Alexander Campaign
“ Greatest Campaign of Conquest of all Times ”

Beginning with the new wedding of Philip II of Macedon and the resulting alienation between Alexander and his father, the Alexander Campaign started now well about 2350 years ago in spring 334 BC is presented chronologically and accompanied by the historical sources of Curtius Rufus and Johann Freinsheim in partly first or even unique representations of fine art of the 17^th and 18^th centuries as the pinnacle of the cult of Alexander.

With this at the same time the change of the reception of the Alexander Campaign and Alexander himself by the arts is demonstrated. While initially the glorification of the victorious magnanimous hero was at the fore as, emanating from Louis XIV, self-styling and self-assurance of European aristocracy, the picture later turned first to reflection, then a critical examination of both the person of Alexander the Great and his campaign of conquest to India, which he himself finally liked to think of as a new Bacchus Campaign with himself as Bacchus.

Beside the éclat at the already mentioned wedding banquet of father Philip II the big moments of the Alexander Campaign. Among these not just the famous decisive battles of Arbella against Persian king Darius and at the Hydaspes in India against Porus, but also the submission of and the entry into Babylon as “the triumphal apotheosis” (Donald Posner) as well as such personal moments as the visit in the tent of Darius’s family the morning after Issus or the reflective drawing of the Hyphasis which not only shows the decision to return and by this a turning point in history, but at the same time establishes an utterly new history painting. Finally as supposedly likewise first representation in art the fight at the wall of Multan in the Punjab as “Alexander’s Most Heroic Moment” (Peter G. Tsouras).

With the numerous illustrations and the extensive, comprehensively documented texts the catalog takes the reader on a in this form presumably unique voyage with the Alexander Campaign as one of the great events of world history.

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