The Battle of Alexander at Issus

This shows a battle fought in 333 BC, between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius, but Altdorfer painted it in 1529, and that year matters. As he worked, the Ottoman army under Suleiman the Magnificent was marching on Vienna, the first time they reached the walls of a great western capital. So Altdorfer quietly folds one war into the other. Look at the two armies and you'll see they aren't ancient at all. Alexander's men wear 16th-century German steel, and the Persians are dressed as Ottoman Turks, in turbans, with crescent moons and eastern armour. Above the tangle of thousands of tiny soldiers, a huge sky curves over the whole known world, sun breaking through on one side while the moon sinks on the other, as if the heavens themselves are taking sides. A tablet hangs in the air naming the battle and counting the Persian dead. Duke William of Bavaria had commissioned it for his Munich palace. Much later Napoleon, who admired Alexander, carried it off to Paris, and the story goes that when Prussian troops caught up with his belongings in 1814, they found this painting hanging in his bathroom.