Siegelands

The first in-depth study of siege prints, a monumental form of art depicting the vast scale of early modern warfare

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the technologies of artillery warfare and large-format printmaking converged to give rise to a new type of art. Siegelands examines an extraordinary series of enormous woodcuts created in the Holy Roman Empire at a time when political turmoil and religious strife tore apart northern Europe.

As the distance between enemies became the defining condition of war, artists confronted the challenge of representing a slow form of violence that was singularly unheroic. Sieges were vast gatherings of people, mobile camps on the scale of temporary cities that aimed to conquer an enemy through attrition rather than through combat. The makers of monumental siege prints confronted these realities by pushing the limits of their medium.

With superb illustrations, many published here for the first time, Siegelands recovers a neglected genre of art that arose at a pivotal moment in European history. Carolyn Yerkes describes the complicated narratives of strategy, attack, settlement, and stalemate embedded in the context of landscape and urban architecture. These works on paper—designed to rival the period’s grandest achievements in tapestry, fresco painting, and relief sculpture—were created from multiple sheets to form expansive wall-sized compositions, many of which survive only in single impressions. With the ambition of history painting, the prints brought sophisticated political arguments about the stakes of war to the society that war created.