Giannis K. Hoplite: as i said before, you cant take art too literally, because artists are not soldiers. These are not photographs, but representations made who know how many years after the battles were fought.. and its not that uncommon for artist to "go with the flow" and make his work based on works of those before him. Artists have tendency to idealize everything, so it would be not that uncommon for them to copy some "heroic" posture from other vases they saw, and use them on their own work.. they definitely saw more art paintings than they saw actual battles...
i can tell you that for example, while i'm working on 17.century themed combat game, a lot of art pictures are showing complete nonsense against all laws of physics.. look at any portrait about naval battles.. you will see a lot of ships sinking, burning etc, yet sinking was something that just didn't happened that very often to wooden ships, and definitely not during battle.. yet all portraits are full of it.. its artistic license, picture painted by somebody who painted it but never actually saw a naval battle in his life (and yes, there were some exceptions.. as always) and why did they paint it? because they heard about ships were lost, yet usually only after battle, when damaged ships got into some bad weather and couldnt return back to ports.. yet, for artist who is painting a naval battle, that is not interesting.. he wants to have ships sinking, because his enemies lost so many ships etc etc...
or another example - just look how many battle paintings from 18-19.century show men killing each other with bayonets.. Yet, if you actually look for details from those battles, or any other, you will find interesting thing - bayonet attacks practically never happened in open terrain, because one side always just rout and ran away... yet, did that stopped artists from painting exactly that? NOPE
i can tell you that for example, while i'm working on 17.century themed combat game, a lot of art pictures are showing complete nonsense against all laws of physics.. look at any portrait about naval battles.. you will see a lot of ships sinking, burning etc, yet sinking was something that just didn't happened that very often to wooden ships, and definitely not during battle.. yet all portraits are full of it.. its artistic license, picture painted by somebody who painted it but never actually saw a naval battle in his life (and yes, there were some exceptions.. as always) and why did they paint it? because they heard about ships were lost, yet usually only after battle, when damaged ships got into some bad weather and couldnt return back to ports.. yet, for artist who is painting a naval battle, that is not interesting.. he wants to have ships sinking, because his enemies lost so many ships etc etc...
or another example - just look how many battle paintings from 18-19.century show men killing each other with bayonets.. Yet, if you actually look for details from those battles, or any other, you will find interesting thing - bayonet attacks practically never happened in open terrain, because one side always just rout and ran away... yet, did that stopped artists from painting exactly that? NOPE
Jaroslav Jakubov
