There are many 19th-century paintings like this — where there are seemingly hundreds of minute figures, and you have to concentrate on the small patches of action in order to understand at all what is going on, instead of getting an impression of the whole and then spending time appreciating the details. This one is called _The Battle of Moscow_ 7th September 1812_, and it’s by Louis-François Lejeune. It details a scene from a critical moment in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, when his army near the village of Borodino won a terrible Phyrric victory: he defeated the Russian forces, but the cost to his position and troops was so enormous that it turned the tide of the invasion against him. I think this painting is a perfect illustration of one of the most famous novels of all time, Leo Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_.
Published in completion in 1869, the book parallels Lejeune’s painting: it is a vast work (it would take over 60 hours to listen to its full English translation), and it is told through the accounts of hundreds of characters. The episodes of the individual lives together make a gargantuan portrait of Russia’s aristocracy during the Napoleonic Wars, a story that can only be understood by navigating through their accounts.
In writing _War and Peace, Tolstoy was criticizing the “Great Man” theory of history, arguing that the world is shaped not by the actions of the likes of Napoleon or the few famous movers and shakers, but rather by the momentum of forces created by the masses. In fact, Tolstoy used the language of Calculus to compare computing differentials of a function with the way the minutiae of human behavior can be studied to understand the patterns of history:
“The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous . . . . Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history”.
Source(s): See _Once upon a Prime_, p 138, by Sarah Hart (Flatiron Books, 2023), for the use of Calculus in Tolstoy and the quote from _War and Peace_. The painting, done in 1822, is from Wikipedia, citing the Bridgeman Art Library Object 4229.
