ISSUS AND THE EXPANDING VISION OF HUMANITY

  A painting of an ancient battle has twice served as a display of artistic achievement. Both major works on this subject were painted during benchmarks in human history and creative activity. One is a meticulous mosaic copy of a painting of a pivotal battle in human history, made when the participants could still see it. The other painting looks back at the same event across the mists of 1800 years through the eyes of an awakening age.
  At no time since history began did the maps of the world improve so quickly as they did during the conquests of Alexander the Great. Far flung armies sent back along thier supply lines specimens and accounts of the faraway lands to Alexander's teacher, Aristotle. The legacy of Alexander's campaigns was felt in the spreading of Greek ideas across an immense area, and for scholors unprecedented stretches of the world were being revealed. The sciences bloomed, especially at Alexandria, the city founded by the young conquerer. One widely practised subject of heroic painting of those times was naturally the victories of Alexander.
  Philoxenos of Eretria, a pupil of Nikomachos, painted sometime near the end of the 300s BC a widely acclaimed work of the Battle of Alexander against Darius III, perhaps at the battle of Issus at 333 BC. Other artists are listed as painting this topic, including the only woman painter from antiquity whose name has come down to us, Helen of Egypt. Unfortunately this and all other classical era panel pictures have been destroyed, but this was one of a very few paintings which were copied during the Roman era in a technique which could survive over time, colored mosaics with fineness of detail able to begin to emulate the details so treasured in the original.
       

  This mosaic, found in Pompeii and on exibit in the Naples Archeological Museum, shows a frozen moment of decision in the outcome of an epic struggle. In front of a confusion of battling soldiers horses are depicted with startling foreshortened perspective and furious energy, eyes wild as they lunge and pull in their harnesses amid the chaos of battle. Tilted spears above the heads of nearby soldiers suggest hidden masses in the distance, and in a supreme effort Alexander surges past the Great King's defenses, running through with a spear a bodyguard who put himself between him and his quarry.

King Darius, turned around in his chariot and his arm outstretched, shows his desperate grief as he is speeded from the scene by a steely eyed charioteer determined to get his royal passenger to safety through the confusion.
The anguish of a nearby fallen soldier's face is reflected in a shiny shield, wounded men and horses appear among the litter of war, and details of the scene seem to accurately show the costumes and equipment of the era portrayed. The landscape is very minimal, only gnarled treetrunks appearing in the scene above the flat ground plane.
 

 18 centuries after the creation of the 'Battle of Issus' another great work of art on this theme was done at the time the standards of the great Classical painters were finally being reached and probably surpassed.  The 'Battle of Issus' was done in1529 by Albrecht Altdorfer, and is one of a commissioned series of oil paintings on wooden panels depicting ancient heros and thier exploits. This fantastic work can be seen now at the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich.      
   It is an amazing miracle in paint, a vast battle sways across the lower third of the work, myraids of spears bristle like the hairs of angry beasts which masses of people become during war. The details of late medieval armor, banners, and lances are delicately picked out with paint on hundreds of soldiers and thier horses, all moving at each other in great surging masses. In the far distance only a generalised texture is enough to form teeming crowds, with occassional banners and spear highlights able to carry the illusion. Rising from the surging chaos are ruins and a castle perched on a craggy mountain. Beyond this villages with rows of peaked roofs are seen, with cathedrial towers marking the little city's skyline against the water beyond. It is peaceful out there, around the water in the distance with great masses of land, mountains, and even a river delta stretched out to the distant curved horizon, the land masses becoming luminous blue far away.
  The sun, setting at the lower right of the sky on the fortunes of Darius, is balanced by the moon in the upper left corner emerging in the coming night, with rolling masses of glowering clouds encroaching from both sides of the picture. This is the granduer of the world and the sky above, with the great conflicts in progress below looking as significent from this perspective as the struggles of masses of ants.
  Altdorfer was perhaps the first painter to treat the landscape as a worthy subject in itself, and was observant of many beautiful natural phenomona, particularly clouds. The upper third of the painting features a floating banner backed by some of the most incredible clouds ever painted, masses of farflung ariel drama hinting of cosmic and heavenly beauty. The granduer of the universe swirls overhead and Human masses swarm below.
This is the first painting to show the curvature of the Earth's distant horizon, and is a landmark in percieving and portraying a view of the World no human would have for centuries to come.

  "The Battle Of Issus", a homage to the past done while the world opened up to new truths, is one of the most influentual and inspirational paintings I have ever seen. Napoleon is said to have been amazed by the work.

  

The discovery of the remaining unknown places on Earth was well underway in the 1500s. A conceptual leap is made with this painting which sets the stage for imagining what one could see from unattainable perspectives, and is thus a kind of virtuoso prototype of the kind of paintings made possible 450 years later as science revealed yet more scenery to paint on other worlds.
  

   The first known perspective drawing of the entire Earth as a sphere was done by Albrecht Durer in 1515, using the best maps of the time in collaboration with Nurnberg scientist Johann Stabius. Durer wisely orients the globe to show just what is known, although wide stretches of Asia reveal the influence of the tentative maps derived from the pre Christian era work of Claudius Ptolomy.
   New continents were being tentatively sketched in the opposite hemisphere, but until the invention of accurate durable timepieces in the late 1700s navigators were plagued with uncertainties in determining what longitude on the globe one was as one traveled.
  Renaissance ideas of how Ptolomy's maps looked ( no originals of his maps, or texts for that matter, survived ) continued for years to dominate printed atlases, although useable maps must have existed to serve military and commercial needs with far more accuracy than publicly available charts. Each such secret map was a 'need to know' product of exploration and intrigue. The best maps, then as now, are closely guarded military secrets.
  Gradually the new continents being discovered took shape on maps and globes. The finite nature of the globe could be sensed as the unexplored areas shown in honest maps dwindled towards the frozen poles.

  By the middle of the twentieth century the finishing touches were being put on the world maps. The end of the mapping of the coastlines of the Earth was accomplished along the edges of Antartica just as our first efforts to explore Space were made.
Satellites of many kinds were orbited as soon as the technology was developed, and as the fifties ended there began a period of opening our eyes to our surroundings the like of which hasn't been seen since the decades of the discovery of the great unknown lands once remaining on Earth.