The exhibition is a visual essay on the strange and terrible relentlessness of human existence, on the way violence has, for centuries, been invested with meaning, glory, and necessity, while peace - ideologically extolled - has been recorded by history as merely an episodic instance of an imponderable fragility.

The allusion to Tolstoy's novel is both the pretext and the direct expression of these two primordial states, generously illustrated throughout the history of our familiar art — from Trajan's Column or the romantic depictions of legendary national battles, to the horrors of the Great War and the class struggle of communist propaganda.