Suchergebnisse

A few Remarks on Political Allegory (in Reply to Eric Hobsbawm).
The iconography of the revolutionary movement has not brought with it a revolution in the stock of images employed. Liberty is represented in the nineteenth century by a Female stripped bare in the same way as were Truth and Beauty ever since the codification of allegorical language during the Renaissance. That allegory is therefore not expressive of the role of women in revolutionary struggles, nor is it the symbol of the aspiration to sexual freedom. Firmly established, with the installment of the Republic, as the symbol of the bourgeois State, the allegory of the Woman Combatant was replaced in the socialist iconography by that of the maie worker. But this new proletarian figure —the maie baring his chest to reveal his powerful muscles— is, as before, in perfect conformity with the academie tradition of the representation of the human body.