Studies of political iconography remain a relatively little explored field today. Although cultural and political studies, as well as iconographic studies – mainly related to art history – are extremely fertile and widespread frameworks for reflection, the convergence between the two has not taken place with the same intensity. The relationship between image and politics, however, has been widely recognised and, above all, put into practice.

Beyond some debates that recover iconographies produced within the framework of large-scale political projects (for example, European totalitarian regimes, the Soviet project of the last century and, in the local scenario, studies on Peronism), the production of theoretical frameworks that do not close the meaning of such imagery is scarce and in some cases obsolete or insufficient. Understanding the capacity of images to produce meaning in the multivalent field of “the political” cannot only point to a “propagandistic” and “manipulative” use of them, as if they only had a single sense of circulation (or production). Nor can it be thought that iconographic “tracking” is merely to form a grammar of recognizable and decodable motifs, following a classic trajectory proper to the History of Art.

The proposal for thinking about these images is anchored in the approaches of authors such as Horst Bredekamp, ​​Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, among other researchers who for two decades have conducted studies that investigate the strategies of the image, its aesthetic-political dimension and the mechanisms of its staging. Horst Bredekamp points out the importance of ceasing to think of images as mere illustrations and instead recognizing their capacity to do, returning to his powerful concept of Bildakt that is extremely fruitful for thinking about what images make us do in the field of political activity. His classic study of the famous frontispiece that Thomas Hobbes used for his Leviathan (1651) is a fundamental pillar for understanding how a social (and in this case, political) field is configured from the visual field. The image is an act that creates political reality, which functions as a strategy of persuasion and legitimation. Bredekamp understands that politics needs and produces images but is also guided by images. This line of work resumes the path opened at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century by Aby Warburg, in his constant questioning no longer of motives and attributions, traced back to a primordial origin, but of the dynamic life of images and their energetic assets. In this path, the gestures that animate the political life of the various social groups, the visual formulas of emotion understood collectively and their transformations and appropriations throughout history are recovered. An inquiry into the “life of images” proposes a knowledge that is always open and centrifugal, which is not closed disciplinarily nor restricts the means of the image to be addressed. Likewise, an iconographic approach of these characteristics requires a model of anachronistic time, such as the time of the image itself, following the contributions of Georges Didi-Huberman: images release signs of their time, but they are also a trace of all the supplementary times that have touched them

In this sense, the political iconography rescued here recovers the capacity of the image to generate an effect on feeling, acting and thinking when in contact with it (observing, touching, listening), in this case in the multiple framework of the manifestation of the political

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