From the dawn of time to the present, from the days of mammoth-hunting to the era of Scud-busting, pictures of war constitute the most persistent genre of images human beings have created. In fact, human beings are the only creature who engage in these two activities -- organized violence and the making of pictorial images -- and the author shows how both art and war emerge from the same source: the hunter's eye. This book explores and analyzes the thirteen-thousand year legacy of pictures of war from various cultures over the centuries, from Stone Age cave paintings and the monumental sculpture of the ancient Near East to the art of the classical period and the Middle Ages, from pre-contact Mesoamerican imagery to Napoleonic propaganda and totalitarian art and on to the instantaneous images of the Gulf War.
"There have been countless books on revolutions in warfare. David Perlmutter has written an extraordinarily important book on what is permanent in warfare and on the relationships between the permanent and transitory. By looking at war through the prism of images that humans have created to represent warfare, Perlmutter has plumbed the relationship between the experience of war, imagining war, and the evolution of warfare. He has gone beyond ordinary books about warfare to consider the relationship between war and the human condition. Visions of War is more than a contribution to the study of warfare. It is an important contribution to the study of war as a dimension of human existence."
GEORGE FRIEDMAN, CHAIRMAN OF STRATFOR AND THE AUTHOR OF THE FUTURE OF WAR
"Anyone who believes that images of war and mayhem were invented by Hollywood or Atari should read this impressively erudite and thoughtfully argued book. From cave paintings viewed by flickering torchlight to virtual battles followed on computer screens, humans have been fascinated by depictions of organized violence. But this is far more than a h
