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Rating: Ships mark the times; especially from the modern age onwards, the ship is a symbol of power and prestige, the challenge to the sea and to new lands to conquer, progress. This is also because, for centuries, ships were the most technologically advanced and innovation-rich inventions that man could build, bringing together extremely complex notions of engineering, hydraulics, mathematics, and metallurgy, while also requiring massive mobilizations of resources.
The painting in question (1866) depicts a true turning point in the definition of this technological symbology; it indeed shows us the wild duel that took place at Hampton Roads during the American Civil War, the first historical clash between ironclad steamships. Two units that, in their very conception, contained the seed of a revolution that would change the world.
On the left, the CSS Virginia; a large, heavy, slow, and terrifying monster reborn from the ashes of a wooden federal frigate, the Merrimack, which, set on fire, was recovered and rebuilt with the addition of an armored casemate and a powerful battery of cannons. An hybrid, a grotesque graft of iron on wood, new on old, yet a tremendously effective war machine, capable in a single day of sinking two enemy frigates with cannon fire and ramming. To thwart its threat, the Union had to field all its industrial might and resources. Thus was born the true product of progress and the new era, the Monitor; small, flat, and almost ridiculous, all iron, resembling a barge with a large head—that is, a rotating turret (and here innovation within innovation) armed with only two pieces but enormous, of 280mm, a caliber almost unattempted until then. The federal David met the rebellious Goliath one morning in March 1862 (I'll spare you details and historical locations). Julian Oliver Davidson, a professional painter and author of numerous war-maritime-background paintings, perhaps offers the most realistic version of the duel with a painting which, although not artistically very significant, well expresses the concepts inherent in that epic battle.
To begin with, dominating everything is the steam and cannon smoke, the confusion, the anger of metal. The masses of the two ships stand out sharply, with the Virginia, its pointed helm towering high like the spire of a Gothic cathedral, while the Monitor, wide and low, stares it in the face and unleashes its cannons upon it. Beyond the smoke of this storm, the familiar shapes of two wooden ships stand out, ghosts that steam and iron have already condemned to extinction, watching in awe as the future advances, shattering a world of traditions and certainties. What also strikes is the inhumanity of the fight, and thus of war. The old ships had sails maneuvered by men who, in case of attack, would leap from one bridge to another while often captains would greet each other chivalrously, but that day, on the waters of Hampton Roads, man was absent. Enclosed in his armors, sheltered behind his cannons, he fights and dies unseen by others, except by himself. It’s the ship that fights, and it will be so for all the wars to come, where the ship becomes just a floating fortress without any apparent sign of humanity. The machine forcefully enters the practice of war, forging a whole new world, girded with metal and faceless. The Monitor and the Virginia are the ancestors of those iron fists that, spanning two centuries and two wars, will threaten and shake the world order in the name of supremacy.
How did it end? Stalemate: the armors, which Davidson shows us smoking and battered, withstood the tremendous impact of the full ball shots; it was nevertheless a strategic victory for the Union. The Monitor became the progenitor of a new class of ships, but its armor could do nothing against the fury of the sea: it sank a few months later during a storm. Some time before, the Virginia had run aground on a shoal and was destroyed by its own crew. Inglorious deaths of monsters swallowed by progress and the future, heralds of a new era and new tragedies.
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