Après la bataille du prince Igor

When Viktor Vasnetsov showed this in 1880, some of his fellow painters were baffled. Russian art at the time was full of hard social realism, and here was a battlefield painted almost like a lullaby: fallen warriors lying calm in the grass under a huge reddening moon, birds of prey circling overhead. The scene comes from The Tale of Igor's Campaign, a 12th-century epic about a doomed raid against the Polovtsy nomads. Vasnetsov had been a capable genre painter, and with this canvas he turned toward the old Russian legends that would occupy him for the rest of his career. The wildflowers still blooming among the dead were his own touch, drawn from the mournful tone of the medieval poem.