Twelve famous battle paintings, from Paolo Uccello's The Battle of San Romano, about 1440, to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, 1937. Before photography, pictures like these did the job of a war photograph.
Yet each was usually made months or years later, by a painter who had not seen the fighting, working from sketches, officers' reports and the wishes of whoever paid.
So every one of them makes an argument. Some flatter the patron, others accuse.
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How These Were Chosen
This list takes a broad view of battle. An execution, a shipwreck or the wounded walking away all count, alongside the clash of two armies.
A picture got in by passing one of three tests. First, it changed how war is painted. Second, the record shows what the painter bent, invented or left out. Third, its later life became a story of its own.
That last test let in two unusual entries, a lost work and a rebuilt one: Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, which vanished from its wall, and a Russian panorama repainted after a fire. The countdown starts at number 12 with the most recent picture, from 1937.
12. Guernica, Pablo Picasso (1937)
A bull stands at the center of Guernica, looking almost calm. Beside it a horse rears in pain, a spear driven through its body, its mouth wide open on a tongue as sharp as a blade. Below them a woman throws her head back and screams, a dead child in her arms.
On the right, a second woman stumbles out of a burning building, and a third leans from a window above, holding up an oil lamp. In the foreground a soldier lies in pieces, one hand closed around a broken sword.
Above them all burns a bare light bulb, set inside a jagged shape like an eye. The horse's body is covered with rows of short strokes that look like lines of torn newsprint.
Pablo Picasso painted it in Paris in 1937, in black, white and gray only. The canvas is eleven and a half feet tall and more than twenty five feet wide, big enough to fill the end wall of a large room.
The picture takes its name from the Basque town of Guernica. Spain was then at war with itself, the elected Republic against the rebel Nationalists of General Francisco Franco.
On April 26, 1937, planes sent by Franco's German and Italian allies attacked the town. The planes' stated target was a bridge and the roads around it, and Guernica had almost no air defense.
Picasso, a Spaniard living in Paris, had been asked that January to paint something for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. His first sketches showed one of his favorite themes, an artist at work in his studio.
A few days after the raid, he read a war correspondent's eyewitness account of it and dropped the studio scene. He painted the bombing instead, and the canvas took him about 35 days.
How many people died in Guernica is argued over to this day. The Basque government's count at the time, over sixteen hundred, is now considered too high, and most historians put the dead between about 150 and 300.
At the other extreme, Franco's own side spent decades denying that the bombing had happened at all. A newspaper loyal to Franco was putting the death toll at twelve as late as 1970.
The bull and the horse are stock figures from the bullring, images Picasso had watched since childhood in Spain. Some read the bull as Franco's side, others as Spain enduring the attack, others as nothing so specific.
Picasso never settled the question. In 1945 he told an American interviewer, Jerome Seckler, that the bull was not fascism but brutality and darkness, and that the horse stood for the people.
Decades later, this picture of a bombed town met another war. On February 5, 2003, a woven copy of Guernica outside the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York was covered with a blue curtain and a row of flags.
Inside, the American secretary of state, Colin Powell, was about to make the case for invading Iraq. The woven copy had been there since 1985, lent by Nelson Rockefeller's family and made under Picasso's own supervision.
A UN spokesman said the flags simply made a better backdrop for television cameras. Critics saw something else: an image of civilians killed from the air had been hidden on the day a war was argued for.
At a Glance
Artist: Pablo Picasso
Made: 1937, Paris
Material: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
About This Painting
Why did Guernica stay in New York instead of going to Spain right after it was painted?
Picasso wanted Guernica to go to Spain only once the country had regained democratic government and public liberties, a condition aimed at Franco's dictatorship. Until then it stayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Is Guernica still at MoMA?
Guernica left MoMA for Spain in 1981. It was first shown at the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid and has hung at the Museo Reina Sofía since 1992.
Has Guernica been lent to other museums since it came to Spain?
Guernica has not left the Museo Reina Sofía since 1992. The museum has turned down loan requests, including the Basque government's requests to show it at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, on the grounds that the canvas is too fragile to travel.
11. Gassed, John Singer Sargent (1919)
Ten blinded soldiers walk in a line across the canvas, eyes bandaged, each one holding on to the man in front. Bodies lie in the grass at their feet, and the line must step over some of the wounded to keep moving. Far behind them, almost too small to see, other men are busy with something else entirely.