A painting about a battle in the distant past eerily anticipated a war in the artist's near future.

Rudolf Jettmar's Fighting Amazons, which is part of the Art Gallery of Hamilton's Tanenbaum Collection, depicts an ancient skirmish between the Amazons and the Greeks.

Jettmar, who was born in Poland, worked in Vienna at the dawn of the last century. While many artists were choosing subjects from ordinary life -- and some were poised on the edge of abstraction -- Jettmar turned to classical mythology, the stuff of good old-fashioned art.

Amazons were warrior women who may or may not have existed. They are mentioned by classical Greek and Roman writers as living in Asia Minor. They were skilled at riding horses and shooting arrows.

In one ancient Greek myth, the Amazons attack Athens. The fighting takes place near a bridge, and the Athenians, under the leadership of the hero Theseus, defeat the Amazons.

Jettmar's oil seems to represent this battle. He fills his painting with struggling and dying humans and horses. But he never lets the action get out of hand.

That's because he orders his figures into a circle and leaves only the landscape with the bridge in the centre. Then, by lightening or darkening his figures, or by positioning them in strategic places, he directs our movement within the circle.

We can start with the three bodies lying in the shadows of the left foreground. One of them, a woman with a bit of blue clothing tied around her waist, is clearly an Amazon.

The landscape then dips as we move rightward and we find ourselves engulfed in a more violent scene. Male and female combatants and terrified horses tumble off the bridge and into the water. Jettmar paints this group in a strong light so we can't miss them.

At the top of this writhing cluster, the painter positions a man with a helmet. This soldier aims his spear at a horse and a female rider on the bridge. So we move leftward along the bridge, where bodies pile up. On the far left in the background, a group of men and women, some on horseback, fight to the death.

Some of Jettmar's viewers would have recognized his borrowings from ancient art.

Take the Amazon on horseback in the top left group. She's the one with blue-green drapery around her hips who is raising her right arm against an Athenian soldier. She recalls images of Amazons in battle carved on Greek reliefs more than 2,000 years earlier. But while Jettmar's Amazon is bare-breasted, Amazons in Greek art wore short tunics and long trousers.

Jettmar also borrows from Michelangelo, as many artists did. The twisted mass of nude, heavily muscled humanity on the right is reminiscent of the figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, painted around 1540 on one wall of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

This battle scene, packed with people and horses, also foreshadows a more devastating conflict.

Fighting Amazons was painted in 1912, two years before the First World War broke out. More than a million horses were killed in that war, the last of many in which they played a major part.

Regina Haggo is teaching The Roman Way, a nine-week introduction to Roman art and architecture from the first to the fourth century. Classes start Jan. 7. You can sign up for Monday or Friday afternoons. To register, phone the Dundas Valley School of Art at 905-628-6357.

dhaggo@thespec.com