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.

This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.

This chapter describes the role of private individuals who aimed to collect the traces of the French Revolution amidst the tumultuous events. It is centred on the figure of Jean-Louis Soulavie, and his unique collection of prints and drawings, now split between the Louvre and regional archives. It discusses how Soulavie acquired and interpreted this corpus of images, drawing connections with his changing political convictions, and the different functions ascribed to the image, including the commemorative (especially for victims of the Terror), the explanatory (seeking to understand the cause-and-effect of revolutionary processes) and the predictive (echoing Soulavie’s belief in the occult power of images). It connects Soulavie’s engagement with visual culture with other aspects of his collecting and considers the dispersal of many cabinets assembled by this first generation of collector-historians during the Restoration.

Depictions of violence were ubiquitous in sixteenth-century Europe and drew freely on biblical and classical sources, as well as stories of Christian martyrdom. The new media of print and printmaking dramatically increased the number of such images, while pamphlets and broadsheets ensured their widespread circulation and deployment in the service of propaganda and the reporting of sensational crimes and disasters. The outbreak of polemic and conflict associated with the Reformation also provided new markets for the visualising of violence. The fascination with soldiers and war was driven by developments in arms technology and the desire of princely patrons to emulate the valour of the ancients. Whereas battle scenes in the first half of the century were largely conventional, the outbreak of confessional wars in the second brought images of gruesome violence, wholesale destruction and massacre, in which cities and the countryside were laid waste. While the use of violence for confessional propaganda never disappeared, the cruelty, desolation and terrible miseries endured by populations at the hands of ravaging soldiers during the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War gradually became the object of fierce critique by artists in the early seventeenth century, drawing parallels with Spanish savagery in the Americas.