Visual Representation of Violence in Jacques Callot’s Les Grands Misères de la Guerre

I am now going into my second year as a doctoral student and my fourth year as a graduate student (having received my MA in April 2019) in the Department of French & Italian at Pitt. With each year, my interests have become more and more clear to me, and I have found myself time and again dabbling in the 17th century. For my PhD exams and future prospectus and dissertation, I’m interested in the representations of the figure of youth in the early modern imagination and its crossings with gender fluidity, its affective capacities, and its use as a frame for non-normative life, desires, and possibilities. My Humanities Engage module, while based on working with Jacques Callot’s engravings (1633), was inspired in large part by the political and social turmoil to which we bear witness now in 2020.

Callot’s series, Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, is a set of 18 etchings published during the Thirty Years’ War that depict the violence and chaos of war. The University Art Gallery has a near-complete set of Callot’s Miseries of War prints as part of its Callot collection prints, which, bearing no overtly specific markers of time or place, are important documents of the visual representation of violence. As I’ve read articles and chapters over the past couple of weeks, I’ve realized that the temporal and geographical ambiguity of Callot’s print series is one key to the collection’s resonation with viewers today.

I’m designing my module to be integrated into Professor Chloé Hogg’s course, Kings and Queens (Spring 2021). Professor Hogg’s course explores the history and iconography of monarchy in France and French-speaking world regions and puts a wide range of historical texts into dialogue with contemporary texts and meditations on power and monarchy. Kings and Queens asks what the history and media of monarchy can tell us about power and representation, gender and sexuality, colonialism and slavery.

Last semester, I was student in Professor Chloé Hogg’s Early Modern Adaptations class. Professor Hogg organized a collaborative project co-organized by Chris Nygren (HAA), Sylvia Rhor Samaniego (UAG/HAA), and Paulina Pardo Gaviria (UAG/HAA). For this project, I supervised and mentored a small group of undergraduates in their examination of a 17th-century engraving by Jacques Callot (1592-1635). I guided the students in a small group through engaging with Callot’s etchings as well as through the writing process of composing short captions that described how these 17th-century prints could be related to the contemporary moment. Having collaborated with both Professor Hogg and Sylvia Rhor Samaniego previously and again for this Humanities Engage project, my module builds upon this work. One of my pedagogical goals is to allow the undergraduates of Professor Hogg’s Kings and Queens course to make connections and learn to read the prints as part of a longer history that we are a part of rather than feel distanced or alienated from these 17th-century cultural objects. Students will be asked to formulate new ways of analyzing art and pre-modern works, while also connecting historical depictions of violence with contemporary representations of power.

What has surprised me most about my research has been reading different scholarly interpretations of Callot: some scholars have read the etchings as a critique of Louis XIII’s invasion of the independent Duchy of Lorraine, while other scholars argue, because of the lack of overt temporal and geographical markers, that Callot, having gained the King’s permission for his etchings’ publication, purposely presents an objective and detached representation of the multifaceted devastations of war. Reading the etchings as ambiguously situated temporally and geographically allows me to formulate my approach and goals to encourage a personal and contemporary reading of Callot’s early modern work which is at once unspecific and critical.

Caitlin Dahl
French 
August 17, 2020
 

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