Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

When Lev Tolstoy died in 1910, he was a literary celebrity, famous well beyond the borders of his native Russia. His death became one of the first truly international media events of the twentieth century. But the public hunger for images of the great man was already prominent much earlier in his life, when both commissioned and unsolicited portraits and photographs proliferated, creating an international Tolstoy iconography. Throughout the twentieth century, artists, filmmakers, and writers attempted to create their own vision of Tolstoy, either embracing or opposing, but always engaging with, this visual canon. This chapter discusses Tolstoy as a subject of art in painting, cinema, and the theatre, exploring the impact of celebrity-generated images on his representation in these media. First, it focuses on well-known portraits and sculptures of Tolstoy, from Ilya Repin’s famous paintings to Oleg Kulik’s playful installations, as well as controversial frescoes and advertising images. It then moves on to chart a very short history of Tolstoy’s appearance on film, first as a celebrity and then as a character. The final part of the chapter discusses Tolstoy’s postmodern afterlives in the works of Viktor Pelevin and in contemporary Russian theatre.

Representing Samuel Johnson, whose towering intellect and larger than life persona dominated his era, posed a challenge for portrait painters and caricaturists alike. His public image, which coalesced over several decades, has continued to mutate and proliferate long after his death. Expanding the idea of serial portraiture, this chapter examines pairs or clusters of related images across various artists and media, focusing on the formative function of Johnson’s portraits in and after life and their central role in mythologizing him as a literary colossus. This chapter is particularly interested in tracing how visual representations of Johnson morphed over time, were appropriated and reproduced, and interacted dialogically, creating a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted, complex portrait of Johnson. As his close ties with artists, his support of artistic institutions, his print collection, and his collaboration in the creation of numerous portraits amply demonstrate, Johnson was not the ignorant philistine disinterested in his image that he at times

professed to be.