Political Protest

Before the invention of printing, nonmilitary expression of resistance to authority was limited. The evidence for visual protest before the sixteenth century is sparse and fragmentary. It may be, however, as recent scholarship has claimed, that the eleventh-century Bayeux tapestry contains in its margins and elsewhere, through representations of incidental cruelty to civilians, subversion of its overt purpose, which was to justify the Norman invasion of England In the later European Middle Ages, alternative, critical, and satirical views were expressed in the marginalia of religious manuscripts and in the sculpted misericords and capitals of churches, which mocked aberrant ecclesiastical behavior and the abuse of sacred rituals, as well as human foibles. Absent a connection to wider currents of opposition, it is safer to see these as expressions of playfulness and mild irreverence toward the human, in the context of unwavering respect for the eternal verities of the divine and the fundamental structures of belief.

The invention of printing allowed for new modes of dissent and popular expression; henceforth, visual and literary protest marched hand in hand, the visual (readable by semi-literates and illiterates) acting as a means of popularization, a true international vernacular. The satirical engraving and Polemic against Spanish domination. The Duke of Alva, and the Three-Headed Beast of the Cardinals de Guise, Granvelle and Lorraine, Dutch, c. 1570. Allegorical cartoon. The Donkey Pope of Rome (1523) by Lukas Cranach. woodcut, virtually coeval with the invention of printing from movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century, first came into its own as a polemical tool during the Reformation, fostered directly by Martin Luther (1483–1546) himself and executed in large numbers in separate single-leaf prints (broadsheets) and as illustrations to the Bible and other religious texts by the Saxon court artist Lucas Cranach (1472–1553). They were crude in style and rude in intent and probably as effective as any cartoon campaign has ever been. Two examples illustrate different modes of operation of the "cartoon" (the word itself did not come into use until the mid nineteenth century): realistic representations confronting the ideal and real (Passional), and the fantastic/grotesque, or allegorical (Pope-Ass). Since the propaganda was waged intensively on both (or all) sides, it is remarkable that the Lutheran cartoon enjoyed qualitatively and quantitatively complete supremacy against its Catholic counterpart. This is because the established church eschewed and despised woodcuts, which it considered vulgar and subversive, like as any uncontrollable means of expression generated from below.

Later in the sixteenth century the Dutch used allegorical-polemical engravings in their fight for religious and political independence from Spain; their old habit of close visual and moralizing observation of social reality became a satirical reflex in the seventeenth-century Golden Age of Dutch painting and engraving, which abounded in political as well as social critique of all kinds. Meanwhile, in Germany, a great painting tradition had subsided in the course of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) into pathetic complaint against war in word and graphic image, such as broadsheets complaining about the devastation of Germany by foreign armies. The best visual record of this period, however, is that of Jacques Callot (1592–1635), who protested the military abuses of his prince, the duke of Lorraine, in his Miseries of War (1633), and also military cruelty to civilians in general. His denunciation of war, artistically nonpareil at the time, was unequalled until The Disasters of War by Francisco José de Goya (1746–1828), also a great satirist of the mores, clerical and lay, of his country and age. A comparison of the two series illustrates how style is bound by time and country: Callot's soldiers and peasants, in their sparkling elegance, add up to no less a heartfelt denunciation than the gritty, visceral etchings of Goya. Both were court artists secure enough to dissent, although Goya's etchings denouncing the Napoleonic invasion were not published until 1863, and his work was censored.

People tend to honor the moral value of dissent by its willingness to confront censorship, but the definition of censorship is a difficult one, and dissent in the great democracies in the early twenty-first century is often stifled by internal censoring or self-censorship, apathy, and largely government-influenced or corporate major media of newspaper, television, and commercial advertising. In the early modern age, all European governments sought control of publication, but this occurred perhaps least of all in the Netherlands. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, antiwar art was best represented in the engravings of the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe. The wars and massacres he opposed were those of Louis XIV of France, the national enemy, and he expressed his opposition in the spirit of Protestant and Dutch patriotism.

Rich as the eighteenth century was in satire of all kinds, a new technique, caricature, first nursed innocently in Italian art studios of the seventeenth century, gave new force and direction to visual protest. William Hogarth (1697–1764), painter and engraver, was certainly a key figure, but he was primarily a social rather than a political satirist, and he wanted to be thought of as the master of character, not caricature, which is constituted, properly and historically speaking, through exaggeration of the personal features of an individual. When the cartoonist attacks the individual (or the individual's party) rather than the cause, it is often understood that by subverting or eliminating the peccant politician, something essential will change. This is especially the case when similar governments are constantly reshuffled, as in the two-party systems of the United Kingdom and United States.