¹ See, for example, Jenkins, Marianna, The State Portrait: Its Origin and Evolution (Archaeological Institute of America and the College Art Association of America, 1947)Google Scholar; Rubenstein, Nicolai, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 179–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warner, William Lloyd, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Strong, Roy C., Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Kammen, Michael, A Season of Youth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)Google Scholar; Skaggs, David C., “Postage Stamps as Icons,” in Icons of America, ed. Browne, Ray B. and Fishwick, Marshall (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Edgerton, Samuel Y. Jr., “Icons of Justice,” Past and Present, No. 89 (1980), pp. 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwartz, Barry “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces, 61 (1982), 374–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schwartz, Barry and Miller, Eugene F., “The Icon and the Word: A Study in the Visual Depiction of Moral Character,” forthcoming in Semiotica.Google Scholar

² See Kim, C. I. Eugene and Koh, B. C., eds. Journey to North Korea (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1983).Google Scholar

³ Our findings in regard to the Washington portraiture will support this observation about the character of symbolism in republics, at least the large republic of modern times. Walter Bagehot has presented an alternative view of republican symbolism, which we consider later in this essay.

⁴ For an account of the major historical and allegorical paintings that feature Washington, see Wills, Garry, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1984).Google Scholar Wills fails to recognize how important the display of Washington's face in portraiture was to earlier generations of Americans. Portraits were valued even above allegorical and historical paintings because of a significance that was thought to lie in the portraits themselves.

⁵ Peirce discusses the types of signs throughout his Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935)Google Scholar; for a selection of key passages, see his Philosophical Writings, ed. Buchler, Justus (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), pp. 98–119.Google Scholar A lucid introduction to the topic is provided by Zeman, J. Jay, “Peirce's Theory of Signs,” in A Perfusion of Signs, ed. Sebeok, Thomas A. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) pp. 22–39.Google Scholar For interpretive difficulties in Peirce's theory, see Greenlee, Douglas, Peirce's Concept of Sign (The Hague: Mouton, 1973)Google Scholar, and the 1976 symposium on Greenlee's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 12 (1976), 97–147.Google Scholar Peirce's trichotomy has been utilized by Lasswell, Harold D. in “Key Symbols, Signs and Icons,” in Symbols and Values: An Initial Study, ed. Bryson, Lyman et al. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), pp. 199–204.Google Scholar Nevertheless, the tendency in political science has been to treat all representative phenomena as “symbols” without considering the possibility that they might differ in kind and that some might signify naturally, by their own inherent qualities or relations, and not merely by convention or arbitrary imposition. For an illustration of this tendency, see Elder, Charles D. and Cobb, Roger W., The Political Uses of Symbols (New York: Longman, 1983)Google Scholar, especially their characterization of the symbol as “a human invention” that “arises from the process of attributing meaning to an object” (p. 29).Google Scholar Peirce's trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol has come to play an important role in recent discussions of symbolism by anthropologists. See Firth, Raymond, Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 60–67Google Scholar; and the collection entitled On Symbols in Anthropology (Malibu, Cal.: Undena Publications, 1982)Google Scholar, especially the Editor's Introduction and the essay by Milton Singer.

⁶ See Wills, , Cincinnatus: George Washington and the EnlightenmentGoogle Scholar; Wick, Wendy C., George Washington: An American Icon (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press)Google Scholar; Blodgett, Richard C., “What Did George Washington Really Look Like?” Review (1981), pp. 53 ff.Google Scholar; and Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans (New York: Random House, 1965).Google Scholar

⁷ Although Washington's portrait appeared on some locally minted coins, the use of his image on federal coinage was precluded by the Mint Act of 1792. The Senate, in its version of the Mint Bill, had agreed that on each denomination of coins there should be impressed the head of the incumbent president, which meant that Washington's countenance would be displayed on the Mint's first coins. This plan was debated and rejected by the House of Representatives. The concerns of the House were perhaps voiced best by Representative Page, who warned of the danger of “imitating the flattery and almost idolatrous practice of Monarchies with respect to the honor paid to their Kings, by impressing their images and names on their coins” (Annals of Congress, 1791–92 [03, 1792], p. 488).Google Scholar Page feared also that cabals, corruption, and animosity “might be excited by the intrigues of ambitious men, animated with the hope of handing their names down to the latest ages on the medals of their country” (ibid., p. 489). Congress decided on the emblem of liberty as a substitute for the president's image and thus found a solution that was, in Representative Williamson, 's words, “consistent with Republican principles” (p. 484).Google Scholar Washington, who opposed the Senate's plan from the beginning, applauded this outcome.

