4. April 2025, 14h15 - 18h30

Kunsthistorisches Seminar, Raum 131 - St. Alban-Graben 8/10, 4051 Basel

Outline

If recent geopolitical developments have prompted intensified public conversations and debate about war and warfare, Renaissance studies has long pursued a comprehensive understanding of war as a social phenomenon. Harking back to Jacob Burckhardt’s conceptualization of ‘the [Renaissance] state as a work of art’, Renaissance historiography has traditionally taken a holistic view of socio-political processes in which power and violence were deeply intertwined with aesthetics, cultural production, and systems of patronage. War in the Renaissance is a case in point: recent scholarship has made significant inroads in highlighting, for example, the social and financial implications of mercenary cultures, the use of military motifs in representations of the Renaissance state, and contemporary perceptions of the social and moral consequences of war as reflected in artistic and discursive practices and early print cultures.

The 56^th Basel Renaissance Colloquium focuses upon war in the Renaissance as a phenomenon, a practice, and a cultural formation with powerful implications that extended far beyond the battlefield. Inquiring further into the political, institutional, and aesthetic dynamics and consequences of warfare, we propose to examine war as an explicit feature of the Renaissance, both in the sense of an epochal framework of European history and as a potentially transferable historiographical model. Examining war in this light, a series of questions arise: was there a specificity of ‘Renaissance war’, and, if so, what was its impact on subsequent social, economic, technological, and/or and artistic trends? How might the destructive dynamics of warfare have also served as a vector of social transformation? What can be learned from Renaissance ethical and moral regimes that tolerated or even advanced warfare as a political tool while simultaneously pointing to its dangers? How can we tell histories of organized violence as it was experienced by non-combatants and former combatants: persons displaced and dispossessed by warfare; women who traveled with armies as sex-workers, laundresses, and porters; disabled ex-soldiers, whose bodies testified to the brutality of past military campaigns?

Renaissance of War thus invites critical reassessments of the general implications as well as the social, material, and intellectual conditions of organized violence. The meeting is intended as an interdisciplinary forum open to (and seeking to combine) social, political, intellectual, and art historical methods, as well as approaches that engage with non-European/global contexts and influences. We are particularly interested in comparative, connected, and “bottom up” approaches, as well as in thematic contributions relating to, for example: narratives of victory, victimhood, and survival; the aestheticizing, heroizing, and (visual) critique of military violence; the construction, representation, and differentiation of social roles and responsibilities amidst military conflicts; the forms of transformation both foreclosed and propelled by war in the Renaissance.

The colloquium will allow for individual presentations of about 30 minutes in length, followed by questions and a final roundtable discussion.

Shadow Agents of Renaissance War

Stephen Bowd (Edinburgh)

In this paper I will address some intersections between key groups and themes in the history of Renaissance warfare in order to stimulate discussion about future directions for research. First of all, I will present the initial findings of my analysis of the letters written by Italian elite women who were involved in war or war-related activities after 1494. I will then consider how a gendered analysis might be brought more closely into dialogue with other developing fields in the history of war, notably material culture and the evidence of losses of goods during the sacks of cities. What can such evidence, including the extensive insurance claims or lists of bequests made to monasteries after peace is restored, reveal about the different experiences and outlooks of men and women in relation to war? Finally, I will consider the presence of books in warfare ― both as material objects and as sources for a broader and better understanding of that 'well-trained mob' (Josephus), the camp followers or 'campaign community' (John Lynn). 

The Threat of Dispossession in German Treasure Hoards of the 1630s

Allison Stielau (London)

In early modernity the procedures of warfare separated people from their possessions in many different ways, from looting to forced contribution to the purchasing of safety with treasure. The enormous pressure placed on goods in such contexts reveals much about their value, both to civic groups and religious institutions, as well as individuals. Although war seemed adept at reducing all objects to pure financial value and increasing the speed at which goods were traded and displaced, some resonant possessions still motivated efforts to protect and preserve them, thus demonstrating their non-pecuniary significance. This talk considers three treasure hoards that were hidden in the 1630s, when the sieges and battles of the Thirty Years’ War were devastating Southern Germany. Discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these small groups of silver cups, girdles, spoons, and amulets identify the objects most valuable to elite families at this moment and suggest some of the strategic thinking with which historical actors handled their moveable goods when the threat of dispossession loomed. The mode of interpretation required by the treasure hoards departs from many methods of historical and art historical analysis, as well as those of material culture studies, because it is focused not so much on the features of individual objects, and vectors out to the original moment of production, but rather on what can be gleaned about the context of deposition and how that period of fear and instability informed the meaning of a silver cup or girdle in the 1630s. Wordless, largely displaced, and for the most part unable to find connection to historical figures in existing archives, these caches of objects nevertheless offer remarkable evidence for non-combatants’ experience of wartime emergency. They testify to the fear of dispossession while at the same time serving as proof in each case that dispossession did indeed occur.

The Renaissance and the Gun

Catherine Fletcher (Manchester)

The proliferation of handguns into Italy coincided with the Renaissance. Firearm designs and technologies appear in the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Guns were not, however, reborn from the classical world but thoroughly modern weapons. The cultural world of sixteenth-century Europe accommodated quite contradictory attitudes to firearms. In literature, there was general hostility: guns were diabolical, unchivalrous, and impious. Luxury weapons, however, incorporated in their design numerous conventional motifs of the Renaissance court, both in their iconography and their materials. Turning to the world of art, we find further contradictions. Paintings of gun users are few and far between in Italy (unless we count Titian’s equestrian portrait of Charles V), but the Low Countries had a strong tradition of portraying its civic militia with firearms, a trend beginning in the sixteenth century that eventually informed Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Guns were arguably even more acceptable beyond the continent of Europe, in the growing empires, where Fernando Cortés broke decisively with the idea that firearms were the devil’s work, and reported that ‘God had provided’ the ingredients for gunpowder. What can these histories of the gun tell us about the Renaissance?