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1981
Volume 11, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2052-3971
  • E-ISSN: 2052-398X

Abstract

One of the most iconic images associated with the triumph of the Greco-Italian war of 1940 is a depiction of a young soldier in a characteristic attacking stance, featured on a war poster by Costas Grammatopoulos. Commissioned by Ioannis Metaxas as wartime propaganda, the poster was produced in the Engraving Workshop of the Athens School of Fine Arts, where Grammatopoulos was a student. Shortly afterwards, Grammatopoulos appears to have revisited his original design, this time adapting it to serve the propaganda objectives of the National Liberation Front (EAM). Taking as a starting point an overlooked similarity between the two posters by Grammatopoulos (the one for Metaxas and the one for EAM) and a French poster of the First World War by Abel Faivre, this article aims to place them within a sequence of iconographic transformations that trace back to the allegorical figure of the Genius of War in François Rude’s which adorns one of Arc de Triomphe’s pillars. What appears to drive these iconographic transformations is the specific meaning of liberty attached to Rude’s icon in the process of its recycling as a key motif in war posters. At the heart of these shifts is an ongoing tension between two distinct and, at times, politically incompatible notions of liberty: liberty as national independence and liberty in the form of political freedom, which is intrinsically linked to the revolutionary ideal.

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2025-06-30
2026-04-13

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