Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Dedication
- Editorial Note
- I Defining Medievalism(s) II: Some More Perspective(s)
- Medievalism as Fun and Games
- Medievalism and Excluded Middles
- Medievalitas Fugit: Medievalism and Temporality
- Medievalists, Medievalism, and Medievalismists: The Middle Ages, Protean Thinking, and the Opportunistic Teacher-Scholar
- Living with Neomedievalism
- Tough Love: Teaching the New Medievalisms
- II Interpretations
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Medievalitas Fugit: Medievalism and Temporality
from I - Defining Medievalism(s) II: Some More Perspective(s)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Dedication
- Editorial Note
- I Defining Medievalism(s) II: Some More Perspective(s)
- Medievalism as Fun and Games
- Medievalism and Excluded Middles
- Medievalitas Fugit: Medievalism and Temporality
- Medievalists, Medievalism, and Medievalismists: The Middle Ages, Protean Thinking, and the Opportunistic Teacher-Scholar
- Living with Neomedievalism
- Tough Love: Teaching the New Medievalisms
- II Interpretations
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Summary
At the beginning of his influential monograph Futures Past Reinhart Kosellek compares two distinct moments in the reception history of the famous battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great's Greek army defeated the Persians in 333 BCE. One, Albrecht Altdorfer's widely known historical painting, Alexanderschlacht, unites on a canvas of 1.5 square meters everything that was known, in the early sixteenth century, about the impressive military victory that ushered in Hellenism. Noting various kinds of anachronism employed by Altdorfer, Kosellek remarks:
Viewing the painting in the Pinakothek, we think we see before us the last knights of Maximilian [scil. Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor of the Habsburg empire, 1493–1519] or the serf-army at the Battle of Pavia. From their feet to their turbans, most of the Persians resemble the Turks who, in the same year the picture was painted (1529), unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna. In other words, the event that Altdorfer captured was for him at once historical and contemporary. Alexander and Maximilian, for whom Altdorfer had prepared drawings, merge in an exemplary manner; the space of historical experience enjoys the profundity of generational unity. The state of contemporary military technology still did not in principle offer any obstacle to the representation of the Battle of Issus as a current event. Machiavelli had only just devoted an entire chapter of his Discourses to the thesis that modern firearms had had little impact on the conduct of wars. The belief that the invention of the gun eclipsed the exemplary power of Antiquity was quite erroneous, argued Machiavelli. Those who followed the Ancients could only smile at such a view. The present and the past were enclosed within a common historical plane.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Studies in Medievalism XVIIIDefining Medievalism(s) II, pp. 31 - 43Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009