Notes on the Concept of Schlagbild.

From Aby Warburg to Martin Warnke

Margherita Picciché

Abstract

A Genealogy

Horst Bredekamp has observed, with deliberate provocation, that art historical studies might be reduced to nothing more than variants of political iconography (Bredekamp 2022, 26). Polemically overstated as this claim may be, it contains a kernel of truth that is difficult to evade: the image is never a neutral object, being necessarily defined by social, economic, and above all political connotations that manifest themselves in its production, its reception, and in the uses to which later generations put it.

Political iconography is grounded in the status of the image. In its broadest sense, it encompasses all visual forms that, directly or indirectly, give shape to political content: from design to painting, from sculpture to architecture, through to the mass media (Bredekamp 2022, 26). Its concern is with the qualitative dimension of how objects are presented – whether explicitly or latently – and with the manipulation and control of perception and action. It is in this sense that Martin Warnke spoke of sichtbare Politik (Warnke 1994, 170) – politics made visible: in every era, ruling classes have attributed such high value to the efficacy of images as to invest enormous resources in the visual construction of power. The principle holds in reverse as well: political dynamics from below have equally relied on the strategic deployment of images, above all through idealised representations of rulers and situations that paradoxically proved a symbolic trap for those who commissioned them. A ruler must conform to his own glorified image; the voices of artists are in turn constrained, held within the interpretive frame they themselves helped to construct, thus sustaining the enduring entanglement of representation and power.

This tradition of scholarship has its natural home in Germany, both for its analyses of the historical phenomenon of the image and for its methodological elaborations. The field draws on scholars working across different approaches to art history and image theory – among them Martin Warnke, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Otto Karl Werckmeister, and David Craven – who converge, albeit from distinct vantage points, on the question of what political iconography as a discipline might mean and do. In 1970, Cologne hosted the Twenty-Second International Congress of Art History at a moment of extraordinary political complexity, when across Europe sustained attempts were being made to transform the historical, economic, political, and social order. The art historical world was no exception: it was fighting its own battle against the persistence of academic elites formed under the National Socialist dictatorship within the newly constituted democracy (Werckmeister 2006, 213). In this context, a particular form of Marxist intellectual presence was embodied in the GDR, just as the Soviet Union had underpinned the founding of the Federal Republic through the Western Alliance – all of it a consequence of the Second World War’s settlement. The GDR era was characterised by its claim to represent a “people’s democracy,” defining itself as a primary socialist state. Any cultural opposition from the Left within the Federal Republic that sought to radicalise democracy was therefore compelled to distance itself sharply from the official Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the GDR. In this climate of political antagonism, young West German scholars interested in a Marxist art history turned instead to the Schriften zur Kunstof Marx and Engels (Marx, Engels [1844–1895] 1973, texts that predated and stood apart from the canonical orthodoxies of communist doctrine. As the Marxist art historian Otto Werckmeister underscores, the aim of these young scholars was not so much the political empowerment of the working class, or even the formation of a socialist state, as it was a potentially revolutionary cultural critique of capitalist society (Werckmeister 2006, 213). To compensate for the absence of genuinely usable references, West German Marxist art historians turned to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt – whose work is gathered under the well-known designation of the Frankfurt School, a current of neo-Marxist sociological and philosophical thought built in large part around figures such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This research centre, located at the heart of the Federal Republic, had become a dominant influence on public and academic culture, standing in sharp contrast to the prevailing conservative politics that surrounded it. In this climate, the adjective “critical,” applied now even to art history, became a marker of firm opposition, aligned against the conventional and bourgeois understanding of the discipline. This designation, which carried a philosophical and political charge, derived directly from the Frankfurt Schools critique of society and ideology, and found its programme in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critical Theory (Adorno, Horkheimer [1947] 2002).

