Medievalism and Subversion in Degas’ Medieval War Scene

Edgar Degas’ first Salon entry, Medieval War Scene (1865, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), features a haunting depiction of sexual violence. Its chilling disjuncture between content and affect has long stumped viewers and art historians alike. This paper focuses on Degas’ sophisticated and subversive deployment of medievalism, unveiling it as key to the interpretation of this early work. This inquiry shows that Medieval War Scene, long regarded, along with several early history paintings, as a “Degas before Degas,” removed from his career-long preoccupation with female representation, pictorial convention, and the troubled intersection of the two, is neither a history painting nor an outlier in the oeuvre. From its unusual medium to its pre-academic visual quotations, Medieval War Scene advertises itself as a pictorial antonym to more traditional evocations of the Middle Ages in its era, namely Troubadour paintings. Eliciting and manipulating the newly formed association, celebrated in those traditional medievalist works, between medieval culture with its presumed virile moral valor (chivalric, pious) and a fictitious essential French identity, Degas offers a critique of the noxious cocktail of representational fetish and reactionary nationalism that successfully entraps and confronts the viewer. Contextualizing this work, this paper attempts to chart a more nuanced understanding of how nineteenth-century artists deployed politically charged historic styles not merely to celebrate but also to scrutinize and subvert collective identity.