Martial Virtues Research Articles

Venus’ födelse

Summary Of all old master drawings there is hardly anyone more fully documented than the drawing with which we are here dealing. If we include all the preliminary steps, we may say that its way into being began already in 1695, when Daniel Cronström, the Swedish envoy in Paris, for the first time recommended the painter Antoine Coypel for a royal Swedish commission. His addressee was the architect and future superintendent Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, and it is in their extensive correspondence that we can follow this lengthy affair in all its details. Tessin suggested, to begin with, to let Coypel answer for the panel of the main altar of the Uppsala cathedral, a work for which he himself felt a great responsibility, but the more Cronström furnished him with engravings and information about Coypel, the more it became evident that the commission in prospect ought to be of a more secular, not to say intimate character. The next move was therefore to have Coypel paint a cabinet piece for the King, Charles XI. Several subjects from Ancient mythology and history were considered, but there was never an opportunity to present the project to the King. The commission would have come to nothing, all the more so as Charles XI died in 1697. But in 1699 the situation changed totally, mainly thanks to the artistic interest of the young successor on the throne, Charles XII. Every evening, Tessin and the adolescent king spent hours discussing engravings of buildings and pictures, and the remarkable thing happened that this sovereign, who more than any other Swedish monarch was to promote the martial virtues, became particularly attached to the oeuvre of Coypel. Consequently Coypel was again ordered to present a series of suitable subjects for a painting, now with particular address to the young king. After having proposed 17 titles, the painter was declared free to chose between the three that were preferred by the King. Coypel decided on The Birth of Venus, a choice which pleased all parties involved. This was Charles XII's first commission of a painting, and perhaps his last as well, if one excepts portrait commissions. In 1700, Coypel's preliminary design was sent to Stockholm for the final approval. However, during that spring the great Nordic war broke out, and our young king soon forgot about this project of a French cabinet piece. But the drawing still exists (Nationalmuseum, THC 4023), and it offers a great deal of interest to the art historian. Since it was intended to give an idea of the final painting, it lacks that broad verve, which makes us appreciate preliminary designs. The drawing is, in fact, far more carefully carried out than Coypel's sketches usually are. Our main concern must be the lay‐out of the composition. After having ordered Aeolus to gather the winds, Neptune is leaving the scene to the right, giving way to Venus, who occupies the center of the picture. By this arrangement Coypel has created a contrast between the accessory opening actions in the periphery and the main action in the center. In the development of marine mythologies, this solution offers an intermediate stage. There is still a considerable distance to Boucher's Triumph of Venus, but on the other hand Poussin's marine mythologies offer a far more rigid composition and hardly any waves at all — to say nothing of Raphael's Galathea, who is the ancestress of this whole genre. Coypel's version may be said to represent the stage to which it rightly belongs by its date, 1700, on the threshold between the Baroque and the age of Rococo. However, the moment we consider what this composition meant to the artist himself, we should not overestimate its importance. By the time Coypel got the commission, he had already traced the further development of marine mythologies in several studies, which by their lofty and broad technique more definitely point towards the taste of the Rococo. The Stockholm drawing can easily be brought back to one of these, a brilliant drawing in the Louvre, which stages The Rape of Europe amidst a furioso of black chalk strokes. Compared with this sketch not only the painted oeuvre of Coypel may appear rather tame, but the Stockholm drawing as well. We must also honestly admit that Coypel, who was mainly in the services of the Orléans and the future Regent, cannot have attached a very great importance to this Swedish commission. At the end, we need not be sorry for him that it lead to nothing, or almost nothing — he was recompensed a few years later with designing a medal commemorating the recent victories of Charles XII (Nationalmuseum, THC 4035).

Stoics, Cynics, and the Spartan Revolution

In one of the supreme ironies of history, the austere Lycurgan system at Sparta failed in its primary aim – the fossilization of martial virtue – and succeeded in military victories, the heady profits of which undermined the precarious communism of the bivouac state. Conditioned to repress fear, the Spartan compensated by indulging greed – bribery, not cowardice, was his fatal weakness. After the collapse of the Spartan Empire at the Battle of Leuctra in 371, mercenary service became the principal Spartan occupation, even for Xenophon's model officer and gentleman, King Agesilaus. With landed estates encroaching on the traditional lots and great fortunes swollen by the gains of empire and mercenary adventure, the common Spartan found himself reduced to an equality of obligation only. The inflation and economic stress of the Hellenistic era intensified the imbalance between wealth and poverty in Lacedaemon. In a brief reign (244–241), the idealistic young King Agis IV tried to revive Sparta's military glory by restoring „Lycurgan ways” and did effect the abolition of debts but failed to redistribute land lots – his agent, Agesilaus, avoided the issue until a counter-revolutionary coup led by the deposed King Leonidas overthrew the reformers and lynched Agis. In 227, Leonidas' son, Cleomenes III, seized power and completed the aborted reforms of Agis-his subsequent success forced his rival for leadership of the Peloponnse, Aratus of Sicyon, into an alliance with Macedon, and Cleomenes was defeated at Sellasia in 222 to die shortly after in exile in Egypt.

Two Questions Raised by William James's Essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’

William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”