From these premises, a younger generation of art historians mounted an insurgency against the canons of their discipline, making their demands loudly heard against the entire senior faculty (Diers 1997, 63). Scholars of art history associated with the neo-Marxist movement were active within the Ulmer Verein (the Ulm Association), a dissident offshoot of the German Association of Art Historians, the professions representative body. Founded in 1968 to articulate the critical intellectual interests of the moment, the UV became the most important West German platform for neo-Marxist art history. It was precisely the UVs members who, at the 1970 Cologne congress, took matters into their own hands: they organised a provocatory session entitled The Work of Art between Science and World View (Warnke 1974), chaired by Martin Warnke, which offered a careful and polemical accounting of the persistence of the Nazi past within the discipline (Werckmeister 2006, 214).
The session challenged the discipline’s dominant assumptions head-on, levelling sharp criticism at both the interpretive frameworks and the methodological tools that art historical research had inherited – and at the ideological content embedded within them. As Diers notes, the spectre haunting the discussions of those days was unmistakably Walter Benjamin, whose legacy was returning to prominence precisely in those years through the work of the Frankfurt School scholars. Questions of the reproducibility of the work of art and other then-novel theoretical concerns occupied the full attention of the audience, drawing the tensions of the moment into sharp focus (Diers 1997, 64). In the same year, the congress proceedings were published under the same title – The Work of Art between Science and World View – and the volume came, in time, to function as something of a foundational text for proponents of a radical art history.

The state of Warburg’s reception at that moment can be summarised precisely: his name appeared only in a footnote. And yet, from the crucible of ideas and conflicts that was the Cologne Congress, two figures emerged who would prove among the most consequential both for the future of Warburg studies and for political iconography: Martin Warnke, appointed professor at the University of Marburg in 1970, and one of his younger students, Horst Bredekamp. Werckmeister dwells on the militant tenor that characterised the early work of both Warnke and Bredekamp, attuned as it was to the initial impulse toward sharp rupture with tradition that animated art historians of that generation. Warnke’s Bau und Überbau (Structure and Superstructure, Warnke [1976] 1976) and Bredekamp’s Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte (Art as a Medium of Social Conflicts, Bredekamp 1975) are identified by Werckmeister as two of the most significant works of Marxist art history published in that decade. Both offer sustained analyses of medieval art as a vehicle for class relations. In Bau und Überbau, Warnke begins from a sociological analysis of the written source corpus on medieval buildings. He establishes that cooperation between distinct segments of medieval society was a necessary condition for raising ecclesiastical architecture to supra-regional standards of achievement – standards that lay beyond the reach of any single patron. He demonstrates how kings and bishops, monks and burghers, nobles and commoners were compelled to resolve their social antagonisms and pool their rights and resources in the service of an architecture designed to transfigure the coherence of Christian communities across and beyond class divisions. In Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte, by contrast, Bredekamp addresses the prolonged and frequently lethal controversies over the legitimacy of religious images, from the earliest centuries of Christianity through the various forms of iconoclasm. Behind these disputes he identifies class struggles between secular rulers and ecclesiastical institutions for political control and economic exploitation of their respective subject populations. He shows how both parties deployed images of Christ and the saints as instruments of power in their contest for the religious allegiance of a population susceptible to the fascination exerted by images. More radical in his positions than Warnke, Bredekamp thereby reasserts, in Werckmeister’s reading, Marx’s foundational critique of religion as an instrument of power in the hands of the ruling class.
Where Werckmeister writes with admiration of these experiments in radical and critical art history, David Craven dismisses the scholarship of those years with considerable severity (Craven 2008, 303). In a 2014 article entitled The New German Art History: From Ideological Critique and the Warburg Renaissance to the Bildwissenschaft of the Three Bs – which sought, building on Diers’s 1995 study (Diers 1995, 59-63), to take fresh stock of the state of visual studies in Germany – Craven turns to the text Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur. Published also in 1970, by two former students of Theodor W. Adorno, the essay offered an “implacably” critical reading of the Palladian villa, construing it as a negative utopia. This reading provoked strong controversy on account of its “non-dialectical iconoclasm”, which cast the Palladian villa as historically regressive (Craven 2014, 132). Craven dismisses the study as a “bold youthful exercise in iconoclasm”, conceding only a “populist critique” of the villa that, in his view, bore no relation to sophisticated Marxist analysis – which he understands, by contrast, as a mode of productive tension, one that would construe the villa as simultaneously progressive and regressive, an advance and a retreat at once, so as to make visible unresolved historical contradictions.

