The Apotheosis of War

Vereshchagin painted this pyramid of skulls in 1871, after riding with Russian forces through Turkestan in Central Asia and seeing what a punitive campaign leaves behind. He set it in a scorched plain with a ruined city and bare trees, and crows picking over the pile. On the frame he wrote a dedication: to all conquerors, past, present, and to come. He had watched a real war, not read about one, and he refused to give generals the heroic canvases they expected of a battle painter. Some of the skulls carry the marks of sabre cuts and bullet holes, so the deaths stay specific rather than symbolic. Russian military men disliked the picture intensely, and for a long stretch official buyers kept their distance from work like this.