What Makes an Image Iconic?

As a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, I am assisting the Voltaire Foundation in creating a comprehensive database of Voltaire’s portraits and writing a book on his iconography.

Iconography refers to the system of visual codes that define how a person, subject, event, or idea is represented.

Rather than viewing iconography as a sum of its elements (motifs, themes, and attributes), it is more productive to think of it as a kind of a world, governed by its own internal logic. Based on the images we have seen and our broader perception of the subject, we come to expect certain things and not others. The AI-generated image of the Pope in a voluminous white puffer jacket feels comic and uncanny not simply because it introduces a new element into his visual world, but because this element violates its very foundations (moral, emotional, ideological, as well as aesthetic). Contemporary celebrities play with such expectations, and with our growing appetite for novelty, by inventing new “eras”, often completely reimagining themselves and thereby expanding the limits of the expected.

Within any given iconography certain elements carry more weight than others. We would not expect Buster Keaton to smile — that would be in direct contradiction to his carefully crafted, universally recognised persona. Whereas in the case of Voltaire, quite the contrary, the absence of a smile was often taken as a failure of resemblance. And it was not just any smile that was expected, but a very particular one – a slight, ironic half-grin, detached, knowing, and faintly mocking.

Memorable images generate memorable attributes, which take on lives of their own and can stand in for the person they are associated with. Charlie Chaplin is unimaginable without his moustache, oversized trousers, suspenders, and bowler hat – just as those objects are unimaginable without him. The bowler hat evokes Chaplin, heavy eyeliner Amy Winehouse, and the large, sturdy armchair Voltaire. In fact, the armchair itself became “Voltairean”.

An iconic image is difficult to construct and requires a set of skills distinct from technical mastery. Voltaire was portrayed by some of the finest artists of his time, such as Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. While their works displayed great skill, and in the case of Pigalle’s Voltaire nu (Fig. 1), even innovation, none became influential prototypes. In this respect, Largillière, Lemoyne, and Pigalle were outdone by the Genevan autodidact Jean Huber – Voltaire’s most prolific and, ultimately, most widely reproduced portraitist. A minor artist by comparison, Huber may not have been capable of a masterpiece, but he understood much better than his celebrated contemporaries what makes an image viral (Fig. 2).

Unlike today (when images are so easily found online), in the eighteenth century, iconography was a matter of access. How could one depict Voltaire, who spent much of his life in exile, far from centres of artistic production? While some artists travelled to his residence in Ferney to portray him from life, most had to rely on existing representations. Paradoxically, in this context, cheap, mass-produced prints held greater iconographic significance than painting or sculpture – singular media we generally value more.