In multidisciplinary approaches and case studies, this volume combines two central fields of recent historical research from antiquity to the twentieth century: the own momentum of visual media and political communication beyond a narrowly institutional notion. The »political« is thought to be generally characterised by the striving for broad recognition of resources of authority. Political communication, therefore, revolves around regulatory provisions, rules of interaction and power relations and, above all, their collective acknowledgement. From this perspective, a wide variety of pictorial rhetoric about obligation and liability comes into view. Extending the classical canon of political iconography, it ranges from individual works of art over artefacts distributed by mass media to performative acts as well as mental images and languages. In essence, the volume focuses on the contribution of visual (re-)presentations to such order-keeping and action-enabling discourses. To what extent did and do actors rely on pictorial strategies of plausibilisation for legitimising their claims to normative hegemony?

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