürer’s. Held at 9.2 for that.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a foot soldier’s plume in the lower corner and the sun breaking through the clouds at the upper right. One law holds them. Everything in the picture, men, banners, mountains, sea and sky, is drawn into one motion, a vortex that runs from the press at the foot through the curve of the earth to the wheeling clouds, and everything is painted at one intensity of finish and lit from the one sun. The tablet obeys too: it hangs in the sky and its cloth stirs in the same air. The range, from the smallest figure to the globe and the heavens, is very wide, and it holds. Held at 8.9 for a seam: the battle is a sixteenth century crowd under a cosmic sky, and the join between the narrative half and the visionary half, the town and camp at the right above all, is felt as a join.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held are many for one panel, and the upright integrates them, earth below heaven. War and the state: empires in collision. History: the passage of one world power to another, and the present of 1529 seen in the past. Geography: the known world laid out from above. The cosmos: sun, moon and the curve of the earth. The sacred, as the frame of history’s ending, if the reading after Daniel holds. What holds the axis at 7.9 is what is absent or barely present. There is no consciousness, since no figure has an inner life the picture attends to; there is no labour but killing, no ordinary life, and no family the picture attends to. Within the rubric’s scale the panel falls short of the works that hold persons as well as worlds.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.2, and The Sublime at 9.1. A form whole and legible at almost five centuries, its sun, moon and curved earth intact; a finish carried to the smallest unit across thousands of figures and one sky, one light in one key from the near plume to the far coast; and an elevation that recurs everywhere, the sublime of number below and of the heavens above.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: war, the state, history, geography, the cosmos and the sacred are held in one upright, while consciousness, labour other than killing, ordinary life and the family are absent. Below the rest, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0: great force in its field, with a reach that came late and mostly outside painting. Next, The Unconcealment at 8.2: a disclosure about history given as vision, of scale more than of human cost. The three are one fact: the panel sees the world from a height at which persons cannot be seen.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 falls three tenths short, a disclosure given as vision rather than articulated, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 falls five tenths short, a reach that came late and largely outside its field. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The twelve sum to 103.8, an average of 8.65 that displays 8.7; the aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the panel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the panel, not from a visit, scored as the one panel as it now stands: The Battle of Alexander at Issus (the Alexanderschlacht), by Albrecht Altdorfer, oil on panel, signed and dated 1529, painted for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria and now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. The composition, the commission, the removal to France in 1800 and the return after 1815 are secure; the dimensions are given only as about 158 by 120 centimetres. The other pictures of the ducal set are context and are credited on no axis; Koselleck is reception, weighed on return and reach, never as the object. The figures in the throng are not counted. The inscription on the tablet is not quoted or transcribed, and nothing on this page is quoted but the title of Koselleck’s book. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the kind of wood and the exact dimensions, whether and how far the panel was cut down at its edges, the wording of the inscription, the meaning of the figures on the banners, the form of the signature, the names and painters of the companion pictures, the Romantic reception in Paris, the story of where the panel hung in France, and the condition of the paint; the reading of the panel after the Book of Daniel is stated as argued, not as settled.