Fear Reverence Terror

Fear, Reverence, Terror asks readers to slow down and look carefully at images, and at the power structures built into them. Images of every kind reach us all day, from phones, computers, televisions and the screens at a supermarket checkout. They tempt us, tell us to buy, frighten us and dazzle us.

The historian Carlo Ginzburg, known for his work in microhistory, examines a handful of examples: Picasso's Guernica, the 'Lord Kitchener Wants You' recruitment poster from the First World War, Jacques-Louis David's Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and a gilded silver cup with scenes from the conquest of the New World. He asks whether these are political images, and answers that in a sense every image is, because every image is an instrument of power.

Ginzburg recalls Tacitus's remark that we are enslaved by lies of which we are ourselves the authors. The book sets out to ask whether that bond can be broken. It is forthcoming in January 2027.