The approach taken in Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur is minimised by Craven as a methodological dead end, as are the early experiments of Warnke and Bredekamp more broadly. It is precisely in the subsequent evolution of their work, however, that Craven locates the arrival of a less combative “post-iconoclast critical scholarship”, one that moderated the initial ideological-critical approach (Craven 2014, 134). Craven argues that these and other young art historians recalibrated their challenge to the discipline’s received assumptions through a more sophisticated critical reassessment of the major German-language art historians of the first half of the twentieth century, reading them more carefully through Walter Benjamin and the categories of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt scholars thus served as a mediating bridge between the first, more combative and radical phase of Marxist art history and a second phase which, while remaining critical, began slowly to shift its centre of gravity. It is at this juncture that Craven locates the beginnings of what he calls “Iconographical critique”, in which what changed was the emphasis placed on the specific historical contextualisation of works of art, now framed within a “social history of art” (Craven 2014, 139).

Werckmeister too observes this shift, though he attributes it to historical circumstances rather than to intellectual influences alone. Between 1978 and 1982, Marxist scholars across European and American democracies found that their anti-capitalist positions were increasingly at odds with the democratic majorities that had returned new conservative governments to power. In this renewed political climate, the project of Marxist revisionism – including in art history – lost much of its ideological resonance in the public sphere, as it could no longer make a compelling case for democratic support. Critical art history was, in effect, supplanted by social art history. It was at the turn of the 1980s, in this second phase of iconographical critique and social art history, that scholars who had once positioned themselves within the Marxist tradition began to reread their predecessors, recovering figures such as Aby Warburg. Whereas a few years earlier they had scarcely engaged with him at all – relegating him to a single footnote in an entire volume on the politics of the image – they now returned to his work through an anthropological lens and in the spirit of disciplinary renewal (Craven 2014, 139–140).

The shift from a radical, Marxist art history towards a social art history – somewhat more measured as a consequence of the historical upheavals that had brought different models of society into being – carries genuine explanatory force. It would be the 1990s that definitively consecrated Warburg as a pivotal figure in German art history, with an international congress held in his honour in Hamburg in 1990. From that point on, both Warnke and Bredekamp continued to invoke the Warburgian tradition, making it a touchstone for the institutional projects they subsequently pursued in Hamburg and Berlin: Warnke’s for the Warburg-Haus, centred on Politische Ikonographie, and Bredekamp’s for the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (HZK).
In 1990, Warnke was awarded the Leibniz Prize, which enabled him to establish a dedicated research group in political iconography – the Forschungsstelle Politische Ikonographie at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg – in a conscious effort to restore, also in physical terms, the sites of Warburgian scholarship. These were the years in which he devoted himself to elaborating the concept and, from 1996 onwards, to compiling a visual index of political iconography that encompassed all forms of political imprint – from gesture to electoral posters, from postcards to royal portraits – and which came to acquire a certain prominence (Bredekamp 2022, 31–34). Six overlapping and relatively brief texts are the fruit of this period of study. In 1992, an article entitled Wie die Obrigkeit mit Bildern Politik machte appeared in the Hamburg university periodical uni hh. Forschung, a journal with limited distribution (Warnke 1992a). Around the same time, a new formulation of the definition of political iconography appeared in the essay collection edited by Andreas Beyer, Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst. Zur Geistes-Gegenwart der Ikonologie (Warnke 1992b) – the only contribution on the subject addressed to a broader readership. The same material appears in the introduction to the Bildindex zur politischen Ikonographie, issued in a limited print run in 1993 (Warnke 1993). The particular attention the Bildindex received in sociology and political science was further sustained by two related publications from the same period: Visualisierungen der Macht im 16. Jahrhundert, which appeared in an essay collection on the representation of the state (Warnke 1991); and, also from 1992, Politische Landschaft (Warnke 1992c), whose brief epilogue can be situated within the series of definitions of Politische Ikonologie. Following Bredekamp’s analysis, a later essay from 1994, contained in a volume on contemporary politics and likewise aimed at contextualising the research fields of political iconography, also belongs to this series (Warnke 1994). After the publication of these six texts – born of the enthusiasm surrounding the recovery of the Warburg-Haus, the elaboration of the Bildindex, and the establishment of a research group on Politische Ikonographie – a cycle came to an end of sorts. Only after a pause of nearly a decade did a further article by Warnke appear, in 2003, in the art history journal “Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter”, concerned primarily with mapping the fields of Politische Ikonologie (Warnke 2003). Finally, the Handbuch der Politischen Ikonographie (Warnke, Fleckner, Ziegler 2011), edited together with Uwe Fleckner and Hendrik Ziegler, marked a significant milestone in 2011 – the only handbook on the subject currently available.

