This book explores and analyzes the thirteen thousand-year legacy of pictures of war from various cultures over the centuries, from the Stone Age cave paintings and 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.



Praise for Visions of 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 relationship between the permanent and the transitory. By looking at war through the prism of images that humans have created to prepresent 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 of the study of war as a dimension of human exsistence." --George Friedman, Chairman of Stratfo and author of The Future of War