⁸ See McCombs, C., George Washington, 1732–1932: An Exhibition Held at the New York Public Library (New York: The New York Public Library, 1932), p. 1.Google Scholar

⁹ Tuckerman, Henry T., The Character and Portraits of Washington (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1859), pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Stuart, Jane, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington,” Scribner's Monthly, 12 (1876), 370.Google Scholar

¹¹ In Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, Picturesque United States of America … A Memoir of Paul Svinin (New York: William E. Rudge, 1930), p. 34.Google Scholar

¹² Whitman, Walt, I Sit and Look Out, ed. Holloway, Emory and Schwarz, Vernolian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 59.Google Scholar Whitman did not exaggerate. Washington's portrait could be found in the homes of notables as well as in the lowliest domiciles. Thomas Jefferson had no fewer than four representations of Washington on display at Monticello (see Wills, , Cincinnatus, p. 112)Google Scholar; and Ralph Waldo Emerson had a portrait of Washington in his dining room, of which he said: “I cannot keep my eyes off it” (quoted by Kammen, , A Season of Youth, p. 104).Google Scholar In describing the sparsely furnished interior of Uncle Tom's cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes: “The wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he had happened to meet with its like” (see Stowe, , Uncle Tom's Cabin [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962], p. 25Google Scholar).

¹³ Eisen, Gustavus A., Portraits of Washington (New York: Robert Hamilton, 1932), 3:745.Google Scholar

¹⁴ These and other bicentennial activities are detailed in the massive Report of the United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (Washington: Bicentennial Commission, 1932), 4 vols.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Damascene, Saint John, On Holy Images, trans Allies, Mary H. (London: Thomas Baker, 1898), p. 92.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 92.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 90.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 93.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 98.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 97.

²¹ Ibid., p. 111.

²² See The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, trans. Jex-Blake, K. (Chicago: Argonaut Inc., 1968).Google Scholar

²³ Roozemond-Van Ginhoven, Hetty J., Ikon: Inspired Art (Echteld, Netherlands: The Wijenburgh Foundation, 1980), p. 13.Google Scholar

²⁴ See Jenkins, , The State Portrait, pp. 3–7Google Scholar; and Strong, , Portraits of Queen Elizabeth, pp. 33–41.Google Scholar

²⁵ Strong discusses the religious overtones of the portraits of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and observes: “The sacred images of Christ, the Virgin, and saints had been cast out of the churches as so much rubbish, while in their place we see the meteoric rise of the sacred images of the Diva Elizabetha” (Portraits of Queen Elizabeth, p. 36).Google Scholar In 1580, Theodore Beza published in Geneva a work whose Latin title can be translated as: “Icons, that is to say, true portraits, of men illustrious in the Reformation of Religion and Restoration of Learning.” The first icon is that of King James VI of Scotland, who was only fourteen, but the chief Protestant king then extant. See Carlyle, Thomas, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 5:313–16.Google Scholar

²⁶ Whitley, William T., Gilbert Stuart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), p. 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ This portrait is so named because it was acquired by the Boston Athenaeum from Stuart, 's widow in 1831.Google Scholar A heated controversy arose a few years ago over the National Portrait Gallery's effort to purchase the Athenaeum portrait of Washington, along with a companion portrait of Martha Washington, for $5 million and to move the portraits from Boston, where they had long resided, to Washington, D. C. The dispute was finally settled by an agreement between the National Portrait Gallery and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to acquire the paintings jointly and to move them back and forth every three years between Boston and Washington (see Blodgett, , “What Did George Washington Really Look Like?”).Google Scholar This controversy shows that the old portraits continue to be objects of special importance, despite the surfeit of reproductions and our fading memory of Washington's deeds and character.

