The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2020, xx + 348 pp., £130 (hardback), ISBN 9781138054233; £38.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780367507480

Abstract

The figure of the leader, far from a relic of twentieth-century dictatorship, still looms large in the contemporary imagination. The politics of personality are most evident in the current crop of authoritarians, like Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdo ğ an, and Vladimir Putin, but are equally essential to the appeal of liberal democrats like Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau. The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power , edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone, offers a useful primer to the visual (re)presentation of political figures across a wide variety of historical and national contexts. These include some of the usual suspects – Mussolini, Mao, Stalin – but also less familiar faces like Engelbert Dollfuss, Harold Wilson, and Willy Brandt. While focusing on official-sanctioned portraiture, the contributions also extend to other forms of propaganda as well as caricatures and effigies.