Schlagbild

The declared aim of political iconography is to examine the strategies of images, as stated in the introduction to the Handbuch der Politischen Ikonographie (Warnke, Fleckner, Ziegler 2011). This entails sustained attention to the contents of images, their functions, their circulation, and their capacity to act upon the social body. It is precisely within this horizon that Warburg’s concept of Schlagbild belongs – one of the most generative and, at the same time, most neglected theoretical contributions in his entire body of thought.

The term Schlagbild (“pictorial slogans” as translated in English) – which Warburg used to designate the concept of the public image (öffentliches Bild) (Diers 1997, 12) – appears for the first time in the 1920 text Pagan-Antique Propecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (Warburg [1920] 1999, 622), a study that proved foundational for the subsequent fortunes of political iconography. One can say that it was on this occasion that Warburg found himself, for the first time, directly confronting the concept of the public image – a theme he would continue to develop across other works and which would constitute the incandescent core of the research in political iconography that followed, including and especially its most radical expressions: the concept was subsequently taken up and systematised by scholars such as Martin Warnke, Horst Bredekamp, and Friedrich Schwartz (Diers 1997, 30).

As is often the case in studying Warburg’s work, one must pay closer attention to the second meaning than to the more immediately apparent one. Warburg presented the results of his historical research under the heading of “Luther” and delivered it at both public and private conferences; yet it was impossible not to discern, reading between the lines, an implicit appeal to contemporary events. The figure of Luther plays a role in this context that reaches well beyond the academic: Luther’s hold on the imagination was not Warburg’s alone, but resonated so powerfully that the German reformer had been elevated to a historical icon of the German nation in the period immediately preceding the First World War.

In the Lutherian laboratory, Warburg carried out a first formalisation of the experience of war, retrospectively identifying a peculiar mechanism that the conflict had brought back to the surface: the transformation of symbolic materials into instruments of political and religious orientation. An essay dedicated to the reformer was presented on 25 April 1919 at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and, shortly afterwards, published in 1920 as Heidnischantike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten (Warburg [1920] 1999). An earlier version had already been delivered in September 1917, at an informal gathering at the KBW and subsequently presented to the public of the “Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte” in November of the same year – in the highly politicised context of celebrations marking the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, during the most catastrophic years of the First World War. The occasion presented an opportunity, against a backdrop of hunger and widespread disillusionment on the front and on the home front alike, to stage a bellicose celebration capable of rallying spirits, grounded in the hegemonic narrative that connected Luther to Bismarck as an interpretive key to the birth of modern Germany – the very narrative that wartime theology sought to legitimate (Newman 2009, 144).

For the first time, Warburg not only engaged with the non-obvious political implications of Renaissance imagery but turned his attention to the direct political use of images, seeking to understand genealogically the symbolic mechanisms active in the present (Rampley 2010, 321). Examining the pamphlets and broadsheets of the Reformation period, the Hamburg scholar explored the astrological, religious, and political world of images and ideas, and more broadly the intellectually and politically tendentious literature of the early modern period. The long 1920 essay thus concentrated on the use of woodcuts, and in particular of astrological images, during the Reformation, studying the mobilisation of the visual element by the Catholic Church and the followers of Luther for propagandistic purposes. Warburg’s interest in these materials was undoubtedly shaped by the urgencies of his own present, and analogies with the media of his age surface repeatedly in his language: popular prints are described as a new “medium of propaganda for reaching the less educated”, artists and writers as engaged in a “press campaign” conducted through images (Bilderpressefeldzug), with the bearing of “astro-political journalists” (astropolitische Journalisten) (Warburg [1920] 1999, 618, 622, 601). Word and image together allow us to observe the unfolding of a present steeped in a sacredness rooted in the symbolic structures of the early modern period.

