The painting Apotheosis of War has no practical meaning. It gives moral satisfaction to a limited circle of people who are ready to pay any price for the realization of their own desires. And it doesn’t matter what ultimate goal drives these people – boundless wealth, boundless power, religious beliefs or love. The apotheosis of war is the glorification of murder and the glorification of ruthless slaughter. It is not surprising that the famous battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin called his picture just that.

Description of the picture Apotheosis of War

The yellow scorched steppe stretches to the edge of the horizon. A chain of mountains can be seen in the distance, but this thin dark strip only emphasizes the immensity of the silent and unconditional horror that has settled on these lands. In the center of the lifeless plain rises a mountain of human skulls. A flock of crows is circling over the pile. The scavenger ravens recently had a beautiful feast, and now they lazily jump over the bone roundness, looking for a lost piece of flesh.

It seems that for many kilometers around, crows are the only living creatures. Here comes the war. Every centimeter of the earth is saturated with death, which has poisoned everything. Life evaporated from green grass and once lush trees. All that was left of them were bare trunks and thin branches, stretching towards the sky with mute reproach. The city depicted in the background is empty and looks at the viewer with empty eye sockets of dilapidated towers. The sad end of the war.

The picture was painted in 1871, after the return of Vereshchagin from Turkestan. There are suggestions that he created it, impressed by the legend of the women of Damascus and Baghdad, who came to Tamerlane with a complaint about their men, mired in absolute debauchery. The commander ordered his soldiers to bring one severed head of sinful husbands and put them in one pile. The army numbered almost 200 thousand people, and when each soldier obeyed the order, seven pyramids of heads rose in the field.

The trip to Turkestan as part of the active Russian army, which conquered these lands, was not easy for the artist. Vereshchagin served as an ensign under Kaufman, the governor-general who led the conquest of Central Asia. Every day he watched the death and mountains of corpses that were the result of the pacification of the Uyghur uprising. And with each passing day, the rejection of the war grew in him. This is how the “Turkestan Series” was born, in which the painter depicted battle scenes, the everyday life of the inhabitants of Central Asia. The culmination of the trip and rethinking of the situation was the painting “The Apotheosis of War”.