War in all its awful beauty

War, we all know, is hell. But war is also beautiful. It is the savage lyricism of "The Iliad," the epic sweep and microscopic precision of a Bruegel battle scene, the solemn symmetry of a photograph, published in Life magazine in September 1943, of three soldiers lying dead on a New Guinea beach, their dark bodies pressing into the light sand.

Look again at some of the imagery spewing from America's war with Iraq. On our TV screens, chiaroscuro clouds of smoke and sand drift to engulf palm trees, minarets, people. In newspaper pages, shafts of light from exploding missiles pierce the desert night, recalling Walter de Maria's wondrous outdoor sculpture "The Lightning Field." A British soldier's reflection in a pool of leaking oil shimmers and blurs.

In the split-second it takes for the eye to absorb them, momentarily removed from their grim context, these images are ravishing, exhilarating, uncanny. Beautiful.

"War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages," wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944).

The author of those feverish sentiments was an Italian poet, dramatist and intellectual snake-oil salesman who is credited with inventing the short-lived art movement known as Futurism. When Marinetti set down the principles of the movement in a 1920s manifesto, he exalted war as if it were a magnificent orchestral score composed for bullets, flames and blood, launching an aesthetic that later served the bellicose Italian dictator and Hitler henchman Benito Mussolini. But over the years, saner minds have echoed the idea that war can produce gorgeous images and striking effects that furnish the raw material for sublime works of art -- a subtle yet crucial difference from Marinetti's rabid notion that war itself can be a form of art.

To anyone who has experienced war's ravages firsthand, that idea may sound naive, grotesque, even absurd. Yet over centuries of human brutality, the aesthetic has seldom been at odds with the horrific. Leonardo da Vinci, painter of delicate saints and serene landscapes, stuffed his notebooks with sketches of furious men at arms and fiendishly clever fighting machines. In the 1860s, Mathew Brady shocked the New York public by exhibiting gruesome photographs of Civil War dead. "Here are the dreadful details!" an accompanying text declared. "Let them aid in preventing such another calamity from falling upon the nation." Only later was it revealed that Brady and his collaborators had repositioned some slain soldiers for dramatic effect.