Political Iconography and Historical Time

This study investigates nonverbal iconographical signs in the sphere of political iconography, both in relation to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French historical paintings and portraiture and to political caricatures published in early nineteenth-century France. After examining the visual codes mobilized by French historical painting and portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the temporal symbolism underlying their various modes of visual communication, I examine what I take to be the shift in visual symbolism brought about by the epoch-making caricatures of Honoré Daumier, which deployed new techniques of lithography permitting the unprecedented communication of highly charged political messages to a mass population. In elaborating this second part of my study, I draw on the iconographic theory of Reinhart Koselleck.