To grasp the full import of Warburg’s concept of Schlagbild, it is necessary to place it alongside its verbal counterpart, the Schlagwort. As Michael Diers writes, the Schlagwort is an expression endowed simultaneously with “pregnant form” (prägnante Form) and “heightened emotional value” (gesteigerter Gefühlswert): a slogan, configured as a formula capable of condensing an era or a tendency into a single charged term – at times polemical – that circulates on everyone’s lips and takes a position, explicit or implied, for or against a cause or an institution (Diers 1997, 7–8). Diers further suggests, convincingly, that the combativeness resonating as an association in both concepts derives from their historical context: from the use of cutting and thrusting weapons – a register within which Schlagwort has carried its meaning in synonymous use with Stichwort since the eighteenth century. It is also possible that Warburg’s coinage Schlagbild contains a reference to the expression Schlagzeile – the striking front-page headline: a hypothesis that, if substantiated, would draw the concept even more tightly into the orbit of a political iconography understood as a systematic study of the word-images or slogan-images of power (Diers 1997, 7–8). To the Schlagbild, Warburg attributes a function analogous to that of the Schlagwort, but transposed to the visual plane. It is a representation that is ubiquitous and entirely oriented toward effect – whether a satirical or an advertising image – that acts upon the viewer with the same violent immediacy as a slogan. Its defining characteristic lies in its capacity to penetrate collective consciousness rapidly, to convey a political position through the immediate force of visible form.

It was precisely from the concept of Schlagbild that Martin Warnke drove the renewal of interest in Warburg’s work from 1991 onwards. The political implications of the Warburgian term returned to the centre of discussion within the Forschungsstelle Politische Ikonographie at the Institute of Art History of the University of Hamburg. Initially conceived as an archive of visual documentation – today grown to half a million reproductions – in which the Institute’s slide collection was partly reorganised according to social, cultural, and political themes, the project gave impetus to the publication of numerous texts on political iconography (Rampley 2012, 119–120).

Warnke addresses the theme of the Schlagbild in the essay Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge, contained in the volume Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Über Aby Warburg of 1980 (Warnke 1980, 75ff.), where he reconstructs the centrality of the political image in Warburg’s thought. Here Warnke emphasises, on the one hand, that the biographical dimension must not be overlooked in studying the intensity of Warburg’s political engagement and, on the other, that the heart of Warburgian research was, with something close to obsession, the problem of media – hence the interest in tapestries and stamps as image-carriers (Bilderfahrzeuge).

Politische Ikonographie

Another emblematic site of Warnke’s reflection on the Schlagbild, in its primary sense of public image (öffentliches Bild) (Diers 1997, 12), is the essay Politische Ikonographie, published in Italian, English and Spanish translation in this issue. As Bredekamp notes, this contribution – which turns on an episode from the mid-eighteenth century – is among the texts most frequently cited by Warnke, and constitutes a practical illustration of the concept of the public sphere in relation to the circulation of political images, demonstrating with considerable effectiveness their role as mediators between the private and the public (Bredekamp 2022, 34).

The episode concerns the dissemination, in the Holland of 1742, of a broadsheet that reproduced and commented upon a scene that had actually taken place in Austria. At the time, the Empress Maria Theresa found herself in a precarious position: loyalty to her was wavering, the realm divided between internal conflicts and external threats, and the Elector of Bavaria had occupied Upper Austria. To strengthen the allegiance of her soldiers, the Empress sent a letter to Field Marshal Khevenhüller, her military commander, accompanying it with a portrait of herself and her son. In the letter, she wrote with evident feeling: “Before you are a young queen abandoned by the whole world: how do you consider her fate? How do you consider the fate of this child? Look into the eyes of your princess…”. The Dutch broadsheet depicted the effect of this gesture and, in particular, the Field Marshal’s response: Khevenhüller, having read the letter in his tent, goes outside, recalls his soldiers and officers, gathers them around him, and shows them the Empress’s letter in one hand and the portrait in the other. Through its accompanying text, the broadsheet further relates how the soldiers covered the portrait with kisses, drew their swords, praised the Empress, and renewed their oath of loyalty to her – for, manifestly, the sending of the portrait had struck the soldiers with great force, recalling them to their duty. The simple act of dispatching an image had thus produced an extraordinary emotional and political impact, transforming a private appeal into a public act of mobilisation and the legitimation of power.
The Italian comparatist Lea Ritter Santini, in her course on Political Iconology held in 1999 at the Fondazione San Carlo in Modena, develops sustained references to the Politische Ikonographie of Warnke and the Hamburg group – contained in contributions published (to this day) almost exclusively in German. In her lectures, Ritter Santini evokes the Khevenhüller anecdote, underlining the decisive importance of the count’s stepping out of his tent to share the image with his soldiers rather than contemplating it in private. It is in this movement that the passage from the private to the public sphere is accomplished: an image deployed for political ends neither remains confined to its origins nor exhausts itself in the context of its production; on the contrary, it erupts into collective space, acquiring social resonance and taking on the full character of the öffentliches Bild (Diers 1997, 28).