²⁸ Neal, John, Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings of John Neal, ed. Dickson, Harold E. (State College, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State College, 1943), p. 3.Google Scholar

²⁹ Tuckerman, , The Character and Portraits of Washington, pp. 85–87.Google Scholar

³⁰ Peale, Rembrandt, “Letter to William Dunlap (December 27, 1834),” reprinted in Magazine of American History, 5 (1880), 129–32.Google Scholar

³¹ The United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission, as one of its numerous projects, established a Portrait Committee, consisting of art critics and historians, to select the one portrait of Washington which would receive official sanction and be issued in hundreds of thousands of copies as part of the observance of Washington's Birthday. With an eye to the long debate over which of Washington's portraits truly look like him, the Commission expressed its hope that “the stamp of approval by this committee to the selected portrait, will give it the highest authoritative endorsement and it is hoped bring to a satisfactory conclusion the contention as to which is the best likeness of the first President, that has occupied artistic minds for more than a century and a half” (Special News Releases Relating to the Life and Time of George Washington [Washington: Bicentennial Commission, 1932], 1.69).Google Scholar After studying all available portraits of Washington, the committee was unable to arrive at a majority vote on any one. It finally gave its unanimous choice to the Houdon bust of Washington at Mount Vernon.

³² These writers held that portraits make a cognitive presentation, just as perception and speech do, so that portraits can be judged by the standard of truth or falsity. Thus Dunlap, in a work published in 1834, recalls Horace Walpole's observation that an authentic portrait “is truth itself; and it calls up so many collateral ideas, as to fill an intelligent mind more than any other species of painting.” See Dunlap, William, History of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Wyckoff, Alexander (New York: Blom, 1965), 2:588.Google Scholar This contrasts with the tendency today to depreciate the cognitive dimension of political symbols and to emphasize only their ability to condense feelings or emotions and to stimulate behavior.

³³ Parke Custis, George Washington, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860), p. 529.Google Scholar

³⁴ Of Benjamin Franklin, one of Washington's greatest contemporaries, Charles Coleman Sellers has written: “It is profoundly significant that in an age intensely interested in the characters of its great men not one contemporary has left us a complete and adequate description of Franklin's appearance. For all the interest, excitement, and controversy surrounding him, his face, figure, and habitual manner received only cursory or superficial remark.” See Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 2.Google Scholar

³⁵ Peirce recognized that while icons, indices, and symbols rest on their own distinctive principles of signification, they need not exist only in a pure form. The difference in practice is often one of relative hierarchy or the predominance of one kind of relation over another. Thus, for example, symbols often involve a sort of index, indices may also resemble their objects, and the likeness in icons may be aided by conventional rules. See Jakobson, Roman, “Quest for the Essence of Language,” Diogenes, 51 (1965), 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The portrait is an example of a sign that mixes principles of signification. It becomes an icon or likeness of character by virtue of the indexical relation between physical features and moral qualities.

The name traditionally assigned to the study of character through physical indices was physiognomy. There was an elaborate and highly influential effort in the eighteenth century by the Swiss author Lavater to develop physiognomy as a systematic science. Theories of portraiture drew heavily from Lavater; and he, in turn, regarded portrait painting as the highest and most useful of all the arts. See Lavater, Johann Kaspar, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Hunter, Henry (London: John Stockdale, 1810), vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 23–49.Google Scholar For our purposes, it is important to note that the American artists and critics were avid readers of Lavater, if not his disciples. As Neal observes of Stuart, , “he believed in Lavater, or at least in the leading principles of physiognomy” (Observations on American Art, p. 73).Google Scholar

³⁶ See Peale, Rembrandt, The Portraits of Washington (Washington, D. C.: 1824, n.p.), p. 9.Google Scholar

³⁷ Peale, Rembrandt, “Washington and His Portraits,”Google Scholar in Eisen, , Portraits of Washington, 1:299.Google Scholar

³⁸ A present-day theory of the portrait holds that it is primarily a mnemonic device, something that helps us remember objects that we were acquainted with beforehand. See Steiner, Wendy, “The Semiotics of a Genre: Portraiture in Literature and Painting,” Semiotica, 21 (1977), 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Those who painted Washington's portraits and promoted their distribution were convinced, however, that these portraits could make Washington's person and character manifest to those who would never have the opportunity to see him in person.

³⁹ Yarmolinsky, , A Memoir of Paul Svinin, p. 34.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Quoted in Eisen, , Portraits of Washington, 1:xvii.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Annals of Congress, 1799–1801 [12, 1800], pp. 858–59.Google Scholar

⁴² Ibid., p. 859.

