The Apotheosis of War
Vasily Vereshchagin (1842 to 1904) · 1871
A pyramid of human skulls rises in a scorched valley under a hard blue sky. Crows perch on the skulls and circle overhead, a ruined town lies in the distance, and dead trees stand like scratches on the horizon. Nothing else moves. On the frame Vereshchagin had an inscription carved: dedicated to all great conquerors, past, present and future. The title, The Apotheosis of War, is bitter irony. This is what glory looks like when the armies have gone.
Vereshchagin was a soldier as well as a painter. He served in the Russian campaigns in Central Asia and painted this picture as part of his Turkestan series, at first calling it The Triumph of Tamerlane, a reference to the towers of skulls the medieval conqueror was said to leave outside cities that resisted him. He then made it timeless. Look at the precision of the skulls, each one drawn with the care of an anatomist, and at the sabre cuts and bullet holes he marked on several of them. The bright, dry light of the desert, painted from direct observation, gives the horror a terrible clarity.
The Turkestan paintings shocked audiences in Saint Petersburg and Vienna and were attacked by generals who thought them unpatriotic. Pavel Tretyakov bought the whole series in eighteen seventy four, which is why the Tretyakov holds the largest group of Vereshchagin's work. The artist himself died as he had lived, on the battleship Petropavlovsk when it struck a mine outside Port Arthur in nineteen hundred and four. The painting remains one of the earliest and starkest anti-war statements in European art.
Did You Know? Vereshchagin first called the picture The Triumph of Tamerlane, then renamed it and dedicated it to all conquerors past, present and future.
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