ATTRIBUTED TO GIACOMO DI CASTRO (1597-1687) BATTLE BETWEEN TURKS AND CHRISTIANS Canvas Old restorations Att to G. di Castro, Battle between Turks and Christians, canvas, with restorations 115 x 221 CM - 45,2 X 87 IN. PROVENANCE Important old paintings, Paris, Tajan, 14 December 1998, lot 202 (160 000 francs) Marine painting through the centuries From the 16th to the 20th century, marine painting occupied a unique place in the history of European art. At once documentary, symbolic and poetic, it accompanied the great maritime changes - discoveries, trade, conflicts, technical innovations - and shaped an imagination in which the sea appeared in turn as a space of power, mystery or contemplation. In the 16th century, this pictorial genre really came into its own, particularly in the United Provinces, then at the heart of world shipping. The Dutch masters developed a precise style of painting, paying close attention to ships, ports and atmospheric variations. Their seascapes, often calm and rigorously observed, bear witness to a time when the sea was first and foremost an economic and strategic territory. In the 17th century, marine painting diversified its subjects and became more ambitious. Naval battles, long-distance voyages and busy ports were increasingly popular, revealing a Europe focused on expansion and movement. In France, artists such as Lacroix de Marseille and Joseph Vernet imposed a luminous, poetic style that combined observation and idealisation, and opened the way to more sensitive interpretations of the seascape. This sensibility reached its apogee in the 19th century with the advent of Romanticism, which revolutionised the way the sea was depicted. The sea became a place of intense emotion, of the sublime and the infinite. Artists explored the violence of storms, the play of light and the inner resonances of seascapes. At the same time, the boom in travel and technical innovations - steam, tall ships, transatlantic shipping - encouraged many painters to see the sea as a modern theatre, and to translate its new dynamics. The 20th century marked a further stage in this evolution. Marine painting diversified and reinvented itself through contact with the avant-gardes, who appropriated the sea as a plastic or symbolic motif, while realist painters perpetuated the tradition of the coastline and the maritime world. Their depictions sometimes became more abstract, sometimes more intimate, but all continued to express the essential relationship between man and the ocean, at a time when seascapes were being profoundly transformed by industrialisation, modern ports and mechanical navigation. So, over four centuries, whether documenting a ship, celebrating a battle or expressing an inner horizon, marine painting has kept alive the fascination that societies have for the sea.