⁴³ Tuckerman, , The Character and Portraits of Washington, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Wick, , George Washington: An American Icon, p. 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See the Frontispiece in Wecter, Dixon, The Hero in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Peale, , “Washington and His Portraits,” p. 315.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Wills, , Cincinnatus, p. xix.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Cunliffe, Marcus, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958) p. 6.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Quoted in Lipset, Seymour Martin, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 19.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ See Schutz, John A. and Adair, Douglass, The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1966), p. 229.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Tuckerman, , The Character and Portraits of Washington, p. 54.Google Scholar

⁵² Hubard, William J., “A National Standard for the Likeness of Washington,” Magazine of American History, 4 (1880), 85.Google Scholar

⁵³ Stuart, , “The Stuart Portraits of Washington,” p. 369.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Attempts to mock, deface, or destroy sacred images, whether of political or of religious subjects, have very often been punished severely, sometimes with death. In 1501, for example, Antonio di Giuseppe Rinaldeschi was hanged by the city of Florence for flinging horse dung at a little outdoor painting of the Annunciation. See Edgerton, , “Icons of Justice,” p. 30.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Supreme Executive Council of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council,” II (18 01 1779), p. 671.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Quoted in Moore, Frank, Diary of the American Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner, 1860), 2:492–93.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Fishwick, Marshall W., “Did Anyone Ever See Washington Nude?” in The Hero in Transition, ed. Browne, Ray B. and Fishwick, Marshall W. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), pp. 297–307.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Representative Men (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1900).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ In a separate study, one of the present authors (Schwartz) drew a sample of 60 from the 250 societies on which there is detailed Human Relations Area File information. Material on graven imagery is available for 51 of these societies. The 17 societies which produced sculptured, lifelike images of their leaders or other sacred or authoritative figures were distinguished from those 10 societies whose art forms incorporated some human features but which did not include distinct likenesses. The remaining societies, 24 in number, produced art objects containing no human features at all. If our assumptions about the integrating function of icons in large societies are correct, then we should find a direct correlation between social differentiation (which is strongly correlated with population size and territory) and the presence of lifelike images. The results of the analysis conform to this expectation. As we move from low through intermediate to high social differentiation, the percentage of societies in which distinct and revered human forms are displayed increases from 5 through 18 to 100 percent. This very pronounced relationship becomes even stronger when the three moderately to highly differentiated Islamic societies (which proscribe graven imagery) are removed from the sample. Based as they are on only a handful of societies, findings like these cannot lead to any definite conclusions; however, the direction and strength of the association suggest a distinct functional relationship. Political icons counteract the differentiation of enlarged systems by their centripetal attraction of the moral sentiments of dispersed and specialized peoples.

⁶¹ Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (2nd ed., corrected; London: John Darby, 1714), 1:111.Google Scholar

⁶² Ibid., pp. 111–12.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 113–14. Shaftesbury goes on to argue that our associating inclination has little tendency to support a society when it grows to the point where it can no longer be seen and felt immediately. In large states, therefore, this inclination seeks to satisfy itself through the formation of what eighteenth-century writers could call “parties” or “factions,” thus undermining attachments to the larger whole. “To cantonize is natural,” Shaftesbury observes, “when the Society grows vast and bulky” (p. 113).Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Ibid., pp. 111–12.

⁶⁵ Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 263. More recently, Michael Walzer has argued along similar lines that political symbols are necessary to give sensible expression to the idea of a large community of human beings and thus to make this remote body visible to its members. In Walzer's words, this union of individuals “can only be symbolized; it has no palpable shape or substance.” Politics is thus an art of unification, of making one from many; and symbolic activity is “perhaps our most important means of bringing individuals together, both intellectually and emotionally, in a political union.” See “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly, 82 (1967), 194.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Bagehot, Walter, The English Constitution (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).Google Scholar This book was first published in 1867.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 34.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 40.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 30.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 39.

⁷² Rossiter, Clinton, The American Presidency (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 11.Google Scholar

⁷³ At the turn of the present century, Charles Horton Cooley maintained that a nation or country is best symbolized by some actual persons, and that these persons must be present to the citizenry in pictorial representation, whether in thought or in visual imagery. Cooley writes: “The idea of country is a rich and various one and has connected with it many sensuous symbols — such as flags, music, and the rhythm of patriotic poetry — that are not directly personal; but it is chiefly an idea of personal traits that we share and like, as set over against others that are different and repugnant. We think of … [national] traits by imagining the people that embody them…. Where the country has a permanent ruler, to typify it in his image is doubtless a chief element in the patriotic idea. On the other hand, the impulse which we feel to personify country, or anything else that awakens strong emotions in us, shows our imaginations to be so profoundly personal that deep feeling almost inevitably connects itself with a personal image” (Human Nature and the Social Order [New York: Schocken, 1964], pp. 113–14).Google Scholar