As emerges from Matthew Rampley’s examination of German Bildwissenschaft (Rampley 2012, 119–134), it is within this lineage that the art historian Michael Diers published, in 1997, a small volume of essays entitled Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart (Diers 1997). Working self-consciously with images drawn from different media – news photographs, stamps, paintings, caricatures, posters – Diers set out to examine the role of the contemporary image in the formation and dissemination of political discourse. The decision to traverse media boundaries reflects the conviction that the Schlagbild belongs to no specific support, but is defined rather by its function – the capacity to strike and to orient, mobilising the will of the viewer – irrespective of the channel through which it circulates. Diers’s primary concern was to illuminate the analogies between images and slogans as metonymic representations of political ideas and events, with particular attention to their high emotional charge.

In the preface to the volume, the author reconstructs the theoretical genealogy of the concept, recovering the analogy between Schlagbild as the visual equivalent of the Schlagwort: a ubiquitous representation, “entirely oriented toward effect, incisive” (Diers 1997, 7), whatever the category of public image it may inhabit. Its historical reach is illuminated through Frances Yates’s reference to the Ad Herennium – the anonymous first-century BC rhetorical manual in which the so-called imagines agentes make their appearance: active images, charged with mnemonic force, constructed to strike and to lodge themselves in the memory. In these, Diers identifies a prefiguration of the modern Schlagbilder (Diers 1997, 8). What changes across the centuries is, of course, the medium of transmission: from woodcut to photograph, from poster to video screen, each era has given the same function new expression through its own instruments of reproduction and dissemination. This intertwining of functional invariance and material transformation is precisely what makes the Schlagbild a historically productive concept. Like Warburg – who accused his colleagues of suffering from the bias of “border-police mentality” (grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit) (Warburg 1912, 191) – Diers insists on a redefinition of art history’s field of competence: public images belong “strictly to the domain of reference and competence of an art history conceived as a history of images” (Diers 1997, 11), that is, of a discipline that refuses to confine itself to a specialisation concerned only with “high art”. Public images that “form and propagate political images of representation and appearance in the public sphere” (Diers 1997, 12) are characterised by wide dissemination and are effectively predisposed for immediate consumption: their analysis cannot dispense with consideration of the medium that carries them – today more digital than ever.
The history of the concept of Schlagbild makes visible how political iconography, in its most radical formulation, was born of the urgent need to equip art history with tools capable of measuring the political efficacy of images and their capacity to act upon the public sphere (Schwartz 2019). From the social history of art to the present, for all the transformation of historical and social conditions, it is precisely this urgency that keeps the contribution of Warburg – and ultimately of Warnke and the German school – alive. It is for these reasons that one must underscore how the question of the public sphere, which runs through the entire reflection on political iconography, today presents itself in a radically altered configuration. No longer reducible to the twentieth-century model of a shared and visible space, it manifests today as a sphere that expands, multiplies, and becomes ubiquitous while simultaneously – and not paradoxically – growing more intimate, penetrating screens and individual representations with the same logic by which it once occupied public squares. Fragmented into algorithmic bubbles, personalised down to the individual level, it nevertheless retains intact its function as the field in which political images produce real effects upon bodies and upon consciousnesses. Even in this extreme configuration, the Schlagbild and the practice of political iconography do not lose their analytical pertinence: on the contrary, in the age of technofascism (Coeckelbergh 2026), the critical act of understanding the logic of the construction and circulation of political images – directed at those who produce and disseminate those visual formulas – proves all the more essential. It is in this sense, then, that the image science inaugurated by Warburg and developed by the Hamburg school continues to address us.